The Village Idiot
The eccentric life and adventures of renowned Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) in early 20th-century Paris is hypnotically imagined in The Village Idiot, by award-winning author Steve Stern. One of the more inscrutable artists of an emerging artistic movement, Chaim Soutine was a Belarusian Jew who emigrated to Paris in 1913 and immediately fell in with the bohemian art crowd centered in the Montparnasse district. Stern mixes fact with a unique vision of Soutine as a man at odds with himself and the world, viewing the panorama of his life through the port of a diving suit as he helps his partner-in-art (and crime), Amedeo Modigliani, win a regatta on the River Seine.
Moving seamlessly through time, Stern captures an artist in the heat of creation, as well as the physical torments of incurable ulcers that plagued his life (and caused his death). Along with a touching portrait of Soutine’s deep friendship with Modigliani, Stern explores Soutine’s ambivalent relationships with the women in his life, as well as his conflicted heritage. He is at odds with proud Jews, like Modigliani, who “is compelled to wear his Jewishness like a badge, while Chaim would rather erase all vestiges of his if he could. Especially the map of Jerusalem that is his face.”
Stern’s Soutine is a riddle to himself and others, notable for his broken English and strange customs, his only fixed star the ineluctable drive to paint what he sees. Evoking the feverish artistic scene of the interwar Paris years (and the frightening rise of Jewish persecution by Nazi Germany), Stern creates an unforgettable rendering of a visionary artist at the peak of his powers.
