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Tag Archives: France

More Than a Muse: Leonora in the Morning Light

17 Monday Apr 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1940, artists' vision, book review, escape, feminism, France, historical fiction, Leonora Carrington, literary fiction, love affair, Max Ernst, Michaela Carter, modern art, painting, poetical prose, Surrealists, World War II

Review: Leonora in the Morning Light, by Michaela Carter
S&S, 2021. 393 pp. $27

In 1937, twenty-year-old Leonora Carrington, would-be artist, meets the Surrealist painter Max Ernst in London. One eye blink later, they’re attracted; the average zoo possesses less animal pheromone than these two.

Defying her industrialist father, who disowns her, Leonora follows Ernst to Paris, where she tries to paint, sometimes succeeding, and to avoid her lover’s second wife, who assaults her physically in public.

Despite the pheromones, the lovers are a mismatch. Ernst is forty-six, more than twice her age, and probably couldn’t spell fidelity, never mind live up to it. Nobody around him does. His friends, the likes of Lee Miller, Man Ray, and Paul Éluard, swap sexual partners as if that game couldn’t hurt anybody who has an artistic soul, which makes Leonora fear she lacks one. Head over heels in love, she wants Max to divorce his wife and marry her. Good luck.

I’ll confess that this novel confuses me. I was expecting a story about one woman’s growth as an artist, which would no doubt entail her search for her own style and her fight for recognition in a field dominated by men who’d never accept a woman as anything but bedmate or muse. Indeed, Carter writes in her author’s note, “This is not the story of the Great Man’s Woman. This is the story of the Great Woman.”

Carrington’s 1963-64 painting, The Magical World of the Mayans, at the National Anthropology Museum, Mexico City. Carrington spent most of her life in Mexico. (Courtesy Ioppear via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons)

I wonder. Leonora in the Morning Light vacillates between the feminist/artist theme and Max Ernst’s star power, and since the novel focuses more on their love affair than Carrington’s artistic education, it might not have been a fair fight to begin with.

Perhaps that results, in part, from Ernst’s fame, as evidenced by the emphasis in the jacket flap copy and the pointless prologue, set in 1977, which tries to show how Carrington merits our attention regardless of her erstwhile lover. Moreover, half the book has little or nothing to do with art, recounting the principals’ belated flight from France in June 1940 after the German invasion.

To be fair, before the war, you do see Carrington at work and, even more often, dreaming compelling images that she tries to paint. Also, Ernst does guide her to find her artistic vision and praises her grasp of the surreal—though she feels, with some reason, that he’s stingy that way, when generosity would have cost little. Still, it’s plain that their affair influences her life as an artist.

However, it takes about a hundred pages for Leonora to start painting as if she means it. And Ernst, despite the magnetic attraction, is poison for her, which to me makes him repellent. Selfish, hungry for the limelight, unable to commit himself to her yet complaining when she’s not there when he needs her, he’s holding her back, and she can’t break away.

After they’ve moved to southern France, a home and studio she’s largely created and paid for, nothing will make him leave, even the war. The Germans won’t bother us, he insists, though he knows Hitler has personally branded him a “degenerate” and had his works burned. Besides, the light is so good for painting. She can leave if she wants, but he’s staying, and he won’t discuss it.

What Leonora in the Morning Light does accomplish, though, is to create a remarkably clear picture of artists and how they live, work, and think. Max’s Ernst’s first demonstration for her:

He rubbed the side of the pencil over the paper. . . .It was like dreams, she thought, how they live all day in your body, in the bones of your wrists and elbows, in the spongy tissues of your liver and your lungs. Your logical mind is oblivious to them, and only when you let go and give in to sleep do these dreams dare to show their faces, the way animals at the zoo come out at dawn and dusk, when the light itself is a kind of refuge.

Carter’s a poet, and the language throughout is unerring, whether to set a scene in a Parisian café, artists frolicking at an English cottage, or the desperate escapes after the invasion. I believe everything the characters say and do, which feels utterly natural, without any wink-wink, nudge-nudge because of their fame. Their flaws as well as their genius come through.

If you read Leonora in the Morning Light, be warned that there’s a rape scene. Leonora also has a psychotic break, in which she becomes delusional, involving long, excruciating (and tedious) sequences of images and bizarre events. This didn’t surprise me, because her gift for the surreal is so deep as to suggest fragile internal boundaries between self and exterior, reality and fantasy. Sooner or later, she’ll crack.

What did surprise me was the degree to which she recovers. After her attack, she does draw back from certain subjects and images she fears might push her back over the edge, but you sense she’ll be all right in the long run. I wonder how we can know that.

An intense, unusual novel, this, perhaps best approached as a peek into an artist’s soul.

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

A Heroine Revisited: Joan

26 Monday Dec 2022

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book review, Catholic Church, Charles VII, court politics, cult of heroism, epic, fifteenth century, France, historical fiction, Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, Katherine J. Chen, literary fiction, military leader, religion, revisionism, secular leader, strong characterization

Review: Joan, by Katherine J. Chen
Random House, 2022. 343 pp. $28

One summer day in 1422, ten-year-old Jeanne d’Arc gathers stones for a fight between the boys of her village, Domrémy, against their Burgundian neighbors. The singular, disturbing ending to that brief battle will stay in the girl’s memory forever. But that day ends like any other; her father beats her, this time for dropping a bowl.

She is using her palm to ladle as much stew as she can into her mouth, so that she can’t be accused of wasting food. . . . Also, she is eating from the floor because, in spite of her grief or owing to it, she is starving. In her haste, she has swallowed a bit of the bowl itself, a hard and tiny crumb. . . . Fresh rushes are spread on the floor, and somehow she has chewed a bit of them, too. There’s the taste of grass in her mouth, along with everything else she has gulped down already.
The room has turned sideways. It takes her a moment to understand why, until she pins down the source of her pain: her ear, her left ear, is inside her father’s fist.

Over several years, his blows harden her, both to the pain and because her efforts to elude him lead her to perform useful, physically demanding chores for neighbors, which take her out of his reach—carrying sacks of grain, patching a roof, lifting a cart from the mud.

Jeanne grows tall and powerful, but she’s also a thinker. She’s drawn to her ne’er-do-well uncle because he’s kind and has traveled. She too dreams of going elsewhere, but how, to do what? And could she ever leave her beloved older sister, Catherine, who’s tried to protect her?

This is Joan of Arc, unwittingly preparing for her role in history. You know she’ll leave Domrémy, pass numerous tests that let her penetrate the inner circles of power in a divided France burdened by constant, unsuccessful war against the English invaders. She’ll meet the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, who’ll allow her to lead his soldiers.

Jean Fouquet’s 1444 portrait, oil on wood, of Charles VII, called the Victorious or the Well-Served, the latter more accurate (courtesy Louvre Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Except that this Joan is secular. Chen’s creation hears no saints’ voices, has little use for the Church, and comes belatedly (and reluctantly) to claim divine sanction. In her way, this Joan has religious faith, but I think from a perspective rare, if not unknown, in fifteenth-century France. Rather, she’s a soldier, first and foremost, and how she becomes a fighter and strategist makes a compelling, epic story.

Chen’s approach will offend those who believe historical fiction should render history as faithfully as possible, and since the sources on Jeanne d’Arc are many, these critics will decry the book as revisionism. Readers who have particular affection for the traditional story, perhaps for cultural or religious reasons, will also take exception; I know because I’ve discussed the book with people from both camps. I respect their sensibilities, though I don’t share them.

But I don’t accept how certain naysayers ascribe unsavory motives to the author, whether the urge to trample values others hold dear, or the lure of making money, and to hell with history. What utter nonsense, which suggests how threatening iconoclasm is. Too bad.

Chen is not only a brilliant novelist, she clearly loves her characters and has great respect for the time period, especially the politics and certain aspects of daily life, which she renders beautifully. From the field at the stone fight in the beginning to a town fair to a room at the Dauphin’s castle at Chinon where an enemy tries to entrap her into treason, the narrative imbues physical spaces with mood and character.

Tension thrums throughout, though I particularly admire the court scenes at Chinon and the characterizations that emerge: the Dauphin, his mother-in law, and Joan’s future comrades-in-arms, Dunois and La Hire, to name a few.

Admittedly, I don’t sense the fifteenth century in Domrémy—too much friendliness, not enough superstition. But it’s not twenty-first century either, and however old these events and characters really are, they seem entirely coherent among one another, complete, and logical. One measure of this understanding is how Chen has Joan argue for making artillery—fanciful, I suppose, yet intriguing, given that the king who shrugs off this notion in distaste would later accept it from the mouth of another famous commoner, Jacques Coeur.

Another measure of completeness is how all the expected issues come into play—the Dauphin’s weakness of character, the prejudice against a peasant woman, the soldiers’ devotion, France struggling to become a nation, and so on. They just happen without religion driving the narrative. Impossible in the fifteenth century? Yes, but that’s just about the only difference between the traditional story and this one.

Call it revisionism, if you like, but I recoil at what a few of my colleagues have said, that to describe this book—which they haven’t read—you’d have to drop the historical from historical fiction.

Not only do I admire this novel, I plan to study how the author has written it. Joan touches a nerve, but maybe that’s a good thing.

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

Holocaust Superwoman: The World That We Knew

22 Monday Aug 2022

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Alice Hoffman, anti-Semitism, book review, expository storytelling, folklore, France, Germany, golem, historical fiction, Holocaust, literary fiction, magical realism, no and furthermore, perceptions of evil, Second World War, superheroes

Review: The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster, 2019. 365 pp. $28

In spring 1941, those Jews still left in Berlin live from hand to mouth, managing each day as best they can. But Hanni Kohn, who recognizes her end is near, determines that her twelve-year-old daughter, Lea, will escape. Hanni visits the household of a famous rabbi, seeking a miracle, but he’s not to be disturbed. It’s his seventeen-year-old daughter, Ettie, who agrees to help, and the task is most unusual and occult: to create a golem, who’ll protect Lea and see her to Paris, where she has distant cousins.

The golem, a centuries-old figure in Jewish mysticism and folklore, is a creature made of dust or clay with a human appearance, no soul or feeling, yet with physical powers craved by a people who live in peril. Sixteenth-century Prague provides a famous example of the legend, which Mitchell James Kaplan borrowed for his novel the Fifth Servant. But you can also link the golem to 1930s superheroes, fighters for freedom, and the rule of law in a world tearing itself apart.

Hoffman, however, has a slightly different game in mind:

The figure had cooled into the shape of a woman. She was tall, with long legs and a well-proportioned body. Her hair was flowing and dark, the color of damp soil. The form had been given ruach, the breath of bones, the life force that animates every creature on earth. Its lack of a soul would allow it to perceive the spiritual aspects of the world that no human could ever know or see. Good and evil appeared in their truest forms to a golem, death was easy to perceive and the spirits of the dead could be summoned.

Aptly named Ava, for she can speak to birds, she’s tasked with guiding Lea, Ettie, and her sister, Marta across the border, then to Paris. But Ava’s existence is an affront to God, and as such, must not outlast her usefulness. Once the war ends, she must die.

The narrative therefore relies on magical realism, Hoffman’s trademark, a genre I’ve never taken to. Yet The World That We Knew is a beautiful, passionate novel about life and death, love as miracle and sacrifice, and the nature of grief. It’s also a page-turner.

Just as the escape fails to go as planned for all parties involved, reaching Paris offers less shelter than the refugees hoped. After all, the Germans have invaded, and the French police vigorously help them round up Jews for deportation. Further, the cousins want no part of the refugees, though the younger son, Julien, falls for Lea.

Consequently, “no — and furthermore” abides in these pages, and though the increasing cast of characters has more than its fair share of luck, they suffer losses too. The realism has a magical component but also a satisfyingly hard edge.

Two women in Paris, June 1942, wearing the yellow star that marks them as Jews (courtesy German Federal Archive,
Bild 183-N0619-506, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

At times, the expository storytelling style bothers me, in which Hoffman explains the action. I want to be allowed closer, to be shown what’s happening. Similarly, the historical passages that teach the Holocaust in France sit wrong; they read like lectures and occasionally err in surpassing the knowledge people had at the time, particularly the precise destination of the trains full of deportees and what would happen to them once they got there.

Nevertheless, I understand Hoffman’s temptation to impart this information. I grew up conversant with the Holocaust, partly because my parents came of age during the war, an exposure that today’s generations lack. The author apparently wishes to redress that.

Fortunately, around the time the refugees leave Paris, the narrative kicks into a higher gear, and when it does, the storytelling shifts as well, showing more and explaining less. My favorite character is Ava, who comes to appreciate what life is, why humans cling to it, and its advantages and disadvantages. I like her transformation from unfeeling clay to sensibility very much. With evil pervading the world, it takes courage even to see what’s worthwhile, let alone to act accordingly, the problem the human characters face.

But that issue touches Ava too, in her own way, not least in her relationship with a heron, with whom she dances when his migration flight brings him through France. Also, she has a skill that comes in handy: her ability to perceive the black-robed angel of death, Azriel, as he hovers, waiting his chance to inscribe a victim’s name, a ledger in his hands. This image will stay with me; I think it comes from folklore.

As my regular readers know, I’m particular about Holocaust novels and won’t touch those in which Jews seem mere historical artifacts, depicted for narrative convenience. I’m pleased to say that The World That We Knew swept me away for its moral evocations, characterizations, and sheer imagination.

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

Starting Place: The School of Mirrors

13 Monday Jun 2022

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book review, Bourbon monarchy, child abuse, corrupt court, corrupt revolutionaries, eighteenth century, Eva Stachniak, France, French Revolution, Louis XV, misogyny, Mme de Pompadour, overburdened narrative, sexual abuse, static descriptions, Versailles

Review: The School of Mirrors, by Eva Stachniak
Morrow, 2022. 399 pp. $17

The year, 1755. Thirteen-year-old Véronique Roux lives in a squalid Paris apartment with her mother, who scratches out a living mending old clothes, and three younger brothers. One day, Maman tells Véronique she’s to go into service for a wealthy nobleman, and just like that, the girl’s shipped off to a splendid home a brief carriage ride from Versailles, where Louis XV holds court. Naturally, her mother receives certain financial considerations.

Told that her patron is a Polish nobleman attached to the court, Véronique is groomed for her upcoming service to him. She’s given plenty to eat; her skin and hair cleansed of lice and treated for various ailments common to poor children; she’s taught penmanship, posture, and comportment; to improve her singing and recitation; and, most important, instruction, religious and secular, stressing modesty, restraint, and obedience. In other words, qualities foreign to the French monarchy.

The emotions had to be controlled at all times. Anything vulgar had to be strictly avoided. Eating fast and too much, running, jumping, stomping our feet, shouting, cursing, showing either sadness or joy. ‘News of a death or a proposal of marriage… must be met with equal composure. Always smile, whether you are happy or not. Make your eyes sparkle, no matter what you are thinking of.’

Meanwhile, the narrative also recounts life within the palace at Versailles. In particular, we learn how the king, jaded and bored with his caged existence, longs for pleasures to lift his heart (and another part of his anatomy, which seems to rule his moods). He can’t stand dealing with matters of state, which include a war that’s going badly, so he spends as little time on these as possible. How droll.

Rather, everyone close to him, most especially his former mistress and closest advisor, Madame de Pompadour, do their best to divert him with gossip, prop up his flagging ego, and provide tender flesh to interest that other, significant part of him. Practically from the get-go, the reader understands what Véronique doesn’t: what her “service” will entail, and who her patron really is. She’s a bit dense for a Parisian girl, especially a beauty who’s endured advances from strange men and whose mother has all the tenderness of a brick, therefore the embodiment of hard lessons.

Charles André Van Loo’s portrait of Mme de Pompadour, née Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, ca. 1755 (courtesy Petit Trianon, Palace of Versailles, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Suffice to say that the “Polish nobleman” takes a shine to Véronique, and her subsequent pregnancy gets her expelled from paradise. Her child, Marie-Louise, is taken from her, while Véronique’s packed off to marry some grain merchant.

That I haven’t yet recounted the main premise of the novel tells you the major weakness of The School of Mirrors: The story really picks up steam seventeen years and 175 pages after it begins. Marie-Louise’s life in Paris, apprenticeship to a midwife, and ringside seat at the revolution and its excesses form the core of the book, and I like this part. So do we really need to know, in meticulous detail, how despicable the Bourbon monarchy was under the previous, fifteenth Louis?

Stachniak seems to want to reveal the precise depth of sexual abuse, misogyny, and moral corruption, and what a gruesome, ugly tale it is. I don’t think that justifies its presence, and I suspect that if you began reading at page 175, you’d understand almost everything you need to know to appreciate the novel. Well-chosen back story could have filled in the rest.

The first half of the book does offer a few noteworthy characters. I like the portrayals of the king, his chief procurer, and Madame de Pompadour. The descriptions give a vivid picture of court life — the author knows her ground — though I’d have liked them better had they struck an emotional chord. Some feel merely decorative, static.

But there’s no comparing with the second half of the book, where conflict spins more rapidly, and the revolutionaries turn out to be just as corrupt as the monarchy they toppled, if in their own way. Marie-Louise has more to her than her mother, and the narrative feels more intimate, therefore more compelling.

I wonder whether Stachniak has two novels here; she’s got two stories, certainly. Her desire to connect the two and derive surprise lacks the impact she may have hoped for, but that strategy’s apparently a trend, these days: try to shock the reader, at any cost to narrative flow or plausibility. At least the author doesn’t withhold information the way some do — she’s too generous for that — but I’ve never understood the fascination with connecting multiple disparate narratives. Seldom does it work out as intended in artistic terms, so it must sell books.

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

An Island of Women: Matrix

08 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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abbey, book review, Eleanor of Aquitaine, England, feminism, France, historical fiction, Lauren Groff, literary fiction, Marie de France, medieval belief, National Book Award, reimagined life, religious vision, shelter from male influence, twelfth century, woman's place in history

Review: Matrix, by Lauren Groff
Riverhead, 2021. 257 pp. $28

In 1158, Queen Eleanor of England removes seventeen-year-old Marie from her court at Westminster and dispatches her as prioress to a struggling abbey. Having managed a family estate in Maine, a French province bordering Normandy and Brittany, Marie is judged to be just the person to turn the abbey into a moneymaker. Besides, the queen says, with Marie’s deep voice, huge hands, and taste for disputation, she has no feminine charm or art whatsoever, so who’d marry her?

History knows little of Marie de France, as she called herself, aside from her narrative poems set in Brittany with chivalric and fairy-tale themes, and her fables about animals. But Groff, in what must rank among the most original and vivid novels I have ever read, has reimagined Marie’s life as a feminist heroine who turns her painful banishment into unheard-of success. Deploying considerable political and social gifts, Marie attempts not only to put the abbey on sound financial footing, creating a beehive of productive activity, she aims for nothing less than making the place an island unto itself, not just free of men but of male influence altogether.

Marie de France, from an illuminated manuscript attributed to Richard of Verdun (courtesy Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Talk about a fairytale! These are the Middle Ages, when women have no say in anything, and even to suggest otherwise invites accusations of witchcraft or heresy. But Groff knows exactly what she’s doing, and she establishes this threat alongside Marie’s campaigns for freedom; as the abbey grows wealthy, enemies gather. I particularly admire how the narrative subtly employs a historical parallel between the real queen and the fictive yet plausible prioress. Eleanor, as duchess of Aquitaine, bride to two kings, mother of two others, and a political force into her dotage makes an excellent foil for Marie, whose aspirations are both greater and lesser.

Marie, who loves Eleanor and aches from her dismissal, hopes to impress her mentor and regain her favor, hence both the poems and the efforts to increase income for the crown. Marie therefore has one eye on the temporal world, the other on matters of the soul, yet carries an intense desire for approval, a depiction allowing for compelling personal and public stakes. The setup also permits Marie to receive Eleanor’s half-admiring warnings about the dangers she’s running in a world controlled by men.

Further, Groff expertly fleshes out Marie’s biography, casting her as an illegitimate child of royal rape, which has repercussions throughout the story. (The text implies that the rapist was Stephen, the Plantagenet king eventually succeeded by Henry II, Eleanor’s future second husband.) As an infant, Marie accompanied her mother on Crusade, which gives her needed cachet at the abbey — you can imagine the nuns wonder how a seventeen-year-old can presume lead them. They don’t wonder long.

But the real genius of Matrix involves the re-creation of medieval thought and belief regarding the use and abuse of power, the difference between human goodness and a leader’s greatness, how civilizations rise and fall, and a woman’s place in making history. Marie has visions, ornate religious dramas whose recounting conveniently allow her to promote schemes otherwise considered heretical. But she also explores the emotional and moral spaces where no one else even thinks to go. For instance, when she comforts a bellowing cow whose calf has been taken from her, her physical bond with the beast makes her wonder if that’s the closest she’s come to seeing God.

From the first line, the prose will spirit you away. Take any passage you like — any — but for argument’s sake, consider this one, when Marie intends to send her poems to Eleanor:

She will send her manuscript as a blazing arrow toward her love, and when it strikes, it will set that cruel heart on fire. Eleanor will relent. Marie will be allowed back to the court, to the place where none ever starve, and there is always music and dogs and birds and life, when at dusk the gardens are full of lovers and flowers and intrigue, where Marie can practice her languages and hear in the halls the fiery tails of new ideas shooting through conversations. Not just the tripartite god of parent and child and ghost who is talked about here, not all this endless work and prayer and hunger.

How Marie surrenders this fantasy to adopt the daily task of tending the women around her so that they realize their true natures and abilities makes stirring fiction. (She struggles hard but subtly against what men have said about women; note that in this narrative, the word god is never capitalized.) The title, a clever play on words, suggests what Groff is after. At the abbey, the healer, for instance, is the infirmatrix, and the scribe, the scriptorix. So it follows that the mother is the matrix, which also means “originator.” You may take that figuratively or literally.

Matrix is a finalist for the National Book Award. Next week, we’ll find out whether it’s the winner, but either way, read this novel.

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

Grey. Thomas Grey: Hold Fast

09 Monday Aug 2021

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"no--and furthmore", 1803, awkward tone, book review, Britain, cleverness as style, flat protagonist, France, historical fiction, Ian Fleming, J. H. Gelernter, James Bond, Napoleonic Wars, naval intelligence, Patrick O'Brian, predictable narrative, thriller

Review: Hold Fast, by J. H. Gelernter
Norton, 2021. 238 pp. $26

Thomas Grey, late of the Royal Marines and His Majesty’s Secret Service, intends to sail to Boston and take a job with a lumber merchant. The year is 1803, the Napoleonic Wars have reached a respite, and Grey wishes to seize his chance to get out while he can. Having lost his beloved wife to a French raid on the merchantman on which the Greys were traveling, he’ll to the war no more.

Ah, but not so fast. A privateer attacks the ship on which he’s bound across the Atlantic, and news comes that Napoleon has revoked the Treaty of Amiens, resuming the war against Britain. Grey, with much derring-do, helps repel the attack, but the damaged ship must make landfall in neutral Portugal for refitting. While he’s there, circumstances hand him a great opportunity to pretend to switch sides and dupe French intelligence with disinformation. Rest assured that our hero’s game of double agent will lead him into many tight situations, as he must penetrate the inner sanctum of French military power.

Michelle de Bonneuil (1748-1829), rendered here in pastel by Rosalie Filleul, ca. 1778, was celebrated for her beauty, charm, and artistic ability–and acted as a spy for the French Revolutionary government and Napoleon (unknown provenance, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

If you’re thinking that Hold Fast sounds like Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels of the Napoleonic era meeting Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’ve nailed it, and the author intends as much. In his afterword, Gelernter confirms himself an admirer of both. For reasons I’ll get to a little later, I wish he’d hewn more to O’Brian than Fleming, but as a fast-paced adventure story, Hold Fast has its charms.

First and foremost, the narrative moves like lightning, with “no—and furthermore” lurking in every nook and cranny, to say nothing of dark alleys and rooms in which two’s company and three’s a crowd—especially when the uninvited third holds a weapon. Secondly, Gelernter has a lot of fun turning Grey into a nineteenth-century Bond, equally at home at a gaming table, vineyard tasting room, or hand-to-hand combat. The in-joke will raise a chuckle, here and there; Hold Fast can be pleasingly clever, that way.

The narrative also shows a grasp of physical detail, lightly handled:

It was only the sound of seamen holystoning the Ruby’s deck that pulled him back to the present, reminded him where he was—it was that scrape-scrape, scrape-scrape of men on their knees scouring the ship with sandstone chunks the size and shape of Bibles. Grey couldn’t help but notice that the pace of the scraping was considerably slower than it was, invariably, in the navy. On this ship there was no bosun to start the men with a kick in the pants. Nevertheless, the ship was impeccably clean. Perhaps there was a lesson in that.

As this passage implies, Grey, though a naval intelligence man through and through, rejects the brutal Royal Navy discipline, so a wisp of democrat exists beneath the surface of a warrior for king and country. It’s a wrinkle, unfortunately one of few, and the others don’t appeal me—he’s a prig, vengeful, cold, with a moral code stereotypical of the stuffed-shirt Englishman. Which raises the question: Is this meant to be funny?

There’s a scene in which a young woman points a pistol at him. Since she’s neglected to cock it (it’s a flintlock, naturally), Grey has no trouble subduing her. He cracks her on the side of the head—gently, mind you—deftly grasps her body before it falls, and deposits her in a chair. Should we laugh?

Such humor, if that’s what it is, sits oddly, though, and not just because a lot of bodies fall. Lacking the tongue-in-cheek bravura of the George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, Hold Fast conversely fails to treat the serious subject matter with depth or empathy. Grey’s flatness, though it may provoke a smile, as in the above scene, renders him an automaton, and priggishness never did much for anyone, especially without a sidekick with whom to contrast. As a shallow, even dislikable character, then, Grey offers little to bond with, if you will. This is where the narrative misses anything remotely akin to the O’Brian gift for character and relationships.

I read Hold Fast mildly curious to know how Grey would foil the threats against him. But if I’d stopped reading halfway through, I wouldn’t have felt cheated, because I didn’t find him compelling. Moreover, you can guess how he’ll proceed, relying on his preternatural aptitude for close-quarters combat, which no one else ever seems to match.

Consequently, the character in the novel lacks depth, and the character of the novel comes down mostly to cleverness. That has its points occasionally; my favorite bits concern intriguing sidelights on gambling or the making of champagne. But if these are the most interesting aspects of Hold Fast, I can’t say I’m held.

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

A Way of Seeing: The Electric Hotel

12 Monday Apr 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1910, book review, camera as escape, Dominic Smith, early twentieth century, filmmaking, France, historical fiction, Hollywood, image versus reality, literary fiction, Lumière brothers, New Jersey, Thomas Edison, United States

Review: The Electric Hotel, by Dominic Smith
FSG, 2019. 352 pp. $18

In 1962, Claude Ballard lives in a once-fashionable Los Angeles residential hotel, among old film containers and equipment and memories of a difficult, yet stimulating, past. A long-forgotten (fictional) film director whose magnum opus was The Electric Hotel, shown only once, in 1910, Claude lives out his days taking neighborhood walks with camera in hand and keeping a benevolent eye on a neighbor, a former silent film star whose memory and understanding of her surroundings often desert her.

Into Claude’s quiet, measured existence wanders Martin Embry, an academic field historian writing his dissertation, who takes one look at the director’s apartment and wants to know if the celluloid in those canisters has been developed and preserved. Actually, he takes one whiff and realizes they haven’t, for the decomposing film gives off a strong odor, like vinegar, which Claude has never noticed. That shocks him and makes him more receptive when Martin tries to persuade him to loan him the films that can still be salvaged in the laboratory. Just as important, he coaxes the hermit to recount his life story; it’s as though Claude suddenly realizes that he’s been gathering dust and doesn’t have to.

And what a story, from a lonely youth in Alsace — Claude’s French, by birth — in which his mother died of smallpox when he was quite young. Claude nearly succumbs himself, and afterward, when his vision falters — “the edges of objects began to slowly quake and fringe” — the village doctor sends him to a specialist:

… Claude emerged with a wire frame prescription wrapped behind his ears and it was suddenly as if he’d swum to the surface of a very deep lake. The world rushed back in as the coppered edge of an October leaf, the crinoline hem of his teacher’s skirt, the yellow-white flange of a chanterelle mushroom on his father’s foraging table… He was a diver emerging from the murky, myopic depths into a bell jar of crystalline edges and forms.

That’s exactly the same impression Claude has when, years later in Paris, he watches the first moving pictures of his life. The Lumière brothers, pioneers known today mostly to ardent cinephiles, create minute-long films of everyday life — a bus traveling down the street, people in a crowd. From that moment, Claude knows his life mission. Not only does he want to learn about and make films, he wants to see and record life the way the Lumières do. A shy, withdrawn person who expects no one to notice him, for him, this is true adventure.

Marcellin Auzolle’s 1896 publicity poster for a Lumière brothers comic film, L’Arroseur arrosé (The Waterer Watered), showing the astonished, enthralled audience (courtesy moah.org/exhibits/archives/movies/movie _theatres_p.html; public domain in the United States)

The Electric Hotel requires a reader’s patience, for the narrative takes a while to get places, portraying Claude’s career, associates, and obsessive love for Sabine Montrose, a French actress who stars in his films. But every time I asked myself if I really wanted to continue reading, once I started, I got lost in the story. It’s not just the writing, which often leaps off the page. Nor is it the fascinating detail about making movies back in the old days–and Smith means old, before any of the silent-film stars commonly discussed today got their start (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Mary Pickford, to name a few).

The tale of how Claude and his friends film The Electric Hotel, which occupies the bulk of the novel, involves a Siberian tiger, a dirigible, an impossible leading lady, and a cameo appearance by a grasping, self-involved Thomas Edison. Equally important, the novel portrays a forgotten time and place. As always, people crave novelty, wish to be entertained, even to be shocked. But after they see Claude’s films, they may resent them afterward, because their attraction to the images tells them something about themselves they’d have preferred not to know.

So too with Claude, who tries to hide behind the camera, even into old age, to avoid facing his past. But the past never leaves — it’s all there, whether on celluloid or in meaning—and he’s a casualty.

Most of the characters come through fully, at least the important ones; other than Claude and Sabine, I particularly like Chip Spalding, the Australian stunt man who covers himself with grease and sets himself on fire. However, several lesser figures remain faceless, and I wish the narrative had paid more attention to them, rather than include certain sequences that contribute very little. I especially wonder about a long First World War segment in Belgium, which, though well told, seems utterly superfluous (and bears little resemblance to any historical facts I know, or even possibilities).

Nevertheless, The Electric Hotel may beguile you as a tale of a bygone era, evoking passionate excitement over a way of seeing that hadn’t existed before—and which we now take for granted.

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

Sixth Census: Another Blog Birthday

26 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Andrew Miller, Angie Cruz, book reviews, Caroline Scott, England, First World War, France, Hilary Mantel, historical fiction, Holocaust, Iain Pears, immigrants, inner lives, Ireland, Isabella Hammad, Italy, James Meek, Jennifer Rosner, literary fiction, London, Mariah Fredericks, Mary Doria Russell, mystery fiction, New York, Niall Williams, Oxford, Palestine, Poland, Robert Harris, thrillers, Tudors

Today, Novelhistorian is six years old, and as I do every anniversary, I recap my dozen or so favorites from the past twelve months.

Start with Dominicana, by Angie Cruz, which brings you to a time and place seldom seen in mainstream historical fiction, an upper Manhattan barrio in 1965. A child-bride essentially sold off by a scheming mother as the family’s ticket out of Dominican Republic must cope with a strange, hostile city; a tight-fisted, abusive husband; and the knowledge that the country in which she now lives is abusing her homeland too. She’s a compelling heroine of a heart-rending story, but it’s her toughness and ingenuity that raise this immigrant’s narrative several notches.

Isabella Hammad, in The Parisian, tells of a young medical student from Palestine who travels to France for his education in 1914 (and to escape conscription by the Ottoman authorities). Abroad, he loses himself in freedoms he never dreamed of, and his return to Palestine causes shock waves within him, echoing the nationalist politics in which he’s involved. Both he and his country are looking for liberation, but neither knows how to go about it. Hammad tells her story in a florid, languorous style reminiscent of Flaubert and Stendhal in its fixation on small moments and one person’s biography as a window on a time and place. The book nearly founders in its first 150 pages, but stay with it, and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Robert Harris never stops dreaming up new ways to recount history through fiction, and A Second Sleep is no exception. Genre-bending, yet steeped in his bold narrative approach, in spare yet evocative prose, this thriller brings you to what seems like fifteenth-century England. But the struggle between free thought and religious teaching, human frailty and temptation will work in any time period—and if I sound vague, it’s deliberate, because this novel works best if you let it creep up on you, with little foreknowledge. The pages exhale history like a subtle, authoritative scent; prepare to be intoxicated.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free takes place in 1809, and Andrew Miller’s thriller differs from the ordinary too, but in an unusual way: It’s delicate. Few books in this genre indulge in lush, patient description, yet these pages turn quickly, thanks to Miller’s active prose, brilliant storytelling, and ingenious concept, a manhunt for a man who’s also searching for himself. Inner life matters here, for heroes and villains both, a refreshing change, when cardboard bad guys abound in fiction. The romance between a traumatized soldier with blood on his conscience and a freethinking woman who sees through him but is losing her eyesight will make you marvel, not least because the reader perceives them more clearly than they do one another.

For a different mood entirely, I propose This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, a love song to the rural Ireland of 1957. The narrative hinges, among other things, on chronic rain stopping for no apparent reason, the arrival of electricity, the character of the new priest in town, and the power of storytelling, all seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old who’s just quit the seminary. Warmth, humor, and melodic prose turn a long series of small events into a large story. I almost put this book down several times but always went back—it will seduce you, if you let it. As the narrator observes, “Sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration,” and everyone in town has their own approach to it. Worth the price of admission: a description of a first love, hilarious and painful, practically on a physiological level.

When it comes to First World War fiction, I’m a stickler for accuracy, whether we’re talking about events, attitudes, or characters true to their time. Come the week of Armistice Day, I’ll be writing a column on my all-time faves, but for now, consider The Poppy Wife, by Caroline Scott. She gets everything right, partly a function of her PhD in history but also how she treats that discipline as a living, breathing entity. She offers a superb premise, in which a woman sets out in 1921 to search for a husband presumed dead in battle but never found. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law, who served alongside the missing man, tries not to reveal that he loves her, just as he tried not to let his brother know. Not an ounce of sentimentality taints this narrative, which deploys power and psychological complexity, showing how survivors can be lost as well as the dead, and how perception and memory can twist even what we’re sure of.

Mariah Fredericks captures the upper-crust social world of 1912 New York (and the gritty life of the less fortunate) in Death of a New American. A lady’s maid, enraged by the senseless murder of an Italian immigrant nanny, whose only fault was to love the children she tended, sets her sights on justice. The sleuth’s quest naturally puts her at odds with the posh family she works for, one of the Four Hundred. However, she’s clever and indefatigable, and she’s seen too much of life to be earnest, which is even better. This splendid mystery, which will keep you guessing, deals with xenophobia, gang violence, the disparities of social class, and the workings of the yellow press—Fredericks knows New York of that era inside out. I wish I’d discovered this series sooner.

Hilary Mantel needs no introduction, nor does The Mirror & the Light, the final volume of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s counselor of common birth. Fiction at its finest, the novel explores the pitfalls and attractions of power while recounting how a gifted politician attempts to keep a childish, make-the-earth-stand-still monarch from destroying himself and his kingdom. There’s plenty of intrigue and backstabbing—we’re talking about Tudor England—but, as usual, Mantel raises the bar. Cromwell’s a master psychologist and political strategist, and, through his eyes, you see a nation grappling with how to escape medieval mayhem and derive a more fitting social template for an increasingly modern age. A timeless story, in other words.

The Yellow Bird Sings an enthralling, heart-breaking song of the Holocaust, and Jennifer Rosner, making an impressive debut here, is an author to watch. The premise is almost a trope by now—in 1941 Poland, a Jewish widow, who has sacrificed so much for her very young daughter just to keep them both alive, faces a terrible choice. She must decide whether to flee alone into the forest, handing her child over to a Catholic orphanage, or to travel with the little girl, who’s too young to have a sense of danger or the stamina to confront it. But Rosner convincingly makes this premise her own; her prose, active descriptions, and sense of her characters’ inner lives make a riveting, moving tale. The little girl possesses no flaws other than those typical of her age, but that idealized portrayal is the only real blemish in a novel that protects no one and whitewashes nothing. Throughout, the author uses music as the means by which the oppressed and hunted may find beauty, though the world at large couldn’t be uglier.

Perhaps the most original novel on this list, which is saying something, To Calais, in Ordinary Time, is James Meek’s plague narrative of fourteenth-century England. His portrayal sounds almost prophetic, published a few months before the pandemic. But that’s just for starters. As one wise character says, “Love is whatever remains once one has made an accommodation with fate”—and accommodation is precisely what nobody’s looking for. The central female character, the daughter of the manor, flees home to escape a forced marriage, seeking her less-than-chivalric lover, whom she expects to behave like the hero of a book she’s read. The central male character, a young peasant, has abandoned the same manor to serve as an archer at Calais, expecting to gain the right to live anywhere he likes—and learns the word freedom, which he’s never heard before. Speaking of words, Meek recounts much of his narrative in archaic language, rhythm, and syntax, with loving artistry and much humor, an impressive re-creation of the period.

A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell’s sprawling Holocaust novel about northwestern Italy from 1943 onward, is a gripping narrative of escape, resistance, and reprisal. The characters, who have known hardship in this hardscrabble region, possess infinite patience and resourcefulness and have learned to expect reversals and the unexpected. My favorite is a former pilot who pickles himself in alcohol and masterminds the local resistance, passing as a German businessman one day, and a tradesman or a priest the next—pretty neat, because he’s Jewish. But many characters win laurels here, and how they manage to live and sometimes love despite terror and hardship will leave a lasting impression. At the same time, Russell pulls no punches—she never does—so this is the war as it really was, not how Hollywood would have it.

Finally, An Instance of the Fingerpost depicts the combat between science and superstition in seventeenth-century England, and what a yarn Iain Pears spins. The same crime visited from several different perspectives, each narrator accusing the others of being unreliable, reveals the punishments inflicted by the self-styled righteous, thanks to their unshakable belief in faulty logic. A brilliant thriller about the nature of truth, this novel has much to say, and says it with insight, high drama, and humor, not least to skewer the disagreeable, smug, hidebound, and cruel behavior rampant in England. As a dead-on satire, the book carries a strongly feminist message, but by demonstration, not soapbox (an approach I wish other authors imitated). In Pears’s world, as in ours, men perceive women through the lens of their own weaknesses, and it’s no secret who suffers most.

I call these books the cream of this year’s harvest. I invite you to the reading feast!

Our Natures, and That of Love: To Calais, in Ordinary Time

13 Monday Jul 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1348, Black Death, book review, Calais, Chaucer, chivalry, England, France, Gloucestershire, good vs evil, historical fiction, humor, James Meek, literary fiction, prose poetry, role of women, Romance of the Rose, sexuality, social class

Review: To Calais, in Ordinary Time, by James Meek
Canongate, 2019. 400 pp. $27

The summer of 1348, the quiet Cotswold village of Outen Green simmers with unexpected happenings. Lady Bernadine (Berna) Corbet, daughter of the manor, is due to wed a much older man she detests, while the groom’s own daughter will wed Sir Guy Corbet, Berna’s father. A loathsome arrangement, to be sure, but Sir Guy’s word is law. Berna hoped that her preferred suitor, Laurence Haket, would spirit her away — according to the chivalric Romance of the Rose, which she adores, he should have — but Laurence seems to love his dignity more than he does Berna.

Will Quate, a plowman and archer bonded to Sir Guy, has been recruited to join a troop of bowmen raised by Laurence to accompany him to Calais, where Laurence has a fiefdom. Will’s betrothed pleads with Will to stay and doesn’t understand why he refuses. She assumes that it’s because she had a stillborn child by another man, but that’s not why. Sir Guy has promised to release Will from his bond if he serves one year, and Will, no fool, has dared demand that promise in writing, even though he can’t read.

Unlettered though he is, however, he can imagine what freedom means, and not just in the sense that leaving Sir Guy’s lands without permission is a hanging offense. An unusual, fascinating character in historical fiction of the medieval era, Will dares hope for an as-yet undefined future, what his neighbors would never dream of—though when he hears the word possibility, he has to ask what it means, which is telling.

You sense that Will and Berna will drive parallel narratives, and that the nature of love will be a significant theme. As one wise character says, “Love is whatever remains once one has made an accommodation with fate.” Since the description of the plague rumored to have afflicted France (what the characters call “the qualm”) recalls the Black Death, which also fits the timing, you can guess that how people behave during a pandemic will matter here too. The novel, published last year, isn’t prescient, though it may seem so; rather, it’s that pandemics share certain qualities. But the similarities are striking and instructive, nonetheless.

The Battle of Calais, 1350, as it appeared in Jean Froissart’s chronicles, 1410 (courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons)

With that as background, Meek’s folk hash out good and evil; the nature of gender; sin and redemption; the fear of, and violence toward, women; desire and obstacles to satisfaction; what knowledge and truth mean. Throw in sidelines like anti-Semitism and whether the English archers who destroyed the French nobility at the Battle of Crécy betrayed the social order, and you begin to see how rich and complex this novel is.

I love Meek’s characters; major or minor, they come through in full. One favorite is Thomas, a scholar who joins the expedition to Calais nominally as a churchman, though he has no power to perform the sacraments, which becomes an issue. But he serves admirably as a mediator amid the constant squabbles and moral dilemmas that arise, and he unsettles his companions — especially the archers, a rough lot — by defining and clarifying issues rather than offering solutions or justifying the behavior he’s been asked to judge. He’s a moral relativist, in other words, frightening to fourteenth-century minds. A later generation might think of him also as a therapist.

Except for the educated characters’ narration, Meek tells his story in archaic English, which he apparently culled from the OED, and which appears in unfamiliar rhythms. That takes getting used to, until the usages begin to make sense: for example, neb for nose, steven for voice, lolled for hanged. Consequently, Meek creates a language barrier between high-born and low, part of his exploration of social class. But it’s also beautiful prose poetry:

The priest said man’s lot wasn’t to choose his dreams, nor win of them, and dreams fell upon us, like wild deer in darkness, while we slept. Yet there were some folk who warded their dreams, as shepherds warded sheep, and kept them as easy by day as by night, and won of them, as of their herd shepherds won wool. These folk, he said were called writers, and they were close to the Fiend.

The cheeky humor typifies To Calais, which has its uproarious, bawdy moments. But if you’re thinking Chaucer, as I did at first, this narrative only partly resembles “The Miller’s Tale.” A great deal of casual violence occurs, and the circumstances of a gang-rape, which happened in the past, figure heavily in the narrative.

At times, I find Thomas the scholar’s moral reasoning too modern, satisfying though it is. There’s also a deathbed epiphany that strikes me as implausible. But To Calais, in Ordinary Time offers so many pleasures that flaws like these don’t get in the way. I highly recommend this novel.

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

Shame: Paris Never Leaves You

06 Monday Jul 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1940s, 1950s, anti-Semitism, book review, Ellen Feldman, France, historical fiction, Holocaust, idealized characters, improbable premise, Jews, Manhattan, moral tale, Paris, publishing, shame, teenage exploration

Review: Paris Never Leaves You, by Ellen Feldman
St. Martin’s, 2020. 347 pp. $18

Ten years after Paris was liberated, Charlotte Foret lives in New York but is still in chains. No one’s threatening her anymore; she has her beloved daughter, Vivi, now fourteen; and a career as an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Gibbon & Field. Her boss, Horace Field, is also her landlord, for the Forets live in his East Side brownstone.

Further, Horace and his wife, Hannah, sponsored Charlotte and Vivi to come to the United States after their internment at Drancy, the camp in the Paris suburbs that was a way-station to Auschwitz. Charlotte loves her job and is grateful for the apartment and the sponsorship, but the arrangement feels more than a little awkward, especially since Hannah, a psychoanalyst, has plenty of parenting advice to give, though she herself is childless.

As the novel opens, these threads threaten to unravel, first via a letter from Bogotá that she can’t bear to read. (Melodramatic, but okay, I’ll bite.) More plausibly, Vivi asks about her heritage, specifically about her father, killed in the war, and what it means to be Jewish.

But Charlotte has always said that it took Hitler to make her a Jew, and she wants no part of such explorations. Charlotte’s so adamant, so resolutely opposed to reflection on or discussion of her past — their past, for Vivi lived through the war too — that you have to wonder whether psychoanalyst Hannah has a point. Charlotte’s not only too tightly wrapped, she’s a lousy mother, forbidding her child to discover her identity. To all and sundry, however, Charlotte says, with truth, You weren’t there, so you don’t know.

Even now, in her dreams, she heard Vivi crying, not the childish whimpers and sobs of temporary discomfort but a shrieking rage born of an empty belly, and chilled-through bones, and the agony of rashes and bites and festering sores. Sometimes the crying in the dream was so loud that it wrenched her awake, and she sprang out of bed before she realized the sound was only in her head.

But Charlotte’s memory of Vivi’s sufferings is by no means the whole truth. Paris Never Leaves You excels as a moral tale, for Charlotte’s secret feels so shameful to her that she believes — with reason — that to confess it would make her a pariah. Specifics here would spoil the suspense; once more, I advise against reading the jacket flap, clever and subtle though it is.

Feldman brings alive Paris under the Occupation, as she does New York publishing, some scenes of which are positively delicious. In Charlotte and Horace, she’s created two memorable characters, and the dialogue between them crackles like a moral duel, full of challenge and riposte. Horace wants, nay, demands that Charlotte think and reflect on who she is and what she believes, and as a result, the novel pushes the reader to do the same. That’s what Paris Never Leaves You has to offer.

But, if you’re like me, you’ll have to overlook several flaws, starting with the bland title, which sounds like the compromise offspring of a deadlocked editorial meeting, and the cover, which says nothing except, “See, here’s the Eiffel Tower, so guess where this story takes place?”

More seriously, a key aspect of Charlotte’s secret seems historically implausible, despite what the author maintains in an afterword. I don’t believe the circumstances permitting the premise could have existed for so long, if at all. And even if you take Feldman at her word, there’s Vivi, who’s too sweet, calm, and reasonable for fourteen, and who bears nary a psychological scratch from her wartime early childhood. No nightmares, no tics, no fears, just perfectly adjusted.

As for psychological thinking, I’m tired of reading about dictatorial, heartless psychoanalysts, especially those who sleep with their analysands. It’s also unnecessary, here. Feldman didn’t have to make Hannah an expert—it takes no letters after your name to know that teenagers are trying to figure out who they are–and Hannah’s involvement in Charlotte’s life, particularly her friendship with Vivi, give her standing to sound off.

It’s also odd that nobody, not even Horace, asks Charlotte how she can feel so intensely about literature, an art that lives within reflection and self-examination, yet refuse to look at herself. To do so, of course, would reveal the exact cause of her shame, and though Feldman derives tension from that secret, Charlotte can’t even think about what she has to hide, or the reader will know. That contrivance makes me ask whether Charlotte could have spelled out the secret in interior narrative early on, which would invite the reader deeper into her dilemma, a more generous approach, and perhaps a more genuine characterization.

Still, I think the moral framework stands out, and Paris Never Leaves You may be worth your time because of it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, through my work for Historical Novels Review, where this post appeared in shorter, different form.

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