Mmmm. Emotionally damaged girl finds marriage and love, though not with the same person. Ah... poor thing.

What a wonderful story, unbelievably well written, no heros, no villians, everyone is a bit of both... ( )

Fantastisk roman over 4 generationer fra Tyskland i 1940´erne til dagen i dag fortalt af 4 børn i seksårsalderen, drengen Sol, hans far, bedstemor og oldemor. Begynder med drengen Sols fortælling og arbejder sig baglæns og fortæller om alle de traumer og løgne, der er forekommet i familien. En fremragende fortælling, der griber fra første til sidste side. ( )

It’s a story of love and betrayal set in Paris at the end of the fifties and at the beginning of sixties at the background of unrests caused by the war in Algeria and very fresh still and lingering World War II experiences. The story revolves around three characters: 20 year old German, Saffie, a Hungarian Jewish émigré, Andras, and French gifted flutist, Raphael.

It’s an interesting and well written novel, but a bit too predictable in some parts, and too improbable and arbitrary in others.

Favourite quote:
‘Ah, the dizzying arbitrariness of our choices in life. The insane entanglement of our motivations. The kaleidoscope of our misunderstandings.’
( )

Saffie, a young German woman arrives in Paris in 1957 and takes on a job as housekeeper to a musician, a flautist of growing international reputation. Raphael is smitten with Saffie from the beginning, compelled by her beauty and intrigued by her totally unemotional exterior; she is distant and uninvolved even when he makes love to her. Raphael hopes that marriage and his devotion and the arrival of a son (whom Saffie had tried to abort) will thaw Saffie, but nothing seems to have the desired effect and he begins to despair of his marriage, and Saffie as a mother: cold and distant. And then Saffie meets Andres, a Hungarian immigrant who repairs musical instruments, and she instantly and totally and physically falls in love. It is this love that leads to a blossoming of Saffie, an opening to life that includes her son, and which Raphael benefits from even though he does not know the cause. Andres committed to aiding the Algerian side in the war against France; as a Jew whose family suffered death under the Nazis, he cannot in good conscience stand aside and do nothing in what he sees as a replay of murder by the Nazis, nor can he understand Saffie's indifference. Saffie has her own devils (having been raped by Russians at the age of eight, along with her mother who subsequently commits suicide), and she cannot engage like Andres; for her, having found the love of her life and having opened up to her son is sufficient. Raphael, now a world-renowned musician discovers, by accident, the relationship between Andres and Saffie. He confronts his son, who has always been part of the relationship and who regards Andres more as his father, in a horrific scene on a train that results in the boy's death. He is acquitted of responsibility, but the day after Emil's death, Saffie has disappeared from Raphael's life: "there remained not the slightest trace of Saffie's passage through Raphael's existence". And she disappeared from Andres's life as well. As Huston says, "Even I have no idea what became of my heroine".

Those are the bare bones of the story, and it is a novel that I enjoyed. I had not read Huston before, an interesting woman who is originally from Calgary, but now lives in Paris and who is so fluent in French that she often writes in that language. In fact, she sometimes writes a novel in French and then again in English; not exactly a translation, but more of a re-writing.

A phrase later in the novel describes well the underlying structure/themes of the book:

Ah, the dizzying arbitrariness of our choices in life. The insane entanglement of our motivations. The kaleidoscope of our misunderstandings.

On one level, this is a novel about the impact on individuals of great historical events (WWII, the genocide of the Jews, the war in Algeria (Huston is unsparing of French activities and policies during that war)). These are events that mark history and are studied and reflected upon, but sometimes it is forgotten that these events were conducted and perpetrated by individuals, and that vast numbers of individuals were affected, marked, and scarred by these events; their lives have been twisted, distorted, and set on whole new paths because of their experience of the events, and the setting of certain prisms through which they will ever after view the world and live their lives. And when these life-lines intersect, as they did with Andres and Saffie, and then cross the "normal" life-line of someone like Raphael, the results are unpredictable.

I like Huston's writing style. Very clean, very direct. And she has an unusual practice of what I might call "authorial intervention". She often turns and speaks directly to the reader, for example, at the end where she says that even she does not know what happened to her heroine. It is an interesting technique. It reminds you that you are reading a book, something made-up out of the imagination of the author, but I did not find it distracting. Rather, it seems to reinforce the idea that you are on the outside, looking in at the lives of these people unfolding before you, and yet that does not diminish, at least for me, the engagement of the reader with the characters. As Huston says about Saffie at the end: "The truth of our story is that she disappeared. As we shall all disappear, in the end". And this fits with the historical anonymity that is the fate of 99% of the people who live, or have lived, on earth and so it rings true in this novel as well.
(Nov/99)