Liza Wieland

In 1937, two years after graduating from Vassar, Elizabeth Bishop went with some college friends to France. During this time, there was a three week stretch in time where she did not write in her life-long journal. Wieland has taken a look back and imagined what might have happened in that time. She and her friends move around and end up in Paris. Bishop tries to write. An artist friend has a tragic accident. She meets other artists and writers, including Natalie Barney. She falls for a woman who is not available to her. An older woman takes her on as a replacement for her deceased daughter- and as an aide in saving Jews from the invading Nazis.

Even though I realize this is a well written book, it really didn’t draw me in. It’s written in the third person present tense, which I found a bit off putting. Besides that, I was never pulled into the story, and never took to any of the characters. Wieland’s writing has a dreamy quality, like watching the story through a veil of chiffon. I can only give it three stars.… (lisätietoja)

After graduating from Vassar, American poet Elizabeth Bishop went to France with two college friends. In Paris, 7 a.m. author Liza Wieland imagines what might have happened to Bishop as a young woman in Paris in 1937. In the novel, Bishop forms relationships of various kinds with a young German woman who is in Paris because Berlin is no longer safe for her and an older woman who lost her own daughter some years earlier. There's a lot going on in this novel, from Nazis, to lesbians, to an amputated hand, to rescuing babies, to hanging out with everyone from Sylvia Beach to Marianne Moore. Yet it never feels over-packed. Wieland's writing is almost dreamy and stays focused on how Bishop perceives what's happening around her, rather than what is actually happening, which puts some of the events at a sort of remove, even as they're happening, while intensifying others.

There is a sense of slowly rising danger in this novel, not for Bishop and her American friends, who return to the US safely, although not without having been changed, but for the Europeans they encounter. Not all the Germans in France are Nazis, some are Germans who have found Germany unsafe for a variety of reasons. And while the heart of the story centers on secretly moving Jewish babies into the safety of a Catholic convent in Paris, the reader remains aware of what tenuous protection that will prove to be.

There are a number of novels out there imagining the details of the lives of famous literary and historical personages and a disproportionate number of them take place in Paris. But Paris, 7 a.m. is different enough and written so well as to be well worth reading.… (lisätietoja)

The author, perhaps in an attempt to have her book look and sound like journal entries, does not use quotation marks. She also doesn’t give much, if any, information about the characters, real and imagined, she introduces. Because of these two things – no quotation marks and no fleshing out of characters – the reader is forced to work hard to get from the first page to the last page of this novel. Added to this mix are unexplained time jumps and unexplained location changes, and the book becomes a chore to read.

All the above being said, this book does give a plausible explanation for the three-week lack of entries in Bishop’s journal for the period. There are pages in this book that create a dreamlike feel and portray Bishop’s internal struggles with lyricism.

If you love Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, don’t mind working hard just to finish a book, and love historical fiction, this book may just be for you.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and Edelweiss for an eArc.… (lisätietoja)