In this novel about a woman who works in Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), author Simon Mawer focuses on Marian Sutro, a composite character representing the fifty-four women who served in France between May, 1941, and September, 1944. Of those real women, thirteen were murdered by the Germans following their capture. Recruited to perform extremely dangerous duties, all these women were fluent in French and often bilingual, and all of them were willing to perform under extraordinarily dangerous conditions. Marian’s work takes her throughout much of France, from the drop areas in the southwest to Paris. Everyone she meets is a potential enemy and a potential traitor, and she must operate on her own most of the time. “The danger of Paris is a cancer within you, invisible, imponderable, and probably incurable,” she notes. Many different factions with many different goals operate among the allies in France, and additional dangers from the police, French collaborators, and the Germans, make every moment a trial, especially in Paris. Like his more serious literary fiction, such as The Glass Room, The Fall, The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel’s Dwarf, Trapeze is full of excitement, but unlike those novels, this one is an entertainment, with a “Maisie Dobbs” quality – historically focused and fun to read but less serious stylistically and thematically than literary fiction.
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An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his careful attention to details of the natural world, his uncompromising characterizations, and his ability to incorporate subtle symbols, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship. The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried. “The doctor would be reduced to ashes. He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks. “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn. Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.” As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family, and especially on his own chances for a life of his own. With no emotional resources of his own to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.
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Released to coincide with the fourteenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death on August 31, 2011, this newly translated novel by Laurence Cosse will attract many of the readers who enjoyed her best-selling A NOVEL BOOKSTORE, from 2010. In this novel, originally written in 2003, the author picks up one of the remaining mysteries from the investigation of Princess Diana’s death and creates a novel around it—a witness’s report of a slow-moving car which the Princess’s speeding Mercedes grazed at the entrance to the Alma tunnel where the fatal crash occurred. Sometimes described as a white Fiat Uno, the car has never been found, and the driver has never been identified. Readers of this novel will learn that the driver, as the author imagines her, was Louise Origan, a young woman living, not quite happily, with her boyfriend Yvon, on her way home from work at a restaurant in Paris. Panicked when the Mercedes crashes, Lou never stops, and on reaching the safety of her home, she relives her actions: “I never thought of stopping, not one second. I was running away. It was my foot that decided, or fear, in any case something that isn’t like me.” It is not until the next morning that she learns who the victims of the crash are, and though she may have contemplated going to the police to admit involvement in what she thought at first was an “ordinary” accident, she realizes that “there was no way she could go to the police now.”
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Probably every lover of literary fiction has had a fantasy about creating or finding the ideal bookstore—one which is dedicated to exactly the kinds of novels we like to read, where we can enter and spend an afternoon browsing, reading whatever strikes our eye, all the while knowing that every book there has the potential to become one of our favorites. It is a fantasy in which all the other browser-readers there enjoy reading and talking about the same kinds of books we do, and the helpful staff has read most of the books and can make recommendations. The main characters in this novel by Laurence Cosse have created just such a bookstore. Ivan (Van) Georg, who manages a shop called The Good Novel, and Francesca Aldo-Valbelli, the heiress who is supporting it financially, have committed themselves to a shop which is not “an ordinary bookstore…[and] our customers [are not] ordinary customers.”
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Vietamese-born Linda Le, one of France’s most popular authors, moved to Paris in 1997 when she was fourteen, accompanying her mother, grandmother, and three sisters soon after the fall of Saigon. In this energetic, sometimes raucous, and always surprising novel, Le describes the lives of three other young Vietnamese women who are also living in France—now totally assimilated after twenty years of living there. Two sisters, known as Elder Cousin, or Potbelly, who is pregnant, and her younger sister, Long Legs, a “cutie” who is living with someone she hopes is a ticket to wealth, have decided to invite their estranged father, King Lear, to come from Saigon to Paris for a three-week visit. Potbelly will pay for the trip, since she is married to a wealthy French “Hardware Man” in the “nutsandbolts business” who will be away during the visit; Long Legs has no money, spending her small salary on clothes, makeup, and trinkets. The third member of the Three Fates, Southpaw, referred to at one point at Albatrocious, is their cousin, a young woman who has lost a hand. The sisters have few expectations regarding their reunion with King Lear, and Long Legs does not even remember the language, but they do plan to impress him with their financial and social success in France and show him how “French” they are.
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