A romp which, too soon, slows to a crawl.
A frothy exposé of the perils of book packaging, seasoned with a soupçon of culinary courtship.
In French-German author Barreau’s American debut, lovers of Paris and voyeurs of the French publishing scene will find much to relish. However, aficionados of tightly plotted romantic comedies will find considerably less. After being unceremoniously dumped by Claude, her boyfriend of two years, Aurélie Bredin, chef/owner of a charming restaurant on the Rue Princesse, drifts into an Île Saint-Louis bookstore to elude a nice gendarme who thought she was about to leap into the Seine. She espies a novel entitled The Smiles of Women, in French translation, by an English author, Robert Miller. Amazingly enough, the novel portrays a beautiful woman resembling Aurélie, and much of the action unfolds at Le Temps des Cerises—her restaurant. Her new infatuation with Robert Miller supplants her despair over Claude, and she resolves to meet the author, which poses a problem for Miller’s editor, André Chabanais, of Éditions Opale. Urged by his boss to scout and commission an “Englishman in Paris” project, André finds it easier just to write the thing himself. Collaborating with a British literary agent, Adam Goldberg, André invents a stereotypical English writer, an ink-stained, country-dwelling recluse. Adam’s dentist brother, Sam, agrees to pose for Robert Miller’s book-jacket photo, but now Opale’s marketing department is clamoring for Miller, who’s selling books in France like Ladurée sells macaroons, to make a Paris appearance for press interviews and a book signing. Worse, when Aurélie comes to his office in pursuit of Miller, André is smitten. To prevent exposure of his hoax, André, while trying to woo Aurélie himself, must answer her fan letters to Miller. But, what will happen when Miller, as impersonated by Sam, finally comes to town? The enjoyment of the deception is somewhat mitigated by the many talky scenes that pad the plot. The English translation exacerbates the ennui with flabby phrasing.
A romp which, too soon, slows to a crawl.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00670-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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