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Tag Archives: belle epoque

Tidy Mystery, Messy World: The Man upon the Stair

02 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1890, absence of tension, belle epoque, book review, Gary Inbinder, historical fiction, mystery fiction, Paris, poor characterization

Review: The Man upon the Stair, by Gary Inbinder
Pegasus, 2018. 252 pp. $26

On the day before he accedes to the chief inspectorship of the Paris Surêté, Achille Lefebvre witnesses the execution of an anarchist assassin. Colleagues warn Lefebvre that the dead man’s friends will seek revenge the first chance they get, so why not have them “taken care of”? No, Lefebvre says; he believes in the rule of law, and stooping to criminal methods would undermine that and reputation he wishes to maintain.

It’s an unusual viewpoint among the Parisian law enforcement of 1890, but, then again, Lefebvre is no ordinary detective. He’s studied the Japanese warrior code, martial arts, pistol marksmanship, the latest methods in criminology that his superiors scoff at (such as fingerprinting), and reads Jules Verne as if the master’s works predicted tomorrow’s news. Lefebvre knows and keeps good relations with Toulouse-Lautrec, cabaret singers, stars of the demimonde, the king of the rag pickers, and every important figure in the judicial and police world, with a few diplomats on the side.

Paris, circa 1890, from A Photographic Trip Around the World, John W. Illiff & Co., Chicago, 1892 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain, expired copyright)

So it is that when Mme. Mathilde de Livet, wife of a nouveau riche baron, approaches the detective’s wife, Adele, at the watering hole of Aix-les-Bains and seems strangely agitated, Mme. Lefebvre’s social antennas quiver. Well they might, for Mme. de Livet is soon telling the police that her husband has disappeared. Questioning the missing man’s valet reveals that the baron was holding hundreds of thousands of francs in a Gladstone bag, said to be gambling winnings that prompted a duel. Before long, the case will involve possible espionage, a poisoned maid, Russian diplomats, and several swindles. A few of these problems may pose serious international implications, it seems.

Inbinder has written a clever mystery that keeps the pages turning; just when you think there can’t be another twist, he gives you three more. Lefebvre is an appealing character, if hard to believe, but his heart’s in the right place, and he earns his subordinates’ loyalty by praising them and giving them chances to succeed. (Everybody deserves a boss like that.) As a family man, Lefebvre wishes he could do better, for some days he hardly comes home. One of my favorite scenes is when he has to beat a quick retreat, leaving Adele to administer her own form of law enforcement to their young daughter.

Another pleasure of The Man upon the Stair is fin-de-siècle Paris. Inbinder spends few words on it, but they all count:

Achille sat on a slatted wooden bench on the open upper deck of the Rue Caulaincourt tram. The horse-drawn car ran up from the Place de Clichy and over the iron viaduct that crossed the cemetery. He grabbed the brim of his fedora as a gust whipped over the elevated roadway. Wind rustled the reddish-golden-leaved treetops lining each side of the thoroughfare. The breeze carried smoke from dead leaves smoldering in piles gathered around the graves and sarcophagi; the fumes irritated his eyes and nostrils, making them water. He removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, coughed, and blew his nose.

For all that, I find The Man upon the Stair a contrived, frustrating mystery to read. There’s never any doubt that Lefebvre and his minions will handle whatever obstacles arise, before the tension can stretch its legs or the reader’s nerves. It’s as though the author, through his detective, were saying, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this covered.” For instance, we’re told that the diplomatic complications could provoke a war, but we don’t actually see that in play, so there’s no reason to believe it. No amount of explanation that the French government is courting Russia as an ally raises the stakes. It’s historically accurate but involves no drama, for Lefebvre massages everything behind the scenes and then narrates his success after the fact.

He should at least break a sweat. But, as he says himself, he’s very lucky, and his infinite sources of information never fail. Moreover, that information is most often relayed to him (and the reader) in dialogue that reads like declarations or pronouncements rather than ordinary speech. This stilted feel pervades the novel, in which there are too few surprises. Minor characters have one overriding trait or concern, which the narrative describes or explains, and which the dialogue then reinforces, so you often have the impression that you’ve just read something twice.

So though I enjoyed The Man upon the Stair, largely for its glimpses of a city I love, I could take this novel or let it alone.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Hustles and Bustles: To Capture What We Cannot Keep

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Beatrice Colin, belle epoque, book review, Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, hard-edged romance, historical fiction, literary fiction, nineteenth century, Panama Canal, Paris, Scotland, sexual propriety, Third Republic

Review: To Capture What We Cannot Keep, by Beatrice Colin
Flatiron, 2016. 289 pp. $26

Imagine meeting the love of your life on a hot-air balloon ride, and that he happens to be the chief lieutenant to Gustave Eiffel, just then (1886) about to begin construction on the tower that will become famous. This is the engaging premise to a well-plotted, hard-edged romantic novel of literary credentials that vividly delivers both the luxury and seamy side of Paris during the Belle Époque. What more could you want?

Newspaper caricature of Gustave Eiffel, reflecting the storm of criticism for having compared his as-yet unbuillt structure to the pyramids (Le Temps, February 14, 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Caricature of Gustave Eiffel, who compared his unbuilt tower to the pyramids (Le Temps, 14 February 1887; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Well, a couple things, actually, but I don’t want to carp, since I thoroughly enjoyed To Capture What We Cannot Keep and suspect that you will too. Even so, let’s get one thing out of the way, the unfortunate title, which evokes All the Light We Cannot See. Authors don’t always decide their titles, and if this one sounds like pandering, Colin succeeds in at least one respect where Anthony Doerr, her presumed predecessor, failed. There’s no treacle here, nothing that even remotely resembles it. The only obvious similarity is that both books take place in France.

Caitriona Wallace (a histrionic name, I think), is a thirty-year-old Scottish widow reduced to playing chaperone for the beloved niece and nephew of a wealthy Glaswegian industrialist on their grand tour of Europe. Shortly before the trio are to leave Paris, Caitriona, known as Cait, takes that fateful balloon ride and meets–or sort of meets–Émile Noguier, an engineer whose direct appraisal seems less than wholly gentlemanly and thus very exciting.

And so things turns out, but, as in any worthwhile romance, the course of true love never does run smooth. The memory of Cait’s marriage pains her, but where most people assume that her husband’s untimely death is what troubles her, that’s not what hurts most, the details of which take a good while to emerge. More importantly, though Cait recognizes the unfairness behind the sexual double standard and dislikes corsets and bustles, she feels bound to uphold propriety, especially since her two young charges are determined to find trouble. As for Émile, he too feels pressured, with a domineering mother and a family tradition on one side, and a taste for Montmartre artists’ models on the other.

I like how Colin uses Paris, a city she understands and loves, to embody her characters’ outlook and desires:

Children threw rocks into dirty brown puddles, while girls only a few years older, with strings of imitation pearls around their necks and jewels of rain in their hair, waited in doorways for customers. It had shocked Cait at first, the poverty, the brazenness with which young women sold themselves, the casual attitude toward destitution and morality.

For Émile, building the tower, to him a work of art unlike any known before, requires a lot of ugliness before beauty can arise:

The men had quarried down through damp clay and wet sand, through mud studded with broken crockery and shards of glass, with splinters of animal bone and flakes of flint, and now the air reeked of decayed things, of sulfur and rot. Cutting across everything, however, making your eyes water and the world intermittently gray and indistinct, were clouds of woodsmoke. The fires seemed to burn day and night, purifying and polluting in equal measure.

With prose like this and a keen eye for psychological moments, Colin conveys the fullness of her protagonists’ inner lives and how convention keeps them from seeking what will make them happy. Several secondary characters also emerge in full, such as a conniving beauty of easy virtue and a gift for manipulating the naive, and Eiffel himself–narcissistic, generous, but always looking out for number one. Colin turns a few clichés inside out and keeps you guessing as to the resolution; “no; and furthermore” flourishes here.

But sometimes to resolve the obstacles she places, she leans on a minor contrivance or two of her own, most particularly the cardboard niece and nephew. Alice is a twit of great beauty but no culture or manners who seems completely obsessed with getting engaged at age nineteen. If she’s to be a twit, at least she can show some individuality about it. Ditto her brother Jamie, a spendthrift wastrel who causes a great deal of harm without even trying.

Finally, I wish Colin had fleshed out one point of history, a scandal regarding an attempt to build a canal in Panama, which ruined Ferdinand de Lesseps, entrepreneur behind the Suez Canal, and almost dragged down Eiffel too. The failure bankrupted an entire swath of French society, involved government bribery–causing no end of trouble for the still-young Third Republic–and incited a wave of anti-Semitism. I understand why Colin didn’t want to get enmeshed in the Panama affair, yet I think she might have hinted at how deeply the scandal roiled the country, beyond mere mention of lost fortunes and how Eiffel suddenly lost his social cachet.

All the same, To Capture What We Cannot Keep will satisfy legions of readers.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Not-So-Belle Époque

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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art, ballet, belle epoque, Cathy Marie Buchanan, Degas, historican fiction, nineteenth century, Paris, patronage, sex discrimination, women

Review: The Painted Girls, by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Penguin, 2013. 353 pp. $28

It’s Paris in the late 1870s, and the three van Goethem girls are living a hair’s breadth from destitution. Their father has just died, and their mother, a laundress, is too friendly with the absinthe bottle. With the landlord beating at the door, the eldest daughter, Antoinette, a mere teenager, brings the next oldest, Marie, to audition for the ballet. If eleven-year-old Marie makes the cut, she’ll get a stipend, which, however meager, will help pay the rent. Meanwhile, Charlotte, the youngest, longs to be a dancer herself, but more for the dance, not the money.

But even if the sisters enter the ballet company, there are slippers and skirts to buy, plus extra lessons without which even the most talented newcomer can’t hope to compete with her more experienced peers. Not only won’t the stipend go that far, the long hours of practice and, if she’s lucky, rehearsal for performance, drain many hours from the day. There’s little time for paying work on the side, assuming a young girl could find a job.

Unless, of course, a well-to-do gentleman who subscribes to the ballet is willing to be her patron, in which case the ballet slippers, skirts, and lessons are paid for. Perhaps too, he whispers in the director’s ear, and voilà, his protegée receives a promotion to the next of many levels within the ballet corps. Naturally, however, patronage doesn’t come for free.

This is the life that Cathy Marie Buchanan explores in The Painted Girls, and what a heart-rending tale it is. As Marie laments more than halfway through the novel,


 

I want to put my face in my hands, to howl, for me, for Antoinette, for all the women of Paris, for the burden of having what men desire, for the heaviness of knowing it is ours to give, that with our flesh we make our way in the world.


 

Marie’s one of the lucky ones. She has Antoinette to lean on, and a nearby bakery where she earns a little on the side, as well as the shy smiles of the baker’s son. Also, a painter named Degas, who prowls the ballet scene, asks Marie to model, which brings in a few more francs. But tenuous circumstances change quickly, and the van Goethems, like poor people everywhere, lack the resources to cope. Consequently, The Painted Girls shows the not-so-belle époque in its daily squalor, vividly demonstrating the social divide between artist practitioners from patrons, and the latter’s prejudices and illusions.

Dancers Practicing at the Barre, Edgar Degas (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Dancers Practicing at the Barre, Edgar Degas, 1877 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

I like the storytelling here very much (except the last forty pages or so, which sometimes dip into melodrama). I also like how the author has depicted Marie, her ballet classmates, her patron, and Degas, with subtle complexity and depth. However, I don’t understand why Antoinette falls prey to a masochistic love affair–why does he appeal to her?–though once it gets going, her blind devotion feels absolutely real and chilling. Charlotte, the youngest sister, is a nonentity, a sketch.

Buchanan has painstakingly researched the van Goethem sisters and Antoinette’s lover, all of whom existed, and of course Degas and a few others. Strangely, though, Buchanan’s Paris is almost completely interior, giving full attention to rooms and, at times, building facades, but not streets. Is this a matter of style? To suggest claustrophobia? It’s also a bit odd that certain contemporary events–the Paris Commune of 1871, for instance–rate no mention, despite their profound aftershocks.

Still, the world of The Painted Girls deserves wide attention, and so does this good novel.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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