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Bezig met laden... Haunting Paris: A Noveldoor Mamta Chaudhry
Dead narrators (42) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. I kept waiting to be as beguiled by Sylvie as some characters in this remarkable book are. Unfortunately, the remove between us was never quite breached making me impatient with a story that required patience. Nevertheless, a beautiful if flawed novel of war and peace, of love lost and found, and - unsurprisingly - of Paris. The "haunting" is both classic ghost story and history: the rounding up of French Jews - Operation Vent Printanier - during the German occupation, reminding us in our own time how few of us can rise above indifference or the temptation to ride out the squalls of evil behind closed doors.
Julien Dalsace, a sensitive Jewish-French psychologist, has been dead for almost a year as Haunting Paris begins, in July 1989, but his ghost still roams the city’s ancient streets, yearning for glimpses of his longtime lover, the shy pianist Sylvie.... The problem is that the plot hinges on an unbelievable premise. (No, not the ghost part.) The reader must believe that the devastated Sylvie, desperate for any concrete reminder of Julien, would wait until page 70 to tear open the sealed envelope that conveniently falls out of a secret compartment in his desk on page three.... Luckily, the lure of the mystery and the seductive writing outweigh the annoyance of the author’s heavy manipulation. ... a graceful debut from Chaudhry, its sedate pacing revealing a finely textured world where grief and love commingle. Julien’s spirit travels across time but keeps careful vigil over Sylvie, their separate paths nonetheless a powerful testament to the enduring strength of the bonds we form in life. Chaudry’s debut is a heart-wrenching love letter to Paris masked as a wartime tragedy.... In the bicentennial year of the French Revolution, a grieving Sylvie finds a folder that leads her on a search for information about members of Julien’s family who were arrested in the tragic Vel d’Hiv Roundup in 1942, when 13,000 Parisian Jews were rounded up in a single night, many of them children.... But every page about these Parisians and their fair city is so fraught with emotion that eventually they lose their impact. Readers who adore Paris and war stories may nevertheless forgive this very fine writer for not showing more restraint. ... while Chaudhry brings a kind of reverent seriousness to events both past and present, her approach is more familiar. Characters are often simple, like the kindly Jewish baker, the protective (but kindly) concierge, the sympathetic American lodgers, and even Sylvie’s anthropomorphized terrier, Coco. And resolutions, even sad ones, arrive with coincidence and ease. A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy, might well touch a popular nerve.
Paris, 1989: Alone in her luminous apartment on Île Saint-Louis, Sylvie discovers a mysterious letter among her late lover Julien's possessions, launching her into a decades-old search for a child who vanished in the turbulence of the Second World War. She is unaware that she is watched over by Julien's ghost, his love for her powerful enough to draw him back to this world, though doomed now to remain a silent observer. Sylvie's quest leads her deep into the secrets of Julien's past, shedding new light on the dark days of Nazi-occupied Paris. A timeless story of love and loss, Haunting Paris matches emotional intensity with lyrical storytelling to explore grief, family secrets, and the undeniable power of memory. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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