Van Gogh was a reader the same way he was a painter: the man who produced a painting a day plus drawings during the last three months of his life must have read at a similar rate. ALL of Zola's twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, much of Victor Hugo, all of Shakespeare. In the spring of 1890, he said he was planning to RE-read ALL of Balzac - that's 90 novels. He read Tolstoy, he read Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Dickens (god love him - in English AND in French). He read them, he studied them, he wrote to his brother and sister about them; he woke up in the night, turned on his lamp and kept reading.

Guzzoni's lovely little book, abundantly illustrated, surveys Vincent's reading, and makes a case for how he wove life, art, and books into single way of seeing the world. As a young man he fanatically collected illustrated magazines for the sake of the pictures, which he hung on his walls, then Japanese prints. He read the stories, he knew who the illustrators were (he had thoughts of becoming an illustrator himself). He thought deeply about what he read, memorizing long passages, using incidents in books as a prism through which to describe events in his own life. A small drawing from a story he read recognizably reappears in one of his paintings. He even painted books - many of his portraits and still lifes include books, some identifiable as to title and author. One poignant painting (unfortunately not reproduced in the book - you can see it here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ward_in_the_Hospital_in_Arles.jpg), depicts the ward of the hospital in Arles during one of his stays. The figures in the long and looming room are faceless, turned away, or downcast. Except for one man, turned toward us, wearing a yellow straw hat, reading a newspaper. Reading seems to be as essential to this man as his painting.

It's a fascinating look into Vincent's mind, beliefs, philosophies, and artistic influences from a different medium. And whatever you may think about how Vincent's death came about, one has to wonder: does a plan to re-read all of Balzac sound like someone who was within weeks of suicide? ( )