A discordantly frothy vision of Paris’ darkest chapter.
Nightlife goes on in Schaffert’s ornate tableau of Nazi-occupied Paris.
Schaffert’s narrator, Clementine, is presumably in her 70s, though she’s not talking. A Nebraska native, Clem is self-described as queer and has long preferred the persona of a dapper dandy. Settling in Paris after a long history of thievery in the United States, and one monumental and disappointing love affair with another person known only as M, she dares not return to the U.S., where too many warrants await. In France, she exploits her other signature talent, perfumery. Her chief competitor, Pascal, has disappeared, which is no surprise since Paris has been seized by the Nazis and Pascal is Jewish. Pascal’s Left Bank hôtel particulier now bivouacs aging Nazi kingpin Voss, who, as a member of the old guard, clings desperately to his rank. Zoé, Pascal’s daughter, sings torch songs incognito in a cabaret attached to a bordello. Lush description of scents and extravagant lists of everything from butterflies to poisons underscore Clem’s prodigious powers of observation, but the novel’s beautifully rendered atmosphere is no substitute for suspense and conflict. The aesthete Voss and the loutish but lovelorn Lutz, whose unwilling mistress Zoé becomes, are not particularly menacing though they're Nazis, and the terrors of the Occupation—the dispossession and removal of the city’s Jews, the hunger, the cruelty of the occupiers and the co-optation of the occupied—are mostly offstage. There are nods to the Resistance—but even here, misplaced whimsy obtains: for example, tobacco-scavenging nuns branch out into helping prostitutes flee south, disguised in habits. In what passes for an overarching plotline, Voss and Clem form an uneasy alliance to ferret out Pascal’s hidden perfumer’s diary as part of a double-cross which begins as fanciful and ends as anticlimactic. For most of the novel, Clem, her young protégé Blue, and her friend Day, also a chanteuse, seem to be enjoying themselves far too much for the setting.
A discordantly frothy vision of Paris’ darkest chapter.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54574-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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