MADAME

Readers who admired Bernhard Schlink's The Reader won't want to miss this scintillating bildungsroman about a

charmingly self-absorbed Polish teenager pursuing intellectual maturity—and the older woman of his dreams—in postwar Communist-controlled Warsaw. He (never named) is a fledgling writer whose artistic energies stimulate him to form a high-school jazz group (inspired by Ray Charles's mischievous vocal stylings) and a "drama circle" that scandalizes school authorities by performing "Western" material. And, when his school's beautiful new headmistress ("Madame le Directrice") doubles as his French teacher, the narrator focuses his not inconsiderable analytical skills on this alluring, enigmatic stranger. His "investigations"—a beguiling combination of late-adolescent lust and honest intellectual curiosity—involve him with the Polish scholar who may be/have been her lover, and the tangled tale of Madame's birth and childhood (in "the West" so despised by his xenophobic peers), which estranged her from her parents, causing her to adopt a "strategy—concealment and disguise—the strategy of the sphinx." Libera paces his young hero's fulminations, fantasies, and discoveries beautifully, building a remarkably subtle characterization of a bookish idealist who reaches the maturity to which he has so zealously aspired (he does become a writer and teacher) only to find that his own concentrated intensity (and, as a result, his secretiveness) has made him the object of his own students' mythmaking curiosity and ironically fulfilled his desires ("I had become Madame"). He also makes this brimful novel a telling critique of the consequences of both myopic anti-intellectualism and (as the narrator remarks when studying an exhibition of Picasso nudes, "man's . . . pretense of maturity . . . his risible pride in being the creator of Culture." A sophisticated coming-of-age tale that's also delicious high entertainment. Put this one already on the list of this year's

best novels.