This is a beautiful book for lots of reasons. First, the writing is tremendous and the stories and characters are rich and compelling. And second, the author's own story is also just as compelling and interesting.The book is made of two short novellas both taking place in June 1940, the first about Parisians fleeing the city on the eve of the German invasion; the second in a small French town during the German occupation and is about the fraternization of the French townspeople and the German soldiers stationed there. The book was intended to be a suite, much like a symphony taking place with multiple acts, but with some variations on a theme with an ensemble of characters that are intertwined and overlapping throughout the different acts. The author intended the book to have five acts total, but was only able to complete these first two.
The author, who was born a Russian Jew and immigrated to Paris at 18yrs old, converted to Catholicism, but was repeatedly denied French citizenship. She was writing this while in hiding in France in 1940, but was turned over by the French and taken to Auschwitz where she died later that year. Her manuscript was saved by her 10 year old daughter thinking it was a journal. 50 years later it was published in France and became an instant best-seller.
Even considered "unfinished" as far as the overall work is concerned, I felt that the two novellas still felt complete as works on their own.
p.s. It makes a great Book Group book, not only because of the amount of information available for discussion, but also if you have a ward that reads only books with a PG rating.
2 comments:
I loved this book. My husbands step-mom was from Paris and for years we've talked about the war as it happened from her viewpoint, this book helped to flesh out, so to speak, some of the things she had told me. Written beautifully, I couldn't put it down.
My favorite part of this fabulous book was the appendix. It really fleshed out the author as her own character in the meta-plot and placed the stories in context in a way that more richly colored every character and every action depicted in the book. It's an amazing occurrence to have both the story in the book and the story OF the book so important/artistic/compelling/instructive/beautiful. One of the best books I've read this year.
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