Pour moi, écrire est plus qu'une simple façon de raconter de belles histoires ; c'est une manière d'explorer ce qui compte vraiment pour nous en tant qu'êtres humains. Mes personnages, comme nous tous, s'efforcent de découvrir une forme de vérité, de répondre à une question fondamentale sur eux-mêmes tout en affrontant les dilemmes de la vie. Ayant été impliqué dans le monde de l'art la plupart de ma vie en tant qu'historien, connaisseur et collectionneur, je trouve que les arts visuels éclairent mon écriture, tant en termes de description que d'environnement physique —toujours un personnage à part entière— et la lutte que les artistes endurent pour explorer le monde sous tous les angles. Le grand art, comme la grande littérature, ne doit jamais livrer tous ses secrets ; il doit toujours y avoir suffisamment de mystère et d'ambiguïté pour le garder frais et vivant. L'art le plus profond consiste à transmettre des sentiments et le sens d'une quête spirituelle — l'aperçu fugace de l'invisible au cœur extatique de la vie. Nous existons sous le sortilège de la mémoire, imprégnés des gloires métamorphiques du monde visuel.
In Gods of Deception, acclaimed novelist David Adams Cleveland has created a thrilling tale of espionage, a family saga, a stirring love story, and a meditation on time and memory, taking you on an unforgettable journey into the troubled human heart as well as the past-a past that is ever present, where the gods of deception await our distant call.
Common sense dictates that it simply cannot exist -- the "Leopardi Madonna," a glorious treasure by the fifteenth-century master Santi Raphael. All the reference books and reliable scholarship indicate that the painting was destroyed in 1945, when the Allies bombed a Nazi warehouse filled with looted art. Only now the Madonna has reappeared, it seems, in this stunning, original thriller that uncovers greed and treachery in the rarefied precincts of the art world. Summoned to Venice from America to view the painting, Renaissance scholar and sometime-art dealer Jordan Brooks returns to the city that had enchanted him twenty years before. As he ponders the possibility that a fake was set afire a half century earlier and the authentic work has resurfaced -- or that the actual masterpiece was lost in the conflagration and a magnificent fake has taken its place -- he also contemplates the strange and secret auction which offers him a chance to bid on the painting. Set against the backdrop of Venice in late autumn, when the timeless city's rain-swollen lagoons threaten to swamp all her treasures, the novel limns the path that lands Jordan on the doorstep of his former teacher, Giorgio Sagredo, who has compromised his ideals to sell the Madonna. It leads Jordan, too, into a horde of amoral art dealers eager to make a killing and, more fortuitously, introduces him to Katie, a young American student who has a scent for the truth and a way of turning up at the moment he needs her most.
As Robert goes about his daily activities during April, he encounters an ever-increasing number of rabbits.