Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was looking for a way to combine my youngest girlie’s birthday–which was yesterday–and Ellen Feldman’s Paris Never Leaves You; ‘daughters’ was the only similarity I could come up with. Which works, right? My youngest girlie is also my youngest anything, and the fact that she is six (now officially old enough to butter her own muffins with a plastic kid knife!) feels a little crazy. Not to mention the fact that we’re still celebrating, because today is distance learning (because of SEPs), and thus much more conducive to coffee cake for a birthday breakfast as well as gnocchi for her birthday dinner. (We did have ice cream sundaes for her birthday dessert last night, as well as presents.) I’ve cooked the potatoes–which are cooling on the stove–and after this review and some possible putting away of laundry, gnocchi dough is in my future! (By the by, I wasn’t sure how she felt about her birthday gifts yesterday, but there seems to be a lot of playing with them today, so that’s a good sign.)

In the meantime, Feldman’s book is also about a mother with a daughter–a Parisian mother who gave birth to a daughter on the day that the Nazis entered Paris. Life has taken Charlotte Foret from a Paris bookshop to a cubicle at a New York publishing house; she has made a life for herself and her daughter and has no desire to think about their war years. The past, however, is an inescapable part of life, is it not?

I recognize that as descriptions go, that one is obnoxiously vague. This is a spellbinding novel, however, and not one that you can summarize easily; better to experience what Charlotte experiences as the novel unfolds. Paris Never Leaves You is both austerely hopeful and philosophically complex; it’s also a compelling story of life during an enemy occupation and what comes afterward. It manages to be both an utterly human novel–a novel of people and their lives–as well as an extraordinarily thought-provoking one. It stays in your head, flooding your mind with thoughts of choices and humanity. There is infidelity–which is never my preference–but it didn’t ruin the reading experience for me, as it so often does. (It still didn’t make me happy, mind you, because infidelity is wrong. I’ve been married for more than twenty years now, and our happiness is hard-won, as is most marital happiness; we’ve won it by keeping our commitment to each other. If your marriage isn’t a place you feel you can stay, you owe it to yourself and your integrity to exit honestly.) It’s somewhat open ended, but in a way that feels necessary, whether there is ever a sequel or not. Ultimately, I found Paris Never Leaves You impressive, and I’m grateful to St. Martin’s Press for the ARE.*

*With the one exception of the title. I’m not sure what I would have called it, but I don’t feel like that title did it justice.