The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

 Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2020--San Antonio

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai is a very good book.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times.  There are multiple stories going on as the book jumps forward and backward in time, but they all tie together.  There's the woman who studied art in Paris and was the mistress of a known painter before WWI and returned after the war to be model for a number of famous artists; in her old age, she wants to donate her private collection of sketches and paintings by these famous artists--pieces that no one else even knows exist.  There's the story of the young gallery acquisitions director in Chicago who is gay and is negotiating in the 1980s with the woman to get her to donate her art to his gallery.  There is the story of a young girl who leaves her family in the 1980s with her brother (both teenagers at the time) when the father kicks the brother out of the house for being gay with her story continuing as far as 2015.  There is the story of the AIDS epidemic from the point before it even had a name through the loss of so many friends, colleagues, and relatives to it in the 1980s and 1990s while there still were no treatments that would allow them to continue to live.  There is the story of a young woman who is alienated from her mother, runs off with an older man to join a cult, and eventually is seen in a photograph with a young girl (daughter?) on a bridge in Paris.  And there is the story of the photographer who documented so many of these lives and eventually became world famous, so much so that he was known by just his last name and was having major exhibits around the world.  The book builds slowly at first.  By the time the reader gets halfway through it, it is hard to put it down.  And toward the end, it becomes impossible to put it down.  No wonder it was so well recognized as a great book of the year.  I gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.