“How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.

Her name is Diana.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUL 29, 2011)

Hands up anyone who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet. No-one? Thought not. Chances are you cut your literary teeth on it, and it probably holds some special associations for you. That’s why it’s such a good subject for a modern/historical parallel romance story with sinister overtones.

Julie Jacobs is the quasi-eponymous heroin of the novel. Orphaned as a very young child, she has been brought up by her Great-Aunt Rose along with her twin sister Janice… who is as like to Julie as a marble is to a strawberry. Great-Aunt Rose has brought the sisters up in the States, but when they are in their mid-twenties she ups and dies, leaving Janice the estate and Julie (rather inconveniently) merely a letter and the address of a banker in Sienna. A heartbroken and down-at-heel Julie makes the best of a bad deal and packs her unfashionable bags for Sienna.

Matters get complicated almost immediately with a chance befriending by the glamorous Eva Maria Salimbeni – and that’s before Julie ever even reaches Sienna. The narrative rapidly develops distinct fairy-tale colours, which grow richer by the page. Julie soon discovers that few things really happen by chance in this neck of the woods. What with Julie’s historical trouble with the Italian police (don’t ask) and Eva Maria’s handsome nephew Alessandro being Captain Santini of the Sienna police, a certain amount of intrigue becomes inevitable from the word go.

The mystery trail of the letter leads from the bank, to a box, to clues, to the Pallio, to museums and clan rivalries, to subterranean passages and clean through to the 14th century. Sienna, it seems, not Verona, is the original location for the historical characters that inspired Shakespeare’s tragedy: a story already two hundred years old and re-told countless times by the time he got to it. To gain the treasure that the historical Romeo and Juliet supposedly left behind, Julie must immerse herself into her own past, which extends far beyond what one would think reasonable in chronological terms.

Fortier displays brilliant craftsmanship in weaving the multi-faceted timelines of her story into a cohesive narrative. She intersperses new mystery, romance and violence at a pace which will leave no reader able to resist the next page. But above all, she really loves her Shakespeare. This work has obviously arisen from a love of the original text. The imagery of warring opposites, fire and ice, danger and beauty that characterize Shakespeare’s work have given birth here to whole neighbourhoods, new characters and impassioned landscapes. This is no half-baked, ill-fadged limping mess that so many supposedly more straightforward “historical” novels fall into. It’s an inspired work of art with a backbone not only of research but of understanding, one could almost say sympathetic resonance. It’s so clever one wishes it were true.

However, not everyone will like it. Readers often divide into camps between the two sisters Julie and Janice: some finding the latter two-dimensional, many considering the former mawkish and generally kickable. The main plot is pretty easy to guess from the start, which is perhaps not ideal for a mystery. I didn’t find this a problem at all, as there were so many details in between A and B that just because one knows the outcome it doesn’t make the journey any less pleasurable.

Possibly its main detraction for many might be that it’s essentially chick lit. Let me qualify this swiftly: I don’t read chick lit and I found Juliet thrilling. It’s the sort of thing you put down with a glow and wonder whom to tell about it first; and then possibly consider that boys might not be so keen on it. I hate to say it, but with 80% of serious readers being female, I still think it’s got a pretty good market. Chick lit it may be, but very good chick lit. As I read it, I was taking notes on structure and tactics, thinking, “if only I could write more like this.” I’m not sure what higher form of admiration one could offer.

If you like your stories well-written, exciting, properly researched, and you have a tendency towards things pre-1400s with a dash of the paranormal and several cask-fulls of romance, don’t delay in reading this especially now that it is available in paperback.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 159 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anne Fortier
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Romeo & Juliet tales:  Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James Brazil by John Updike And another Julia on a quest through the past: The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

Bibliography:

• Juliet (August 2010)

 

“Memories were just photos printed on synapses. As such he justified sharing some of them with the world while keeping others locked in hidden albums. Yet as he’d poured the steaming water down his water bottle’s rubber nozzle, some queasy emotion made him shudder, splashing scalding water over his hand. Was there some law at work, some authority that required him to submit his memories of Fuwa to her as evidence?”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann  (NOV 1, 2010)

In the snow-encrusted archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land, moth-winged bulls and a creature that can turn things white with her gaze share an island with more human lives: people who lose love as quickly as they gain it and who must struggle with the baggage of the past.

Midas Crook, a young and reclusive photographer who cannot stand to be touched, fights the legacy of his father within him. When he meets Ida, a strange woman hobbling around in huge boots, he accepts her oddity the way only another misfit can. Ida, it turns out, is searching for Henry Fuwa, the erstwhile love of Midas’s mother’s life, because she believes he may hold the key to her “condition” – a creeping glassiness that has already claimed her toes and feet. But Fuwa, a “recluse in a wilderness of recluses,” does not want to be found by anyone, let alone Ida, who knows some of his secrets.

This budding romance between Ida and Midas is haunted by the unspoken. Neither can speak of a possible tragic end to their feelings, and, because of this, their affection for each other acquires a stark, almost frozen beauty. They tread carefully, as though anything too overtly passionate will shatter the glass in Ida’s legs.

At first Midas wonders whether Ida “could understand the tangles of life here. The gossip chains more powerful than television. The snooping neighbors who could detect secrets like crows detecting carrion. Almost worse than that (because you could ignore people): the way the place regurgitated unwanted details.” One of these details, protected by Henry, lies submerged in a bog, and it holds the truth that no one dares to articulate. But, despite what Midas thinks at the beginning, people cannot be ignored, either. As he discovers his own connection to others, especially to Ida, he learns that the small strip of land where he has lived his life is no longer enough.

These stories involving others on St. Hauda’s Land take shape around Midas and Ida: Midas’s childhood and the tragic relationship between his parents; Carl’s unrequited love for Ida’s mother; Gustav and his daughter Denver’s loss of Catherine; Emiliana’s faith in her healing powers; the mysterious story of Saffron. All of these stories about lost love create a creeping sadness until one realizes that it’s not the loss that counts but rather the fact that one once had love, something that the characters cannot always accept.

The delight of this novel is not the story, per se, or even the characters, but rather the delicate way the novel unfolds in a place that seems both real and not. Shaw’s prose is nothing short of extraordinary, with phrases and images that make one want to linger over pages instead of rushing through to find out what happens. The impending sense of disaster is tempered by hopefulness, both in the characters and in the description. When Shaw writes, “Light was only of use as a metaphor for the ungraspable moment. Until there was a kind of camera invented that could return you entirely to a moment from your past, pictures such as those were no use,” we understand: here, the written word is more powerful and lasting than a photograph could ever be.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co.; 1 edition (January 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ali Shaw
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another you might like: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Bibliography:

• The Girl with the Glass Feet (January 2010)

“Ordinarily, life kills off stories like this: there are mornings when you feel that something is about to begin, something pure and rich and unique, then the telephone rings and it’s all over. Life chops us up and scatters us, leaves us in fragments, refuses the clean brushstroke. What was special about the woman with the bouquet was that life took a certain shape again: her fate had all the purity of literature, the economy of a work of art.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (SEP 25, 2010)

The woman stands on platform number three in the Zurich railway station with a bouquet. She’s been doing the same thing for fifteen years according to the locals. Whom is she so patiently waiting to meet? Does she expect a representative of love or death to alight from the railcar?

In this title short story, “The Woman with the Bouquet,” Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt blends his trademark elements of fairy tale romance, pathos, and fatedness. It radiates mystery and romanticism but also a ghostly bit of menace, and it cuts to a marrow of sorrow. It appeals to our curiosity about the “obsessing” people in this world who will not be moved from their own missions, and simultaneously it reminds us that time spent waiting for something is time not spent doing something else more “constructive.” Loyalty and love would seem to be the motivators of the woman, but perhaps she just is retiring from the world by standing there every day?

The Woman with the Bouquet contains, besides the story just discussed, one novella and three other short stories. It opens with the novella, “The Dreamer from Ostend,” about Emma Van A., an old woman who “must have been very beautiful” but due to a recent cerebral hemorrhage, “her muscles had melted” and her “joints were ravaged by arthritis.” Emma secreted herself in her father’s library of classics and “read in order not to find herself alone and adrift…not to fill a spiritual void but to accompany an all too powerful capacity to create.” Although very secretive about her past apparently devoid of lovers, she relents and tells her history to a writer (the novella’s narrator) who is a boarder in her house, trying to recover from his recent romantic breakup. Hers is a fantastic tale of a secret love that reminds the writer of Cinderella (without the happily-ever-after ending). He has the temerity to tell Emma he doubts her. “The Dreamer of Ostend” is a modern fairy tale infused with literary and psychological insights. The question of whether Emma was indeed beautiful as a young woman comes up, and the narrator doesn’t see how the world order he knows could have handed her the romantic adventure she claims. Emma’s “need” to read only books by dead, “tested” writers is a way she tries to stay out of the present and remain dreamily in the past she claims for herself. Yet she hoped to perpetuate her past by passing it on to the writer. Will he find a reason to be persuaded after all?

“Perfect Crime” begins with a decades-married couple hiking on a high cliff: “The winding path grew perilously narrow a hundred yards further up the slope overlooking the valley.” The wife, Gabrielle, has been feeding her own suspicions about her husband for some time, and now she looks around and, seeing no witnesses, decides it is time to send her husband into the abyss. This is Gabrielle’s story of the aftermath of that decisive moment. Her husband kept secrets from her and she needs to find out once and for all what sins against her they prove. She also has to reevaluate the venomous advice she got from a woman called Paulette who once told her about men that “you really have to push them to the brink to see what they’re made of.” In “Perfect Crime” Schmitt gives us a woman whose suspicious mind and inability to be happy may have led her far, far astray.

Schmitt sometimes focuses on people who are very self-conscious about their appearance and who sequester themselves from life as a result. “Getting Better” carries that theme. A Parisian nurse who is has low self-esteem and considers herself “in the fat lump category,” is startled when a paralyzed and blind male patient tells her, “Lucky me, to have such a pretty woman looking after me…” By caring for him, she knows he was a virile and handsome man before he became so incapacitated. And his women were model perfect to judge by the ones who come to visit him. So why does this man who can’t see or touch her think she is pretty? Asking herself this question causes her to make changes in her wardrobe and her outlook. But is she exchanging withdrawal from the world for an unrealizable attachment? Will love grow fully or be pruned into something else?

And then there is “Trashy Reading,” a manic, black spoof about the “consequences” of reading eight-hundred page blockbuster novels by writers with single-syllable names like “Chris Black” and “Dan West.” Maurice Plisson, a professor with no private life to speak of, tells one of his students scornfully, “Stuff and nonsense!…Those who write novels are writing for a population of idle women, no one else….You see, novels reflect the reign of the arbitrary, complete vagueness. I’m a serious man. I don’t have the place, or the time, or the energy to devote to such nonsense.” Well, of course this stuffed shirt, while on holiday with his female cousin, is drawn like iron filings to a magnet to a trashy novel she buys: The Chamber of Dark Secrets. And that turns Maurice’s previously staid life into one in which he sees danger, intrigue, and murderers all around him.

The Woman with the Bouquet deals with characters who limit themselves by pomposity, pride, fear, insecurity, and suppressed anger. Yet, into the lives of these fragmented, sometimes broken people come extraordinary (even miraculous) events that inspire them to break out of their cocoons and take wing. The results run the gamut from transcendence to tragedy.

Schmitt’s previous Europa Editions volume of stories, The Most Beautiful Book in the World, had a draft feel to it because Schmitt had written most of it hurriedly during the filming of the title story. This collection, although it features many similar themes, feels more finished, more polished. One can quibble with a few of the author’s plot decisions (particularly, in “Perfect Crime,” the revelation of a much touted secret of the husband’s — it falls short of expectations). However, this set of stories is very entertaining and arguably creates its own niche in literature because it melds a number of genres so unconventionally. I enjoyed it. (Translated by Alison Anderson.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt Wikipedia page on Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
EXTRAS:	NPR’s Excerpt Europa Editions page on The Woman with the Bouquet
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Most Beautiful Book in the World

Bibliography:

• The Most Beautiful Book in the World (2006; July 2009 in US)
• The Woman with the Bouquet (2007; August 2010 in US)

“But as soon as she was on the bus, she forgot all about the incident and began to levitate. For from the very first sentence, Balthazar Balsan’s new book drenched her in light and carried her away into his world, blotting out all her troubles, her shame, her neighbors’ conversations, the sound of machines, and the dreary, industrial landscape of Charleroi. Thanks to Balthazar Balsan, she had her head in the clouds.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (NOV 02, 2009)

The Most Beautiful Book in the World is a collection of eight modern fairy tales. In each of the novellas, a sense of the fantastic intertwines with the mundane, sometimes enchantingly, sometimes crudely but still beguilingly.

The title story, for instance, transports the reader into the midst of a women’s gulag during Soviet rule where the inmates suspiciously eye the newcomer, Olga. She might, after all, be an informer. But the talk of the day is about her hair which is either “horrible” or “magnificent” depending upon the prisoner opining. The women think she is from the Caucasus because Olga’s hair is “a thick mane…frizzy, robust, course.” Yet one of the leaders in the camp, Tatyana, wants to get close to Olga and test her trustworthiness. Tatyana and others who bunk together are determined to smuggle out messages to their children — all daughters, coincidentally or not. Despite the strictly-enforced ban on the possession of writing materials, they have hit upon an ingenious way to “create” paper, but have no pens or ink. Tatyana is convinced Olga is the answer to their prayers in that department. Here this tale veers into the improbable (I won’t say exactly how), but let’s just say the guards aren’t as thorough in fables as in real life. Anyway, just get past that and let the rest of the story unfold to ample reward. The women naturally worry about what they should write their children who are now most likely wards of the State. With a limit on the precious amount they may write, they agonize over what is most important. Then, the prisoner considered by the others to be “the most scatter-brained of them all, the most sentimental, the least headstrong” stuns everyone by being the first to get her message down. She is at utter peace with her choice of words. The others can’t help feeling jealous and very curious. What did she write?

“The Most Beautiful Book in the World” touches on many themes: a) Whether women in repressive regimes ought to be political activists or “simply keep quiet…and immerse themselves in domestic values?” b) The mistake made when judging people by appearances; c) The wisdom of simplicity; d) How inventive people can be when they deem it necessary. And so on. Weighed in terms of literary finesse, and how fully it explored the themes introduced, one can argue this short story comes up somewhat short. However, it packs a mighty nice emotional punch. The conclusion, in its Epilogue in the year 2005, imparts a fitting epiphany about how we human beings can communicate immensities with but a few choice words. It is a lovely comedy in the classic definition of the term: there is a triumph over adverse circumstances.

Immediately before the gulag folktale, the collection’s longest selection (thirty pages) has its turn. The title character in “Odette Toulemonde” has “a talent: joy. In her deepest self, it was as if there were a non-stop jazz band playing lively tunes, pulsating melodies. No hardship seemed to get her down….Since humility and modesty were part of her personality, no matter what the circumstances she rarely felt frustrated.” Odette excitedly goes to a bookstore to buy the new book of her favorite author, Balthazar Balsan, and to have him autograph it for her. Odette, a lower middle class widow with two jobs, two teenagers, and a modest apartment in a low income/welfare building, gets so tongue-tied when she meets him that she can’t even speak her own name properly. Balsan’s books, she believes, showed her that “in every life, no matter how miserable, there are reasons to be happy, to laugh, to love.” Balthazar, a wealthy but rather empty man with a troubled marriage and young son who is taking too much after his old man, goes through his own identity crisis soon after this book signing. In true fairy tale form, he ends up staying with Odette and her family for a while. The question is can or should these two people have more to do with each other? In one pivotal talk together, Odette tells Balthazar, “Our paths may cross, but we can no longer meet each other.” Will that be the end of them, or are they destined for more?

The stories in The Most Beautiful Book in the World often embrace irony, rely on incredible turns of fate and misunderstanding, and contain characters who say one thing but actually feel another. Many of the tales float on almost magical clouds of romanticism and a tentative idealism. Yet, the thunder and lightning of life constantly show themselves too. “Odette Toulemonde” tries to point the way to balanced living, but “happily ever after” isn’t the endgame; instead, it’s a recognition of self and the ability to know when to grab for the brass ring and when to hold back, when to understand that if the brass ring isn’t within reach, maybe an iron one is. In “Every Reason to be Happy” a woman discovers her husband isn’t the man she thought and she has to decide how she will handle the startling revelations. The Wanda of “Wanda Winnipeg” is a rich, selfish woman indelibly marked by an older artist from whom she’d madly desired to learn lovemaking when she was young. Can she do something equally momentous for him now? In “The Forgery” the ability to trust is tested by two women with very different results. And what would any set of fairy tales be without “A Barefoot Princess” who may not be what she seems? Each story feels unreal on some level. And some are morose, some ugly, some more upbeat. Each in its own way also strikes notes of resonance and invokes human value.

Psychologically, each story delves into motivations, not always entirely convincingly. Fears, insecurities, trust, and belief play through the generally broadly written and sometimes quirkily inconsistent — but captivating — characters. Often, the reader will have little idea where the story will lead. Deaths occur. Lies morph as they pass from one person to another. But the leitmotif being passed forward by the author, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, is, arguably, that regardless of our histories, regardless of our economic status, regardless of our pettiness and self-centeredness, life often hands out teachable moments that can either make or break us. Truth, beauty, and especially happiness are ours if we possess the strength to see them everywhere.

Playwright, novelist, and short story/novella writer Schmitt, informs the reader in his Postscript, dated August 15, 2006, that he used free minutes between directing the screen version, Odette Toulemonde (for which he had also penned the screenplay), to write these stories. He explains that he’d been carrying them around in his “mind for a long time.” He adds, “‘This allowed me to rediscover the joy of clandestine writing, the one I’d known as an adolescent; filling the pages brought back an appetite for secret pleasures.” This appetite outs in The Most Beautiful Book in the World in such ardent phrases as “…after they had brushed against each other once too often, and he had kissed and dried the tears on her eyelashes or under her lips.” His characters display muted eroticism and less muted passion. However, the greater insight has perhaps to do with artistically technical matters than with secret pleasures. Schmitt didn’t have the luxury of endless hours in which to fine-tune his pacing or his prose. Although the plot ideas were pre-thought, his execution was impromptu. This unfinished quality accents each of the eight stories, although “Odette Toulemonde” — being his movie — presents with the most polish. Once one understands how these stories were written, their “draft” feeling isn’t bothersome (at least it isn’t to my mind).

The back cover lauds Schmitt as “one of Europe’s most popular and best-selling authors.” Europa Editions is the first to publish short stories/novellas of his, and they are translated by Alison Anderson. Unfortunately, Schmitt’s companion film, Odette Toulemonde, isn’t available with English options — yet. Schmitt’is fables — his fairy tales — give a tantalizing taste, but leave this reader wanting more. Some of his plays are available in English, but what about his novels and other short stories? It would be interesting to see his talent from a wider angle and read material he did not jot out in a hurry between movie takes. Perhaps we’ll see more of this author in partnership with Europa Editions?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (July 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	The Most Beautiful Book in the World
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
EXTRAS:	Europa Editions page Wikipedia page on Eric-Emmanuel Schitt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Woman with the Bouquet More Fairy-Tale-like books: The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt Godmother by Carolyn Turgeon Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• The Most Beautiful Book in the World (2006; July 2009 in US)
• The Woman with the Bouquet (2007; August 2010 in US)