The House I Loved / Tatiana de Rosnay

The grandiose avenues and squares of Paris, the impossible conceit of l’Etoile, the romantic uniformity of the golden stone facades and their wrought iron balconies—all this was imposed upon a medieval network of streets and passages. In the course of about fifteen years in the mid-1800s entire streets and neighborhoods were literally wiped off the map to make room for the new triumphant boulevards, parks, and grand public spaces. What effect did this have on the people of Paris and their neighborhoods? Tatiana de Rosnay (Sarah’s Key) attempts to investigate this by recreating a historic street that is scheduled to yield to Baron von Haussmann’s wrecking crews in order to make room for the new Boulevard Saint-Germain. Rose Bazelet, a widow, is the homeowner at the center of the story, a person whose life is so rooted in the neighborhood and the very house in which she lives, that she cannot consider abandoning it. Her life story is revealed chapter by chapter as the demolition team approaches her secret hiding place in her beloved home.

A fascinating insight into a particular time in Parisian history, this story reminded me a bit of Tracy Chevalier’s historical novels and made me want to find out more about Paris before it was transformed into the beauty it is today—we know what was gained, but The House I Loved attempts to show the reader what was lost.

[Oh, and the cover of the book is totally wrong—whoever photoshopped it and whoever approved it never read the story. But I don’t much like the British version either. The best one I saw was probably the Norwegian version since it gave a glimpse of an old neighborhood that was lost.]

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog