Infrared

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Fault Lines

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The Mark of the Angel: A Novel

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This novel marks the stuning American debut of an internationally acclaimed writer.  Combining the narrative drive of Birdsong with the emotional resonance of The Reader, The Mark of the Angel is a haunting and unforgettable tale of three lives woven together by longing, fate, and the weight of history.

The year is 1957, and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal and the Algerian war is about to escalate.  Saffie, an emotionally damaged young German woman, arrives on the doorstep of Raphael, a privileged musician who finds her reserve irresistible.  He hires her, and over the next few days seduces her and convinces her to marry him.  But when Raphael sends Saffie on an errand to the Jewish ghetto, where she meets András, a Hungarian instrument maker, each of their lives will be altered in startling and unexpected ways.  As Saffie learns to feel again, her long buried memories coupled with the inexorable flow of historical forces beyond anyone's control, create a tableau of epic tragedy.  The Mark of the Angel is a mesmerizing novel of love, betrayal, and the ironies of history.

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From Nancy Huston, a Canadian writer who's lived in France for a couple of decades, comes a modest proposal in the form of a novel: Maybe millennial fiction shouldn't look forward. Maybe it should look back to the shames and sadnesses of the 20th century. The Mark of the Angel, Huston's U.S. debut and a bestseller in France, tells the story of Saffie, a young German girl who takes a job as a housekeeper in 1957 Paris. Her employer, a brilliant young flautist named Raphael, falls hard for her, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he finds her "impassive" and "impenetrable." Hard-eyed Saffie seems to sleepwalk through life, and as if in a dream, she and Raphael marry and have a son, Emil. When Raphael sends her off to have his flute repaired one day, he little suspects what he's setting in motion. In András, the instrument maker, Saffie finds a damaged twin. Both are victims of the horrible experiment of Hitler's war: German Saffie has endured not only rape and torture but also the knowledge of her own family's Nazi sympathies. Hungarian Jew András has lost his family and his country. The two embody the horrors that Europeans visited on each other in the middle of the 20th century. And they covertly embark on a five-year affair, during which their love comes to be sorely tested by the Algerian war for independence from France.

Huston's prose is cool, opaque, ironic, and intensely romantic. Her style and her story both owe a great debt to Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, a debt she seems to acknowledge explicitly: "Saffie is crushed, stifled, petrified by the... how to put it... the unbearable tenuousness of the moment... Dizzy with inexistence, she clutches at András's arm--and he, misunderstanding, sets Emil down in a chair on the café terrace--turns to his lover--takes her in his arms and begins to waltz with her... Ah! Thanks to András, the hideous unreality of the world has been held at bay once again, movement has turned back into true movement, instead of immobility in disguise." Kundera's preoccupation with Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return is clearly at work here too: The past, Huston warns us loud and clear, is never past. --Claire Dederer

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Sweet Agony: A Novel

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On a snowy New England evening in a small college town, Sean Farrell–a hard-drinking, libidinous poet and professor–hosts a Thanksgiving dinner. The eleven guests include two fellow professors (one a novelist, the other also a poet), two of Sean’s former lovers, his lawyer, his housepainter, and his baker. What none of them knows is that Sean is dying. This dinner could be his grand finale.

As food and drink flow, secrets are exposed, tragedies bared, and truths uncovered. “Never could we have dreamed how rough adult life would be,” one character thinks. Yet there is wit and laughter too, in a novel about mortality that is also a celebration of life. With each new book, it becomes increasingly clear that Nancy Huston is a writer of exceptional gifts. Sweet Agony is another impressive performance from a writer whose eye is as sharp as her insight into the human condition is wise.

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Une enfance d'ailleurs : 17 écrivains racontent

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Lettres parisiennes : Histoires d'exil

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