Sometimes I buy vintage photo lots from Etsy. I love flipping through old photos of people or places I’ve never known. If it’s a person, I like to imagine what his/her life was like at the moment the photo was taken. I’ve scanned some of the photos I’ve collected, and posted them here to show you:

Who is this girl? The back of the photo says that her name is Martha. Where is she? It looks like she might be at a camp. Where was she heading before she half-turned back to smile for the photographer?

Where is this house? Who lived here? Was it a big family? Did they like to sit on that beautiful porch in the summer? Where do they keep their car(s)? Is this house still standing? Who lives there now?

Who is this man and this woman? How do they know each other? Are they a couple? She has a lovely hat on. Who took the photo? Were they dressed up for an occasion, or did they always dress nicely to go out?

I think Elena Mauli Shapiro and I are kindred spirits, because this type of curiosity is how she wrote the novel 13, rue Thérèse. From the book jacket:

Elena Mauli Shapiro was born and raised in Paris, France, in an apartment below the real-life Louise Brunet’s. Shapiro found herself in possession of a box of Louise’s keepsakes after her neighbor died and no relatives arrived to claim them. These postcards, gloves, photographs, coins, letters, and other mementoes utterly captured her imagination.

So, this novel was right up my alley. Shapiro took the objects left behind and imagined the life of Louise Brunet that surrounded them. Very little is known of the real Louise, but her keepsakes inspired this work of fiction. Printed throughout the novel are color photographs of the actual objects. You can go to http://www.13ruetherese.com to see the objects and learn more about the book.

This novel has:
1. Time Travel
2. Romance
3. Paris
4. Color photographs of real letters and photos

…what’s not to love?

This novel was a lovely and unusual read. I think those who enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will enjoy 13, rue Thérèse. It has the same combination winning combo of historical fiction and wartime letters, but with more passion and mystery. I didn’t want to put it down.

Here are my two favorite lines from the book:

“She leans in and kisses him, kisses his lax and comforting lips. She does love him. Yet she is riddled with flaming foolishness – and she knows such things don’t last, but she cannot accept that such things are false just because they are fleeting.” page 131

“He is driven by something he cannot understand – some unknown thing inside him pushes him on and he yields. It must be that whatever is to follow is already written.” page 191

I’ll confess this right now: I bought Skippy Dies for the cover. I read the blurbs too, and it sounded like a good book and justified the purchase. But what really sold me on this book, above all the other books I saw while popping in and out of every bookstore I passed in Ireland, was the cover. It’s gorgeous. It’s also, conveniently, a great book. It’s a sprawling tragi-comedy. It might be a little Dickens-esque. I think what I loved above all were the characters – it has a very large cast of them, and it changes point of view frequently. Even the terribly flawed characters are painted with love. I recommend this book for when you’re in the mood for a great big story full of life and sorrow and humor – it will hit the spot. Plus, you’ll be able to gaze at its beautiful cover, a nice bonus.

Here is my favorite passage from the novel:

He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and whatever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely – from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends. (page 300)

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden is a unique book. The entire plot technically takes place on one day (would you be surprised to hear that day is Molly Fox’s birthday?), but the narrator (not Molly Fox) pauses to reminisce throughout the day and we readers travel back with her, and along the way details of her past are colored in. The style felt very clean, and fresh. There’s a particular sort of mood that would be best paired with this book, though it’s hard to lay a finger on just what mood that would be. It almost felt meditative. It’s not a book packed with action or adventure, but the writing is beautiful, and the insight into the characters is skillful and interesting.

Rather than say more, how about some of my favorite passages?

~

Eventually we decided, after much discussion, that our different approaches to character could be seen as a continuum. For me, as a playwright, the creation of a character is like listening to something faint and distant. It’s like trying to remember someone one knew slightly, in passing, a very long time ago, but to remember them so that one knows them better than one knows oneself. It’s like trying to know a family member who died before one was born, from looking at photographs and objects belonging to them; also from hearing the things, often contradictory, that people say about them, the anecdotes told. From this, you try to work out how they might speak and how they might react to any given circumstance, how they would interact with other characters whom one has come to know by the same slow and delicate process. And out of all this comes a play, where, as in life, people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say, where they act against their own best interests and sometimes fail to understand those around them.
pages 7-8

Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.
page 32

When I went back down to the kitchen I was struck by how it had changed since the morning, with the changing light of the day. I had seen this room – and this house – at all seasons, at all times of the day and night. I had been here when the whole place was cocooned with snow. I had seen it by candlelight. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden.
page 159

The seating of the auditorium was arranged in curved rows, and from where I was placed I was able to observe not only the stage but also the audience. I could see all the people by the light of the stage, their rapt faces, the quality of the attention they were giving to what they were watching. Each of them was making their own private connection with the work, each bringing their own experiences and emotions to bear upon the play, to interpret it and integrate it into their own imaginative life. That this was happening in the presence of so many other people was crucial. In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets. That night when Molly appeared as the Duchess, I looked at the audience and I thought, nothing surpasses this.
page 213

Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invent as we go along, almost as a social reflex? Perhaps it is instead the truest thing about us, and it is the revelation of it that is the problem; that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial.
page 214

Title: The Postmistress
Author: Sarah Blake
Published: 2009
My edition: Putnam Hardcover 2009
Borrowed From: The Hoboken Public Library
Pages: 326

Synopsis (from Strand): As the dawn of World War II sweeps throughout Europe, Americans are still relatively at ease and holding fast to Roosevelt’s promise that we’d be safe at home. Though, one American radio reporter, Frankie Bard, whose been stationed in London is bent on extending warnings to those in Europe and back home. While many of these broadcasts go unheard, Franklin, MA, resident Iris James has heard the call and heeded the warnings. Along with Iris, whose concerns are still veiled behind feelings for a local mechanic, Will and Emma Fitchs’ lives are about to be changed by the warnings as well. In “The Postmistress” author Sarah Blake offers us a novel that shows us 4 lives forever changed and intertwined.

I read this because: I saw about 400 fantastic reviews, and had to check it out for myself. It also sounded like exactly the sort of novel that I would enjoy.

My thoughts: To put it very simply: I love this book. It was almost like I made a checklist of everything I’d love in a novel and Sarah Blake wrote it: Historical fiction, WWII, strong & likable characters, letters, a love story, multiple points of view, a small town on the Eastern seaboard.

I was craving a good novel, too. As much as I adore memoirs, poetry, non-fiction, food writing, short stories, etc; I often need a compulsively readable novel. I want to be told a story. From page one I was completely drawn into this story, and didn’t want to emerge from it to do things like eat, sleep and work.

One thing that this book made me think a lot about is our society’s relationship to the news. There are many people who follow world news extensively, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. (I’ll be the first to admit that I often fall into the latter category.) A common excuse is that “there’s too much sadness & bad news out there.” This book really brings that attitude into perspective, especially through the character Frankie Bard, who travels around Europe riding evacuation trains and interview people to find out their stories. Some (ok, most) of these stories are heartbreaking. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it, there are heartbreaking stories happening all over the world, right now. (The passage I quoted below relates to this.) It doesn’t mean we need to spend our whole life being sad about what happens in other areas of the world, but we can certainly try not to be blind to it, and we can do what’s in our power to be educated about what’s happening and help however possible.

Book club worthy? Yes.

You might like this book if you like: The Help, Water for Elephants and historical fiction in general.

Links to purchase: IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Strand

My favorite passage:

I wanted to write about this somehow – this aspect of war and its terrifying accidents and how we come to terms with the fact that wars are being waged right now, even as I write (and you read) these words. How do we imagine that simultaneity? (page 324, from the afterword)

Extras: Read the first chapter online, BookPage interview with Sarah Blake