KIDNAPPED AND IN HOLLAND: a book review

LENOIR by Ken Greenhall

"THEY ARE DERANGED.

They are pale, their country is flat and wet, and they have no souls.  I believe they are being punished for having only one God."

This powerful opening paragraph hooked me until the very end.

Have you ever visited a museum and noticed the rare face of  a Black person amid the colors and nuances of a European culture?  When you stopped to reflect, did you ever think to push yourself into the time and place of the painting while wondering what life was like for the exotic individual who inspired it?

Dutch painter, Peter Paul Rubens painting, Four Heads of A Negro was the inspiration for author Ken Greenhall's  extraordinary novel, LENOIR.

Lenoir, a kidnapped African during the European slave trade, is sold to a Dutch hustler during the height of  the Renaissance in 17th century Amsterdam.

The regal and arrogant Lenoir, finds himself both intrigued and repulsed by the Dutch society in which he finds himself.  In his  complex status as a slave he finds his duties to include that of companion, business partner, advisor, clandestine lover, to a man who introducess him to the upper levels of  society and the great salons of  the artistic community.

Working as a artists' model and painter's assistant  for personages such as Rembrandt and Rubens, and eventually as an actor for the traveling Italian Commedia de Arte theatre troup allows Lenoir to become a keen social observer and participant in the strange customs of what he considered a souless,  primitive and morally conflicted people.

Lenoir is an astonishing ahcievement and a well crafted novel, by a contemporary author who obviously had spent a great many years as an outsider in Europe's Low Country.

Next review: Blackgammon by Heather Neff