“Dear parents,

Last night I visited a club in Montparnasse where the men dress as women and the women as men. Papa would have loved it. And Mama’s face would have crinkled in that special smile she has for Papa’s passion for everything French.

The place is called the Chameleon Club. It’s a few steps down from the street. You need a password to get in. The password is: Police! Open up! The customers find it amusing.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 22, 2014)

Early on in Francine Prose’s richly imagined and intricately constructed tour de force, Yvonne – the proprietress of the Parisian Chameleon Club –tells a story about her pet lizard, Darius. “One night I was working out front. My friend, a German admiral whose name you would know, let himself into my office and put my darling Darius on my paisley shawl. He died, exhausted by the strain of turning all those colors.”

History – and the people who compose it – is itself a chameleon, subject to multiple interpretations. Ms. Prose seems less interested in exploring “what is the truth” and more intrigued with the question, “Is there truth?”

The title derives from a photograph that defined the career of the fictional photographer, Gabor Tsenyl: two female lovers lean towards each other at the Chameleon Club table. His is one of five narratives that punctuate the novel. The showcase narrative – written as a biography by the grand-niece of one of the participants – focuses on Lou Villars, a one-time Olympic hopeful and scandalous cross-dresser who crosses over to the dark side and becomes a Nazi collaborator. The other four narratives are composed of devoted letters from Gabor to his parents; the unpublished memoirs of Suzanne, his wife; excerpts from a book by the libertine expatriate writer Lionel Maine; and finally, the memoirs of a benefactor of the arts, Baroness Lily de Rossignol. Each narrative plays off the others and provides subtle suggestions that the other narratives may not be entirely accurate.

What is the truth of this intoxicating time, when artists of all kinds gravitated to the Paris scene and when war with Germany was an increasingly sober possibility? Francine Prose suggests that the truth is fluid. Reportedly, Lou Villars was inspired by a real person named Violette Morris. There are more than a few hints of Peggy Guggenheim in Lily de Rossignol and Lionel Maine bears a resemblance to Henry Miller. How much is fact and how much is fiction?

And once the reader gets over that hurdle, how much of what is revealed by the fictional characters is distorted through their own lens? How much of that is truth and how much is perception? Can we ever know the real person who lurks behind the mask? As Francine Prose writes, “The self who touches and is touched in the dark ,between the sheets, is not the same self who gets up in the morning and goes out to buy coffee and croissants.

I’ve said little about plot and that’s deliberate: the unfolding of the plot is for each reader to discover himself or herself. I will say this: the writing is exquisite and in my opinion, elevates an already talented contemporary writer to entirely new levels. The ending is breathtaking in its audacity. The setting – Paris in the late 1920s – is mesmerizing. The themes touch on universal matters: getting in touch with our authentic selves, crossing society-imposed gender barriers, understanding the fluidness of morality, searching for love and approval in dangerous places, making sacrifices for art, and discovering that history is not immutable, but changes depending on who tells it.

I read Lovers at the Chameleon Club directly after another very disparate book: Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. Interestingly, both tackle the meaning of truth from very different yet unique angles. This is a stunning book and I enthusiastically recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (April 22, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Francine Prose
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife More 1920s Paris: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• Judah the Pious Atheneum (1973)
• The Glorious Ones (1974)
• Marie Laveau (1977)
• Household Saints (1981)
• Hungry Hearts (1983)
• Bigfoot Dreams (1986)
• Women and Children First : Stories (1988)
• Primitive People (1992)
• Hunters and Gatherers (1995)
• Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas (1996)
• The Peaceable Kingdom: Stories (1998)
• Blue Angel 2001)
• A Changed Man (2005)
• Goldengrove (2008)
• Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (April 2014)

Teen:

• After (2003)
• Bullyville (2007)
• Touch (2009)

Nonfiction:

• The Lives of the Muses : Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired (2002)
• Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003)
• Sicilian Odyssey (2003)
• Caravaggio : Painter of Miracles (2005)
• Reading Like a Writer (2006)
• Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009)

“My mother said briskly, “After you take everything upstairs, Missak, you return the cart to Donabedian as soon as possible. Maral, put the spices in the jars, and the sugar on the top shelf. The rest goes wherever you and Auntie Shakeh find space.”

That was how our war began. It didn’t start with blaring newspaper headlines announcing a pending invasion, nor was it signaled by the drone of warplanes overhead. Our war commenced that afternoon when my mother stockpiled groceries so that, no matter what this new war might bring, her family would have something to eat.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JAN 7, 2014)

The setting is World War II Paris — when the Germans begin their occupation of the city, the protagonist of this story is just turning sixteen. Maral Pegorian and her older brother, Missak, are part of an Armenian family displaced to France after the Armenian genocide. They are stateless refugees and have made the suburb of Belleville in Paris, their home. Maral’s father is a cobbler and owns a small shoe shop hoping to one day pass on his skills to his son.

Missak, on the other hand, has different plans. He is a skilled artist and wants to work as an apprentice at the local print shop while spending most of his time secretly helping the French resistance. As a girl from a fairly conservative family, Maral can’t do much to help her brother, even if she sometimes wishes she could. “Was this to be my lot? Stuck in an apartment knitting or sewing or cooking while waiting for the men to come back from some adventure? It made me want to take the kitchen plates and throw them out the window just to hear them smash into a thousand pieces on the cobblestones below,” she laments.

Easily the smartest in the family, Maral goes through school even with the war progressing all around her, and towards the end of the story, graduates with an offer of admission to one of France’s most prestigious universities.

The Pegorian family’s fate is not unique to Paris or even to Armenians. Their neighbors, the Kacherians (also Armenian) are scraping the barrel to get by as are the many mixed families (including Jewish folks) in the neighborhood. Food is hard to come by — it’s mostly bulgur and turnips that the Pegorians manage to finagle with their ration card. There’s hardly any butter or meat to be had and even onions can be a rare delicacy. Despite the evident sufferings of the citizens during the Occupation, the children somehow manage to be themselves. Maral, in fact, falls in love with Zaven, one of the Kacherian sons, and Missak’s best friend. The two meet surreptitiously and pledge themselves to each other. Yet the best laid plans don’t always come to fruition.

Zaven and his older brother, Barkev, are swept up by the force of history and spend time in a German camp which changes them forever. The war crimes they witness leave permanent scars on their psyches — and ripples from these will eventually touch everyone they know including Maral.

History plays out in more than one way in this touching novel by Nancy Kricorian. With the weight of the Armenian genocide on their shoulders, the Armenian families in All The Light There Was, only want to lie low and not be subject to more tragedies. Maral’s parents have witnessed the horrors of the massacre personally and understandably it defines their life perspective in many subtle ways. When a Jewish family next door is rounded up by the Germans, the Pegorians hide the youngest girl in that family in their own apartment until the child is ready to be shipped to her aunt in Nice.

The Armenians in Maral’s generation might be removed from the immediate horrors of the Armenian genocide but they use the lessons learned from it to know that survival depends on many complicated factors. They are not ready to judge when they see their fellow brethren wear the American or the German uniform in the war.

In the end this story is a coming-of-age tale about Maral, a girl of promise at the novel’s start but who gradually gets worn down as the story moves along. “This is the story of how we lived the war, and how I found my husband,” Maral says at the beginning. The path toward finding her husband is not necessarily the most optimal but of course this is wartime and everyone’s lives are shaped by it. For someone who was fairly strong-willed at the beginning, it is a little frustrating, if understandable, to see Maral give up her education and instead fall into what comes more easily.

All The Light There Was is told through Maral’s voice and her perspective. In one sense, since she doesn’t do much except to bear witness to events that happen around her, this point of view feels limiting at times. The lens is never trained away from Maral and it occasionally gets claustrophobic. Yet it is precisely because the story is told through Maral’s voice, that the reader gets to feel what life was like for everyday citizens in occupied Paris. You realize that even during the worst wars, life can plod along — and even shine through — with grace. The beautiful cover art in this book drives home the point gracefully. Maral and her boyfriend are up front, lost in each other, while the rest of Paris goes on around them. You realize that while teenagers are often self-centered anyway, in times of war, this can be an essential mechanism to get through its many tribulations.

Ultimately the story ends with a ray of hope. “This world is made of dark and light, my girl, and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again, even if you yourself don’t live to see it,” Maral’s father once tells her. As the reader turns the last page, you hope that the sun will indeed come again and shine down on the young and vibrant Armenians.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nancy Kricorian
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Armenian history: Skylark Farm by Antonia Aslan The Last Day of War by Judith Claire Mitchell More occupied Paris: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

Bibliography:

• Zabelle (1998)
• Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003)
• All the Light There Was (March 2013)

“Before I give you information about the project, let me ask you a personal question,” Manet said. “How do you feel about Jews?”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (DEC 8, 2013)

It is Paris in the spring of 1942. Paris, the glorious “City of Lights” is even more wondrous in the springtime….but not for the French, not in 1942. It is the second year of the victorious Nazi occupation, and the French are struggling to get by. There are economic problems with the payment of the costs of a three-hundred-thousand strong occupying German army, which amounts to twenty million Reichmarks per day; lack of food for French citizens – the Germans seize about 20% of the French food production, which causes severe disruption to the household economy of the French people; the disorganization of transport, except for the railway system which relies on French domestic coal supplies; the Allied blockade, restricting all imports into the country; the extreme shortage of petrol and diesel fuel; (one walks or rides a bike); France has no indigenous oil production and all imports have stopped; labor shortages, particularly in the countryside, due to the large number of French prisoners of war held in Germany. And then there was the Jewish problem.

Approximately 49 concentration camps are in use in France during the occupation, the largest of them at Drancy. In the occupied zone, as of 1942, Jews are required to wear the yellow badge. On the Paris Métro Jews are only allowed to ride in the last carriage. Thirteen thousand one hundred fifty-two Jews residing in the Paris region are victims of a mass arrest by pro Nazi French authorities on 16 and 17 July 1942, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, and are transported to Auschwitz where they are killed.

Parisian Lucien Bernard is a struggling architect, trying to make a name for himself. He is just trying to earn a living, gain some respect in his chosen field and stay alive. He hates the Germans but has little feeling for the plight of the Jews. Since the German occupation, all work has dried up unless it is for the Nazis.

As the book opens he is on his way to an appointment when a Jewish man is gunned down by a German soldier right in front of him. His main concern is that he not be splattered with blood because he has an important appointment with Auguste Manet, a potential client and wants to make a good impression. He also wants to arrive on time.

“Lucien had learned early in his career that architecture is a business as well as an art, and one ought not look at a first job from a new client as a one-shot deal but rather as the first in a series of commissions.”

This job has much potential. “Monsieur Manet had money, old money. He was from a distinguished family that went back generations.” And Manet was in an excellent position to obtain German contracts. Manet offers Lucien two commissions. He cannot take one without the other. One is for a large factory – to design a new Heinkel Aircraft Works, the other is to construct a secret room in which to hide someone. A room that will never be discovered no matter how well a house is searched; rather like the “priest holes” of yore. Lucien needs the money and wants the contracts that this relationship might bring. He accepts.

Lucien’s first hiding place is inside a Doric column. The actual work is carried out by a German named Herzog and another man. Both have worked for Manet for years and are entirely dependable. He begins designing more expertly concealed hiding spaces -behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe – detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

Lucien’s Faustian bargain with the Third Reich is central to the plot. His moral dilemma between his art and his humanity leads him to decision making and life threatening choices. The architect is not the hero here. His actions are not heroic. He undertakes each “hidey hole” design project because he also receives generous monetary recompense and is awarded German engineering projects as a part of the bargain. The “heroes” are the individuals – a Catholic priest, a wealthy Jew, a Parisian fashionista and a German soldier, who, despite the risk of certain death, step up and do something/anything to thwart the actions of the Gestapo.

Lucien is a character who changes as the novel moves, but not without struggles and betrayals. What he is doing is very, very dangerous and there is one German who is determined to capture this man who tricks and deceives the Germans.  Lucien may be somewhat detestable in the beginning with his philandering, his off-handed anti-Semitism, and his greed, but he undertakes a monumental metamorphosis which strips the negative influences from his life and allows his true self to shine through. That may sound corny but it is true. In that aspect, The Paris Architect is a beautiful story of change and growth.

Charles Belfoure is an an author and an architect. Because of his architectural background and insight to the human soul and spirit, he has the ability to shape characters the same way he might craft buildings. The architect’s skill of seeing through to the skeleton of a building must have imbued him with the power to reveal the humanity in each of us.

Just a bit of historical information about the book. Mr. Belfoure has stated that he got his idea about the hidey-holes from Elizabethian England. Priest holes or hidey-holes were secluded or isolated places; hideaways. The term was given to hiding places for priests built into many of the principal Catholic houses of England during the period when Catholics were persecuted by law in England, from the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. The effectiveness of priest holes was demonstrated by their success in baffling the exhaustive searches of the priest-hunters. Search-parties would bring with them skilled carpenters and masons and try every possible expedient, from systematic measurements and soundings to the physical tearing down of paneling and pulling up of floors. It was common for a rigorous search to last a week, and for the priest-hunters to go away empty handed, while the object of the search was hidden the whole time within a wall’s thickness of his pursuers. He might be half-starved, cramped, sore with prolonged confinement, and almost afraid to breathe lest the least sound should throw suspicion upon the particular spot where he was immured. Sometimes a priest could die from starvation or by lack of oxygen.

I was immediately immersed in this unusual novel and highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sourcebooks Landmark (October 8, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Belfoure
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on fiction based on historical Paris: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Bibliography:

• The Paris Architect (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Baltimore Rowhouse (1999)
• Monuments to Money (2005)

“Dad, do you think dogs go to heaven?”

“You mean what will happen to Grandma when she dies?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn Oct 16, 2011)

George Baxter Henry is no paragon of virtue. In fact, he is a paradigm of vice, with a penchant for lustful young women. His marriage is on the rocks and his fractured family is falling apart. Connor Bowman’s novella after The Last Estate takes us back to the South of France—this time Nice, but with an American protagonist. In this sinfully laugh-out-loud story about a wounded family trying to stitch itself back together, Bowman manages to make the reader care about these cross and querulous individuals who are headed on a grease skid to oblivion.

George is a fifty-one-year-old trial-phobic attorney in Boston. His vitriolic ninety-one-year-old mother-in-law, Muriel, hired a snoop, who captured George in a Kodak moment in flagrante delicto, and now Muriel is trying to convince George’s wife, Pearl, to divorce him. Seventeen-year-old rock musician, Billy, needs dad’s consent to a big record deal offer from Carnivore records, but George won’t do it until Billy’s urine is clean for a month; he snorts cocaine like kids eat Cheerios. Fourteen-year-old daughter, Iska, is researching apples for a book she wants to write, and is on the brink of new discoveries.

George sequesters the family away to a rented chateau in bucolic Nice, hoping to save his marriage, his son, and his finances from ruin. Pearl is open to reconciliation, but Muriel, his nemesis, is determined to interfere. A former screen star of the twenties and thirties, Muriel Hale née Meek is an italicized battle-axe who George derides as “about as meek as a Panzer division.” She never lets anyone forget her averred fame and one-time Oscar nom, flashing celebrity names like rhinestones on an Elvis cape.

George executes his own private rehab for Billy — he locks him in his room, while trying to repair the fault lines in his marriage, which has had a five-year sexual drought. Every step of repair between Pearl and George is a lure for sabotage by Muriel:

“If you’d listened to me all those years ago, you’d have married somebody suitable instead of scraping the barrel for an engagement ring and a time-share in George’s pecker.”

George starts playing boules with some locals he encounters during daily solitary walks, and also meets an Elvis-obsessed French pastry chef with a hot oven, big cupcakes, and porn-star moves. Salvation is laced with cream pie.

George’s perspective on life volleys between mockery and scorn, with a generous dose of self-effacement to lend a measure of vulnerability to his cynicism.

“Children are the single greatest drain on the world’s finances after global warming and oil slick clean-up costs… As far as they’re [children] concerned, it’s win, win, win. They didn’t ask to be born, so you pay for that. You want the best for them, so you pay for that, and best of all, they hate you and you want them to love you, so you pay for that, too. Stick a dunce hat on me and call me Chase Manhattan!”

The avaricious tension between Muriel and George keeps the zingers fresh and lively:

“To get a clear picture of my precious mother-in-law in your head, think Godzilla meets Margaret Thatcher and they have a child.”

As the narrative glides like a combat missile, the reader is installed in George’s personal battle of a lifetime — a self-propelled mission to redeem himself and his family. There’s a bit of a dues ex machina, but it comes with a wink and a wallop that will have you cheering for his redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (August 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Conor Bowman
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on The Redemption of George Baxter
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Estate

Bibliography:

• Life and Death and in Between: Stories (2004)
• Wasting By Degress (1998)
• The Last Estate (2008; August 2010 in US)
• The Redemption of George Baxter Henry (2008; August 2011 in US)

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Just Kids by Patti Smith Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Bibliography:

• The World As I Found It (1987)
• Last Comes the Egg (1997)
• Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud (July 2011)

“The wine comes in 250-ml bottles, or by the carafe, your choice. You take a sealed bottle. Vin du pays from Hérault, 11.5 percent alcohol, with a picture of grapes on the label. Screw top. There’s also a liter bottle for drunks. The wine has the power to humiliate you. Like truth serum, it scours, strips, reveals. It flows into you like a kind of blood, spreading pain. The soul plunges into it. You grimace as the first swallow announces the metamorphosis. The wine is like a developer solution specially formulated for the wretched misery we stew in. The photograph that emerges isn’t a pretty one: a guy sitting in front of his cafeteria tray, head down, grinning at his neighbors’ tired jokes, his heart in his mouth. (from “Cafeteria Wine” by Laurent Graff)”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd AUG 13, 2011)

According to Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, when Homo erectus, already master over fire, threw some tubers on a spit, freeing up nutrients and easing digestion, teeth, jaws and intestines shrunk, paving the way for the evolution of larger brains, and us, Homo sapiens. In the wilds of the prehistoric world, it’s likely our human ancestors gathered around a single fire for safety, and a communal feast, suggesting that our need to sit and break bread with each other – rather than scarfing down food, alone, in a moving car –is an ancient memory buried deep in our brains. And so, it’s little wonder that meals, and the rituals surrounding them, are of unmatched importance in human society; can you think of a holiday that isn’t centered around food, if not in the form of a celebratory feast than in a ritualized period of denial? If food – it’s acquisition and preparation – is arguably the foundation of human evolution, it’s also the cornerstone of our culture, and there is no better way to familiarize oneself with a foreign country than through the idiosyncrasies of its cuisine.

No other country has mastered this relationship between ritual and sustenance, nutrition and indulgence, quite like the French, and, for better or worse, French cuisine is inextricably linked to our concept of French culture. The caricatured Frenchman, sporting a mustache, sailor-stripes and a beret, brandishes a wine glass and a baguette. In much the same way that, from Bogota to Beijing, the Golden Arches signals a (perhaps comfortingly familiar) McDonalds, rattan-backed chairs, red banquettes, polished wood and brass rails characterize reproductions of the French brasserie all over the world. But without resorting to these cultural clichés, French Feast: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, a collection of short stories translated from French, provides a window into French culture through its relationship to food.

William Rodarmor, the editor of this collection, notes just a few of the French words that have entered our culinary lexicon: entrée, quiche, escargot, crepe, hors d’oeuvre, petits-fours, Bearnaise, baguette, croque-monsieur, vinaigrette, pate, maitre’d, sous-chef, “and even the word cuisine itself!” To Mr. Rodarmor’s list, I would add: à la carte, à la mode, au gratin, soup du jour, nouvelle cuisine; and I’m sure you’ll be able to add your own too—there’s just so many of them. My pocket copy of Gastronomic Dictionary French-English was indispensable for dining in France; from cuts of meat to sauces and preparation techniques, the French language is far more nuanced when it comes to food. So needless to say, it should be no surprise that there are enough (good!) French stories to compile a collection thematically centered on food.

The collection is broken into sections, each its own component of a long French meal: Appetizers; Entrees; Main Courses; Libations; and Desserts; the stories of each section linked by a single theme; memory, manners and society, family, fantasy, and love and sex, respectively.

In “The Taste of New Wine” (Mariette Condroyer), a dying man longingly eavesdrops on his doctor’s lively household through the door connecting the doctor’s examination room to the kitchen. The aroma of the doctor’s wife’s cooking both fortifies and weakens the old man, filled with longing for a life he knows he’s soon to leave. In “Pfefferling” (François Vallejo), a young man remembers a summer spent at a hotel in Switzerland, quite close to the sanatorium featured in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a book the boy has just finished and loved. When an elderly German countess offers to walk with him to the sanatorium, the boy agrees, but when they reach the buildings, the boy doesn’t want to go inside, “afraid that like Hans Castorp, [he] would never come out again.” Instead, the countess offers to show him the cemetery out back, where they harvest the chanterelles that grow in abundance on the graves for an omelet back at the hotel. The boy has difficulty swallowing “these chanterelles of death, these fleshy mushrooms swollen with wet and earth and mixed with the rotting flesh of old Davos and Magic Mountain TB lungers.” But, all too often in life, it’s through the memories of those meals we never wanted, or of things too mundane to notice– the smell of onions frying in a young wife’s kitchen – that we come to appreciate the miracle of our lives.

To judge by two of the best stories in the next section, one would think that politesse had had the sole purpose of keeping gourmands from their food. “The Plate Raider” (Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut) is the hilarious account of Ernest Pardieu whose “either stingy or unskilled” mother subjected him to a childhood of watery puree and leathery steak, so that poor little Ernest had little choice by to make sure he never missed dinnertime at the houses of friends with “cordon bleu mothers.” From there, it was just a few years and a few crashed parties until he perfected his “art of infiltration,” setting him on his way to a career as a “professional plate raider.” But who can really blame him, faced with such mouth-watering fare as “ miniature vol-au-vent garnished with bits of scallop and seasoned with a drop of apple pommeau,” “smoked salmon with guacamole and green tea mousses,” “four-spiced foie-gras with crushed pear drizzled with honey,” and “frogs’ legs fricassee in a hazelnut croute.” A real gourmand, the only thing Eric can’t stomach are peanuts, which of course he mistakenly eats, at a funeral, in what can only be described as just desserts.

A chapter from “Belle De Seigneur “(Albert Cohen) works as a wonderful set-piece, the excerpted section a brilliant comedy of manners; Adrien, a clerk at the League of Nations, awaits his boss’ arrival, with his socially ambitious mother, Madame Deume and his long-suffering (and hungry) father, Monsieur Deume . One can’t help but feel for the poor Monsieur Deume who, after an interminable afternoon of fussy preparations, is told he won’t get to eat any of the sumptuous feast laid out for their guest but rather will have to eat “bread and cheese and the three ham sandwiches left over from lunch” standing at the sideboard. And as Madame Deume informs her husband that their feast will be wrapped up and put in the fridge to entertain whichever illustrious guest she can persuade to join them for dinner the following evening, you know he wishes he had the chutzpah to raid the fridge after his wife has gone to bed.

Those closest to us are often the ones responsible for much of our pain – aren’t most murders committed by loved ones? – and two stories in the next section highlight the dark undercurrents that course through our most intimate relationships. In “Tears of Laughter ” (Nadine Ribault), a Sunday lunch reveals complicated alliances and hidden resentments of an extended family. In “Brasserie” (Marie Rouanet), a woman settles in to enjoy a solitary meal, with a glass of wine and good book, only to be distracted by a family with a horribly abusive patriarch.

The Libations section centers on fantastical tales, tales like “The Legend of Bread” (Michel Tournier), an origin myth for those wonderfully crusty-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside baguettes and pains aux chocolats; or “Oysters” (Fabrice Pataut) told from the point of view of – wait for it – an oyster! Perhaps most charming story in this section, “Eating” (Cyrille Fleishman), imagines a Yiddish poet who manages to pack his readings to the rafters (a standing-room only poetry reading? – fantasy, indeed!). Of course, most poets aren’t handing out delectable pastrami sandwiches .

No meal is truly complete without dessert, and like a warm moelleux au chocolat or a silken crème brûlée, “Come and Get It” (Tiffany Tavernier), a steamy account of a couple’s last meal together, satisfies just as naughtily. “Porcupine Stew” (Calixthe Beyala) is more refreshing fare –ginger-lime sorbet perhaps – that delights as it piques the palate for the novel its excerpted from, How To Cook Your Husband The African Way, detailing the sexually charged tension between a woman in love and her lover’s lonely mother.

The collection runs the stylistic gamut, from realism to fantastical, and most stories would be better described as vignettes than fully developed short stories, the kind of book that weathers being picked up (on a train, say) and put down again (because there’s no shortage of fascinating things to do in, say, Paris) only to be picked up again (one lazy Sunday afternoon at a café nursing an espresso) some time later. Whereabouts Press is a house devoted to published literary travel companions, and I couldn’t agree more with their claim that, “Good stories reveal as much, or more, about a locale as any map or guidebook.” As for this book, I can’t think of better companion for trip to France, armchair or otherwise.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Whereabouts Press (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Q& A with William Rodarmor on FaceBook
EXTRAS:	Sample
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: French Women Don’t Get Fatby Mireille Guiliano Monsoon Diaryby Shoba Narayan The Cyclist by Viken Berberian

Bibliography:

• France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2008)
• French Feast: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (June 2011)

“Homeland security is a myth…. It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 25, 2011)

As Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy opens, art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon and his wife, Chiara, are living quietly in a cottage by the sea. Silva sets the stage with a series of events that are eerily familiar: Countries all over the world are “teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster;” Europe is having difficulty absorbing “an endless tide of Muslim immigrants;” and Bin Laden is dead, but others are scrambling to take his place. Government leaders in America and on the Continent are desperate to identify and thwart the new masterminds of terror.

All of this should not be Gabriel Allon’s problem, since he is no longer an agent of Israeli intelligence. However, Gabriel happens to be in London when he learns that two suicide bombers have struck, one in Paris and the other in Copenhagen. Later, Gabriel is strolling through Covent Garden when he spots a man who arouses his suspicions. Should he alert the police or take out this individual on his own? A series of unexpected events ensue that will bring Gabriel’s brief retirement to an abrupt end. He becomes a key player in a complex plot–involving high finance, a valuable painting, and a beautiful heiress–to destroy the new Bin Laden and his bloodthirsty cohorts. Allon will clash not just with his natural enemies but also with certain American politicians and their subordinates whose short-sighted and self-serving attitudes he finds repugnant.

Portrait of a Spy is an intricate, powerful, well-researched, and engrossing tale of deception, betrayal, and self-sacrifice. The most memorable character is thirty-three year old Nadia al-Bakari, a savvy businesswoman who is highly intelligent, secretive, and one of the richest women in the world. Her late father was a known supporter of terror networks. Will she follow in his footsteps or choose a different path? Silva brings back many of Allon’s comrades, including the amusing Julian Isherwood, an aging but still sharp-tongued Ari Shamron, and art curator/CIA operative, Sarah Bancroft.

The author choreographs his story perfectly and manages an extremely large cast with consummate skill. The sharp and clever dialogue, meaningful themes (including a description of how women are demeaned and manual laborers are exploited in Saudi Arabia and Dubai), as well as the nicely staged action sequences all combine to make this one of the most entertaining espionage thrillers of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 446 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; First Edition edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Silva
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rembrandt Affair Moscow Rules The Prince of Fire A Death in Vienna

Bibliography:

• The Unlikely Spy (1996)

Michael Osbourne series:

• The Mark of the Assassin (1998)
• The Marching Season (1999)

Gabriel Allon series:

• The Kill Artist (2000)
• The English Assassin (2002)
• The Confessor (2003)
• A Death in Vienna (2004)
• Prince of Fire (2005)
• The Messenger (2006)
• The Secret Servant (2007)
• Moscow Rules (2008)
• The Defector (2009)
• The Rembrandt Affair (2010)
• Portrait of a Spy (2011)
• The Fallen Angel (2012)
• The English Girl (July 2013)

” ‘I am Fabrissa.’ ”

That was it, that was all she said. But it was enough. Already her voice was familiar to me, beloved.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JUL 10, 2011)

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

He hands the bookseller a parchment document to translate, which, the man tells him, dates from medieval days and is written in the local language of the time. The bookseller asks how Watson came to possess the parchment and Watson tells him the story of his strange visit to the Pyrenees in 1928. This first-person narrative forms the bulk of the novel.

For a decade Watson had been consumed by sorrow for his elder brother, George, killed in the war when the younger boy was in his teens. His parents and his friends have lost patience with him. His father is ashamed of him for his lack of backbone; his mother was never much interested in him in the first place. George had been the center of the family. “It was his presence that had made us a family, the glue. Without him we were three strangers with nothing to say.”

The French motor tour, prescribed by his doctor, has taken him into the foothills of the Pyrenees. One tormented night he steps to the edge of a cliff, then steps back. “Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those imposters one from the other.” The moment marks the beginning of his recovery. He joins a convivial tavern crowd that evening in toasting the new prosperity of their town and begins to understand the human need to move forward.

Still as his journey into the mountains continues, his mood swings; the landscape grows more alien and menacing, the sky more threatening. His aloneness is tangible and then a voice – singing, whispering – sounds plaintively. Watson goes on, but is soon caught in a sudden violent blizzard. His car goes off the road, narrowly avoiding a mortal plunge into a ravine, and he is left to find his way down the mountain to the nearest village.

Which he does, coming to rest at a charming little inn, where he is invited by the innkeeper to a village fete taking place that very night.

And from here the narration becomes deliciously unreliable as Watson makes his solitary way to the fete through narrow and deserted village streets, getting hopelessly lost in the silent night before torchlight and voices guide him to a hall where he’s swept up in a friendly whirl of villagers dressed in medieval clothing, seated at long tables, eating from trenchers.

His own dinner companion is a girl whose beauty is exceeded only by her instinctive understanding. Watson finds himself falling in love with a woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself. But their evening is not destined for a fairytale ending. Not the happy-ever-after kind anyway.

Mosse’s writing is wonderfully spooky as she explores the emotional resonance of grief, loneliness and an unwillingness to let go and move on (why, for instance, are people impatient with this lingering grief?) meld with the redeeming power of love and the repeating cycles of man’s brutality to man, i.e. war and atrocity.

The novel’s form is comfortingly familiar – did Watson hit his head in the accident or fall prey to a fever as the modern villagers believe, or was his emotional state particularly attuned to the unresolved tragedy that remained hidden in the hills?

Poignant and eerie, and steeped in French country atmosphere, this is a novel that should appeal to fans of literary ghost stories.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Putnam Adult (February 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Mosse
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Trespass by Rose Tremain The Cypress House by Michael Kortya

Bibliography:

• The Winter Ghosts (February 2011)

Languedoc Trilogy:

• Labyrinth (2006)
• Sepulchre (2008)
• Citadel (September 2011 in UK)

“We buried Vincent on July 30. His paintings hanging on the walls of Ravoux’s café transformed the room. To stand in its center surrounded by such visions was almost blinding. You could tell by the reactions of the handful of men who came for the funeral. […] Some wept, but often they smiled through their tears, for there was joy on the walls. It is easy to forget, especially for those of us who witnessed his last days, that Vincent found delight in what he saw around him, and he brought it to his paintings.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 19, 2011)

Vincent Van Gogh had lived only seventy days in the small community of Auvers-sur-Oise, Northwest of Paris, since arriving in early May. He had been released from an asylum in the South of France and come North to be nearer his brother Theo, who supported him financially. In an astonishing feat of creativity, he dashed off luminous canvases at the rate of one or more per day, until his darkness returned and he went out into a field and shot himself. Carol Wallace’s novel is an account of those seventy days, as told by the person who was the reason for Vincent’s choice of Auvers: Dr. Paul Gachet. The somewhat older doctor, who had trained at the famous asylum of the Salpêtrière in Paris, was an enlightened specialist in mental disorders. More than that, he was an amateur painter himself, a collector, and a friend to many of the Impressionists; Cézanne had stayed in his house and painted it; Camille Pissarro was a neighbor. Surely nobody could better look after the brilliant but troubled Van Gogh?

From my former career as an art historian, I knew Vincent’s letters, and looked up his description of Gachet: “I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being quite eccentric, though his medical experience must maintain his equilibrium while he struggles with the nervous troubles that he clearly suffers from as badly as I do.” This seemed an intriguing premise for a novel — not so much the blind leading the blind, as Vincent wrote in another letter, but the dazzled helping the dazzled. Might Carol Wallace not do something for painting akin to what Adam Foulds does for poetry in THE QUICKENING MAZE, about the mad poet John Clare and his eccentric guardian? My hopes were raised by an early flashback where Gachet attempts to draw female patients at the Salpêtrière, and feels his clumsy attempts taking him deeper into their madness, but Wallace does not really go this route. She is looking for someone to observe Van Gogh, rather than reflect the brilliant splinters of his mind. So she keeps Gachet as the doctor throughout, sympathetic but always objective. She gives him a slightly stuffy late Victorian voice, as he records a smoothly detailed account of those last days. Her Gachet is perceptive and appreciative, but too much of the middle of the book proceeds as a series of anecdotes about how each of the major pictures came to be painted. Despite the accuracy of the verbal descriptions, you need to Google the actual pictures to bring them fully to life: the portrait of Gachet himself, his daughter Marguerite at the piano, the writhing lines of the Church at Auvers, and that terrible final landscape of the bleak wheatfield with its black crows.

Gachet’s prose cannot hope to match Vincent’s wild poetry, or probe the mystery of madness striking sparks from the flint of genius. Yet there is one passage which comes close, later in the book, when Gachet comes across the artist in a field, a blank canvas on his easel, a charged palette at his side, but totally unable to lift a brush. It is worth quoting at length:

“I wished that Vincent could paint, of course. I wished for more glorious canvases of the world I knew, pictures that helped me understand it and that altered the way I saw everything around me. I wished Vincent would paint the wheat fields under the snow — imagine how lovely they would be! The golden stubble and low gray sky and the patches of snow that, in Vincent’s eyes, would not be white at all but something else, lavender perhaps, or pink.

I could wish that of the artist. But it was also my friend who sat before me, the very image of desolation. If he had painted a self-portrait at that moment, it would have been so full of agony that you could do no more than glance at it. To look longer would have been harrowing. My mind was boiling. I felt as if the very earth were heaving.”

This moment approaches a climax for both of them. For Wallace’s portrayal of the doctor as a man of understated competence will pay an emotional dividend of its own, as he comes to realize that he is not competent at all. For all his experience and savoir-faire, this Gachet is a man tormented by his own helplessness. Lacking modern drugs, he is unable to help many of his patients at the Salpêtrière, and his empathy only intensifies his impotence. He cannot help Vincent, despite his friendship and admiration. He cannot help Theo Van Gogh, who he realizes is dying of syphilis. He could not even help his own wife Blanche, whose agonizing struggles with consumption make a particularly heartrending flashback. But there is one thing that he CAN do, and with the licence of fictional imagination, Carol Wallace finally allows him that option

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carol Wallace
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Bibliography:

• Leaving van Gogh (April 2011)

“His eyes are slightly widened in the picture as if he is startled to find himself captured there. She is convinced that she sees the necessary gleam of yearning in those eyes; she thinks she can help this yearning.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (MAR 25, 2011)

In Paris-born Shapiro’s first novel, a young visiting American professor, Trevor Stratton, catches the attention of his prospective Parisian secretary, Josianne, not for his scholarship in 19th-century French literature, but for his poetry translations: “A translator, caught in the space between two tongues.”

In hopes that he is a little different (and after an appreciative look at his photograph), Josianne places a box with a red-checked cover in an empty file cabinet in his new office.

Stratton will open the box and be increasingly enthralled by its contents – letters, mementos and photographs dating from the late 19th-century to WWII, mostly WWI and after – belonging to a woman named Louise Brunet.

A real woman, as it happens, and the box of keepsakes is real too. Shapiro grew up at 13 rue Therèse, downstairs from Louise Brunet, whose box she kept after the old lady died and no relatives arrived to claim it. The mementos illustrate the book, each appearing in color in the text as Stratton handles it. The illustrations can also be seen more crisply and in larger format at the novel’s website : www.13ruetherese.com, along with Stratton’s accompanying notes, and several brief videos and audio files.

This sounds gimmicky, but it works, particularly because the box is real, although Shapiro’s story is fiction. She was a little girl when she acquired the box in the 1980s and did not know the dead woman.

Stratton muses over each memento, Louise growing more real to him as he fits her story together in his mind, from the letters from a lover at the front in WWI, including a 1915 marriage proposal, and the photos he, her brother and her father sent of themselves in trenches, to the miniature appointment calendar from 1928 and a photo of her father in 1944, shortly before his death.

Stratton addresses his increasingly fevered notes to an unnamed “Dear Sir,” which seems an odd salutation, given his personal tone and his missives’ increasingly intimate nature. But the novel is a puzzle of sorts and all will come clear in the end, including Josianne’s motives.

Most of the action takes place in 1928, when a new family moves into the building. Louise, married to a nice, but not passionate man, already has a rich fantasy life. She sometimes goes to church to tell salacious lies to the priest hearing confessions and in 1928, fearful of being forever childless, Louise takes her longings a step further.

Or Stratton does. Their lives become intertwined so that the reader, immersed in Louise’s dangerous, romantic year, never really knows for sure if the story is hers or Stratton’s imaginings.

As events unfold, Louise’s thoughts range back and forth in time. Each memento takes on greater significance as deep emotional contexts are revealed, and the 20th century’s early history acquires flesh and blood.

The plot organization is complex and sometimes distancing, when the reader is reminded that the whole thing may simply be Stratton’s fevered imagination. This is risky, given the gut-wrenching revelations and growing personal intensity of Louise’s story. But Shapiro pulls it off; creating a dramatic, multi-layered, sexy story that should appeal to a wide range of readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books; 1 edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elena Mauli Shapiro
EXTRAS:	13, rue Thérèse website Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel which uses photos to drive a story: The Rain Before the Fall by Jonathan Coe Three Farmers on Their Way to the Dance by Richard Powers

Bibliography:

• 13, rue Thérèse (February 2011)