That Paris Year Review

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That Paris Year ReviewThis is a wonderful book. The language has a poetic quality that is sensual, evocative, graceful, and non-intrusive. The story seemingly emerges not from design but rather from the characters discovering, inventing (and hiding from) themselves against the vicissitudes of circumstance; in short, this is a novel that does not so much have a plot (though it does) as it is a writing that unfolds a story. The characters became very real and detailed for me--the author is a master of the moving, four-dimensional portrait--but within each I sensed hidden places, mysterious seas that the author wisely leaves uncharted. In other words, the author lets these characters live and breathe. We know them, but we never really know them--and in that sense also this is a book very true to life.
Beyond the characters, this is a novel that delights in place. Paris, Pasadena, Provence, the pitching swells of the North Atlantic, the Cotê de Azure; the writing is such that we not only see these places, we smell them, feel their scorching winds, gentle waves, cold winter drear, brilliant colors, faded grays and browns. These become places one inhabits.
Beyond the poetic feel of the language, the elusive unfolding of character and the evocation of place, the novel is remarkable for its play with time and memory. The narrator presents herself as a writer invited to speak to some young women considering spending a year abroad in Paris in 1970, as she did ten years earlier. This distance of a decade, as she recounts the events of that year, lends her narrative a subtle depth and mystery; the questions are never explicitly asked, but they are there, always underneath the flow of story and language. What did those ten years do to that Paris year, how it is remembered, talked about, understood? How did the missing bits and pieces, the later developments in the characters lives, shape this wonderfully told memory? And, one realizes that the book itself was written some decades after that narrative moment that recounts events already a decade gone. I read it, and I am there, in 1960, and it is alive and so real--and yet when and where, really, am I? I pose those questions in relation to the book, but don't they really go the nature of all lived and remembered experience? I don't know that the author intended it, but among the many wonders of this novel is the way that it invites us to reflect on the questions of time, memory, and meaning that go unasked in our daily liveThat Paris Year OverviewIn That Paris Year, five smart, adventurous young women arrive on the banks of the Seine in 1962 for their junior year abroad. What they get is an education of a different sort. As they move from the grueling demands of the Sorbonne by day to late nights of discovery in smoky cafes, the young Americans discover a mythical country shaped not only by the upheavals of history, but by the great French writers of the 20th Century, a place where seduction is intellectual as well as sexual. Ten years later, our narrator, J. J., is asked to speak at her old college on the virtues of going abroad. Drawing on the emotionally charged tools of memory and imagination, as well as old journals, letters, and telegrams, she chronicles and re-creates the story of that momentous year. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Proust, Joanna Biggar has written a novel in which intellect, eroticism, and art reverberate from the page to the heartbeat of the City of Light, an American book with the sweep and elegance of French literary tradition.

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