In this historical novel, a 20-year-old Canadian woman decamps to Paris in 1920, assumes a new identity, and becomes convinced she can achieve the fame and fortune to which her exquisite beauty entitles her.
Ragnhild “Ragny McMutt” McFlaherty, aka Sandrine Thibodeau, arrives in Paris almost penniless. In her tattered carpetbag, she carries the few pricey clothes she was able to steal before departing Montreal. After a day of walking through the city, she winds up on the Left Bank. Eventually she scores a cheap room in the Hôtel Alsace by winning the sympathy of a gentle “patron.” The next day, she enters a cafe on Boulevard Saint-Germain, unaware it is a mecca for the flourishing Dada/avant-garde movement that is taking a still war-weary Paris by storm. With her proclivity for eloquence and snark, Holmström explains the cultural revolution and its consequent abandonment of conventions: “Narcissism and Nihilism stood bride and groom. Their offspring was born on February 8, 1916, getting on…six o’clock in the evening, and was christened Dada, an offspring that never learned to talk properly, and that is now teaching the rest of the world to babble its nonsense.” At the cafe, Sandrine meets a woman who, finding her amusingly intriguing, invites her to a gathering at her “salon.” While repelled by the eccentricities of the guests, Sandrine manages to steal enough cash and jewelry to fund the search for her next mark, this time finding a room on the Right Bank. Several recognizable artistic luminaries make appearances throughout the vivid and scathing narrative, with an emphasis on their personal quirks rather than on their talents. But the author’s biting, albeit often humorous, sarcasm takes a very dark turn when Sandrine (renamed Inga Bagge) moves to Germany. Here, the richly detailed, vicarious tour of Paris in the ’20s ends, and readers are immersed in the insidious and horrific rise of Hitler during the ’30s. While the tale is historically engaging, many readers will find it challenging to spend so much time with its soulless, relentlessly unlikable central character.
An articulate, often entertaining, but chilling portrait of the power of evil.