#8: Mr. Gwyn

Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco is one of the books I got from my McSweeny book club.  It is the story of an author, Jasper Gwyn, who decides he no longer wants to write books anymore.  He instead tells people he wants to be a copyist.  He later comes up with the idea of "writing portraits".  To do this he finds his first model, a young girl named Rebecca.  He has her pose naked in a studio for 4 hrs everyday.  Instead of drawing her portrait, he writes a story about it.  He then starts doing this for other people, but no one is supposed to know it is him who is writing the portraits.  Things go well for a while and then Mr. Gwyn disappears.  Rebecca tries to figure out what happens to him.

I thought the intro into this story was a little slow and hard to understand.  Once the character of Rebecca became more prominent, I felt more involved in the story.  It was a unique idea and I liked the ending a lot.

There was also a bonus book at the end of this story called Three Times at Dawn that was mentioned as a novel in Mr. Gwyn.  I liked this one a lot.

Up Next:  What Color is Monday?  by Carrie Cariello