Para mí, escribir es más que contar grandes historias; es una forma de indagar en las cosas que realmente nos importan como seres humanos. Mis personajes, como todos nosotros, se esfuerzan por descubrir algún tipo de verdad, por responder una pregunta fundamental sobre sí mismos mientras enfrentan los dilemas de la vida. Habiendo estado involucrado en el mundo del arte la mayor parte de mi vida como historiador, conocedor y coleccionista, encuentro que las artes visuales informan mi escritura, tanto en términos de descripción como de escenario físico —siempre un personaje por derecho propio— y la lucha que los artistas soportan para explorar el mundo desde todos los ángulos. El gran arte, como la gran literatura, nunca debe revelar todos sus secretos; siempre debe haber suficiente misterio y ambigúoedad para mantenerlo fresco y vivo. El arte más profundo se trata de transmitir sentimientos y la sensación de búsqueda espiritual, el fugaz atisbo de lo invisible en el corazón extático de la vida. Existimos bajo el hechizo de la memoria, infundidos con las glorias metamórficas del mundo visual.
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.