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SEEKING PARIS by Don Monaco

SEEKING PARIS

by Don Monaco

Pub Date: May 1st, 2020
Publisher: DEM Publishing

A married couple’s pedestrian life is waylaid by their daughter’s desire to uncover their mysterious past in this novel.

Vera and Paul Guardic have spent the last 13 years living a quiet suburban life in Akron, Ohio. He’s a professor at a small college, deeply involved in the machinations of local politics. The couple have a daughter, Paris, soon to turn 18 years old. Vera and Paul chose “the predictable order of America, its power and personal comforts” after a perilous life resisting the Nazis in Paris once the pair fled the Anschluss in Austria. Vera desperately tries to bury the memories of that past, especially those of American Ben Iceland, a freedom fighter with whom she shared a torrid relationship. After a chance encounter with a figure from their past, Vera and Paul are forced to confront the personal history they’ve interred under the topsoil of quotidian lives. But their daughter, evocatively named after the site of their adventures, can’t bear her ignorance of her parents’ history. She suddenly takes flight and heads to her namesake city in order to find the principal characters in the family drama, including Ben. Monaco deftly constructs a thoughtful meditation on the long shadow cast by one’s past, the inescapable source of one’s character. At its best moments, the novel is reminiscent of Patrick Modiano’s work, deeply pensive and darkly suggestive. But the prose can devolve into the ponderous—Monaco simply tries too laboriously to reach philosophically profound heights, a strain particularly notable in the dialogue. Here, one character describes the allure of Denise Novette, a sex worker: “The men will come to worship Athena. You are able to reveal a goddess to them. You are Madame Curie, a muse, a Queen Wilhelmina, Pauline Baker, Anais Nin, Diagalev. You are Athena.”

An intelligently conceived family tale hampered by uneven prose.