An elegant, character-driven family tale set in mid-’90s Paris.
A transit strike unexpectedly upends the life of the owner of a failing bicycle shop in this literary novel.
Paris, 1995. Trevor McFarquhar has just learned he will soon lose the lease on the bicycle shop he operates (and lives above) on the Rue des Martyrs. Despite—or perhaps because of—the shop’s flagging business, the 37-year-old American-born Trevor views this is as nothing short of a catastrophe. Brought to Paris at age 8 following the death of his father and sister, Trevor has never felt fully at home in the City of Light, though he has no place anywhere else. His resentment of his mother for moving her surviving children there—“simply, from what I could tell, because she’d studied French and had spent a ‘fun’ year in Paris”—has mostly softened into a general aloofness toward her, his younger brother, his casual romantic relationships, and most other things in his life. He isn’t even sure what to do about the bicycle business, seemingly content to let the universe make the decision for him (which is actually how he came to own it in the first place). Then a few things begin to happen, each of which threatens to shake Trevor out of his Parisian ennui. First, Trevor meets Béa Fairbank, an English painter at the edge of his tiny social circle who claims to have heard all about him. Then, a general transit strike brings the city’s trains to a halt, stranding commuters and creating a sudden need for bikes. Finally, Trevor’s longtime crush on his brother’s wife, Stephanie, blossoms suddenly into a full-blown affair, the discovery of which has the potential to sever for good his ties to his family. As the year unfolds, Trevor stands to learn a bit about nationality, family, love, and bikes, and more than a little about himself. While Trevor is no longer a confident English speaker, Fleming (Someone Else, 2014) enlivens her narration with sharp and measured prose, as here where she describes the protagonist’s romantic flings: “I was honest with them right from the start about the conditions of our arrangement, that is, I was not interested in anything but the stated Casual Relationship that included no exclusivity clause. Furthermore, any attempt to attach strings would be met with scissors.” As the particulars of Trevor’s past unfold, he becomes a much more relatable, tragic figure than he initially appears, and his pseudo-Americanness makes him a particular curiosity for U.S. readers. (One exchange with an American tourist highlights Trevor’s peculiarity: “ ‘So you live here,’ Harry continued piecing his puzzle together. ‘But you’re American.’ I nodded. ‘So you must be bilingual.’ ”) The novel takes its time getting started, its pace is slow, and it could stand to be 50 pages shorter. That said, the author is a talented enough writer to keep readers intrigued even when not much is going on. Trevor is a Francophonic twist on the familiar ’90s slacker archetype, and he makes for an endearingly grumpy guide through a Paris that is by turns mundane and magical.
An elegant, character-driven family tale set in mid-’90s Paris.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-646-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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