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by Heather Rose
"Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless." - Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love
Our hero, Arky Levin, has reached a creative dead end. An unexpected separation from his wife was meant to leave him with the space he needs to work composing film scores, but it has provided none of the peace of mind he needs to create. Guilty and restless, almost by chance he stumbles upon an art exhibit that will change his life.
Based on a real piece of performance art that took place in 2010, the installation that the fictional Arky Levin discovers is inexplicably powerful. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art sit across a table from the performance artist Marina Abramovic, for as short or long a period of time as they choose. Although some go in skeptical, almost all leave moved. And the participants are not the only ones to find themselves changed by this unusual experience: Arky finds himself returning daily to watch others with Abramovic. As the performance unfolds over the course of 75 days, so too does Arky. As he bonds with other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.
This is a book about art, but it is also about success and failure, illness and happiness. It's about what it means to find connection in a modern world. And most of all, it is about love, with its limitations and its transcendence.
"Starred Review. This captivating work explores the meaning of art in our lives and the ways in which it deepens our understanding of ourselves. As Hannah Rothschild did in The Improbability of Love, Australian author Rose also combines intriguing characters with a laser-sharp focus on art to produce a gem of a novel." - Library Journal
"Rose's melancholy book resonates with emotion, touching on life's great dilemmas - death, vocation, love, art." - Publishers Weekly
"A book that attempts to walk the thin line between the trite and the profound - and sometimes succeeds." - Kirkus
"From its conception to its last page, this book challenges our perceptions of where life ends and art begins." - The Australian
"A glorious novel, meditative and special in a way that defies easy articulation." - Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites
"A deliciously inventive tale of the New York art scene, swirling with complex characters and connections, posing questions about how we should live, about art's ability to change our lives, and about the ways art changes the artists who create it." - B. A. Shapiro, author of The Collector's Apprentice
This information about The Museum of Modern Love was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heather Rose is the author of three children's books and four adult novels. She has received numerous awards for her work. She was the inaugural Writer in Residence at the Tasmanian Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), and she is the 2017 recipient of the Christina Stead Prize and the Stella Prize, a major award for Australian female writers, for The Museum of Modern Love. This is her first adult novel to be published in the United States.
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Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live
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