The Chaperone

This is my new favorite book. I can't express the depth of feeling I experienced while reading this. The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty is "inspired by the life of silent-film star Louise Brooks, the story of two women who could not be more different, and the summer that changed them both." Louise Brooks is truly a minor character in this story where we hear about a woman named Cora, and we see her live out her life from the age of 36 when she chaperoned Louise on a summer trip to New York, all the way to the golden rich ending.

I must have a thing for historical fiction novels, as this book is one in a long line of historical fictions that I've read this summer. I started out with Paris, moved on to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies about Thomas Cromwell, and sped through Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. In a twist of ironic humor, Louise Brooks at one point remarks in The Chaperone to Cora that "in general, historical fiction bores me."

Similar to the novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, this book also takes place beginning in the 1920s. In the beginning, Cora seems to be a pleasant woman; she took part in the suffrage movement, despises the Ku Klux Klan, and is always polite and proper. She hears about an opportunity offered by the tiresome snob, Myra Brooks, for someone to chaperone her daughter, Louise, for summer in New York so she can attend a prestigious dance school. Cora immediately becomes interested for some peculiar reason, and despite talk of progressive husbands, Cora's friend is unsure that any husband would ever allow his wife to go off to New York alone. We know that Cora is conservative, 36, and has two sons. It is here in the start of the book we the theme for Cora's story ... time's changing and with the changing times changing ideas of what is acceptable in society. We hear these mothers discuss their children bobbing their hair and showing the world their knees and rolling down their stockings. "They'll do it to be provocative. To look provocative. That's what passes for fashion these days. That's what young people are all about now." Cora herself still wears constricting corsets, which prevents her from being able to even pick up books that she drops. Cora may be lucky to have given birth to sons, but in a time of war the luck of having sons depends a lot on timing.

Cora remarks that at one point her grandniece scolds her about not calling people "colored" and how could anyone ever think of joining the Klan?! Cora reminds us that it was a different world where people were ignorant of the times. In 1922 Cora was a proper 36 year old with two sons, whereas we know that Zelda Fitzgerald was turning into a flapper and already had a 1 year old daughter she barely took care of. Times are a changing. Cora announces to her husband that she will be going to New York as the chaperone of the capricious young Louise Brooks. Cora is drawn to the adventure, just as Zelda Fitzgerald was, at the prospect of going to New York. Therein lies the uneasiness, however, of leaving home.

When Cora first meets the Brooks family officially, she sees that Louise has an artistic temperament. Remember that Zelda had alluded to the idea that artists are drawn to trouble, to punish themselves almost, and they push other people away from them because of their pride and egos. Opinions are formed during the meeting; the Brooks' carry a pretense of cultural sophistication and condescension, but we see immediately that Cora is caring and is truly the sophisticated one. Louise has blind ambition in her and Cora would like to put a check on her blunt rudeness, her unthinking pride and self entitlement. Louise at this point is only 15, one of those girls with bobs and blunt bangs, and harsh beauty.



Cora is more interesting than her snide, sneaky, tricky counterpart. Louise lacks a proper mother and is hungry for men and attention, always wanting to give her chaperone the slip. There are vast differences between the two. Cora is a woman who works for equality; Louise wants to be a woman but looks like a boy. Fashion dictates the attitudes of the times. Louise mocks the propriety of the 1920s and is looking forward to the end of prohibition, even though she's only a child.

In New York, Louise's dance teacher remarks that if you see a mother with that much thwarted ambition, she'll show you a daughter born for success. We know the Louise goes on to be successful for a time, but again the important part of this story is Cora. Her journey is one you can't help but want to experience, and her thoughts and words are so heartfelt and sincere that you can't help but like everything about her. Cora's purpose in going to New York is to find the answer to a secret that we don't immediately know, but come to find out. She's on a quest to discover who she is, and what she finds is not what she expected. Her own idea of propriety changes through her experience with Louise, her experiences with New York, love and life. "Maybe she was falling behind the times, as provincial and outmoded in her thinking as in her dress. Maybe she was like the old women who had told her generation that they were behaving unnaturally, bothering legislators and asking strangers in the street to sign petitions, trying to get the vote." At the same time that Cora's own idea of what it means for each generation to grow, she makes good points too that so many models and actresses of the day had gotten so thin, and that "all these girls had thrown away their corsets, claiming liberation, but apparently they weren't supposed to eat." Likewise, if we flash forward to the 1950s, the Cora of this time assures ladies, many of whom far younger than her, that "an integrated lunch counter ... was not the end of civilization, and integrated schools and theaters wouldn't be the end, either. It would be fine, she assured friends, thinking back to [a] night in New York. Really. It would be more than fine. She would owe this understanding to her time in New York, and even more to Louise. That's what spending time with the young can do - it's the big payoff for all the pain. The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend , and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through." So you see this novel isn't so much about Louise Brooks as it is about what the young can do for the old. And how one trip can change the way you think, and live, and act for the rest of your lifetime.

Birth control, feminism, racism, equal rights, sexuality, "lewd cohabitation." This book is not only about a character that you will care about but it offers a heartfelt social commentary, a journey to understanding and appreciation. The book engulfs you in its misery and its sadness makes your chest ache and ribs crack open. You feel pity for a horribly damaged child that goes on to be a star and a simple woman who never seems to catch a break until finally she opens up her mind and heart and does.

The Chaperone is extremely well written with details you can feel and touch. It transports you to another time of complex morals at odds with one another and the dawning of the realization that change is inevitable. For once I won't reveal all the secrets of this books, because Cora's is a story you can't google. Read this book to find out about her, commiserate with her, love her, pity her, and laugh with her. See her save not only herself but those around her. Cora "lived too much of her life so stupidly, following nonsensical rules, as if she and he, as if anyone, had all the time in the world." It's a good thing that life can be long.

"Was it mad to at least try to live as one wished, or as close to it as possible? This life is mine, she would think sometimes. This life is mine because of good luck. And because I reached out and took it." This book touched me and was beyond what I expected it would turn out to be. Cora is everything you could ever want in a character, and this is everything you could ever want in a book.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Z by Therese Anne Fowler gives us a glimpse in to what the real Zelda might have been like, and how her life's events may have looked from her point of view. The book pulls you deeply into a fascinating woman's story, and as the author says in her afterword, Fowler does not try to call this a historical biography, by no means. She takes historical events and the research she has done to give a voice to what Zelda herself may have been like and said during her tumultuous relationship with her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We first meet Zelda in 1940, now she can maybe consider herself to be the adult that she could never quite be in her twenties. She is away from her husband, who is in California, and writing to him asking if she could maybe come see him, and then they could be "quite the pair" again. At this point she's in her forties and has had plenty of time to look back on their life together. She has already been in and out of various mental hospitals, and perhaps has been deemed "crazy" by those around her. She wants to go to Scott, who's in Hollywood at the moment, and "take care of him, for a change." She says that it's time. "That commodity, once so plentiful that we spent it on all-day hangovers and purposeless outings with people I've long forgotten, has become more precious than we ever imagined it could be. Too many of our dear ones are ruined now, or gone. Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe ... We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed." At this point, Zelda is from all points considered ... destroyed. We find out here in 1940 from Zelda that Ernest Hemingway himself has played a role in the ever-widening rift that grew between Zelda and Scott. We don't find out immediately why this is, but we can see plainly from her tone that Zelda hates Hemingway, and that Scott seems to enjoy him. As Zelda sets herself up to tell us her story, she says "look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed." And indeed, through this historical fictional account of life as a Fitzgerald from Zelda's eyes, we see immediately that nothing is ever as it seems.

With Hemingway's name mentioned within the first 5 pages of the novel, my mind immediately swept back to the novel The Paris Wife, where we heard about Ernest's first wife, Hadley. In The Paris Wife, Hadley told us from her point of view what her relationship with Ernest was like. The two fell in love despite a vast age difference (Hadley being about 8 or so years older than Ernest), and whilst Ernest had a violent love for writing and a vigorous personality, Hadley was much more dull, complacent, caring, and frumpy. I loved The Paris Wife and immediately recognized the strength Hadley must have had to have been married to such an egotistical brute, and so I felt that seeing the Fitzgerald marriage through Zelda would also prove that I would fall in love with her, and indeed I have. The two books are similar, and both worthwhile reads. Let's get back to Zelda's tale, though.

Zelda recounts her story in parts. Part One starts out with a quote: "If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?" ~ T.S. Eliot. Zelda's story begins in a late-June morning in 1918, in Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda takes ballet lessons, a pastime that she never stops loving, and is preparing for a recital. Even as a young girl she is romantic, flirtatious, whimsical and yes ... those traits will grow her into what is to become an extremely eccentric and proud woman, used to being in the middle of the action, but I already couldn't help wanting to be Zelda Sayre's friend. Is she crazy? Not yet, but it's easy to see how she could be interpreted that way. She lives in the South at a time where the South is still a place of old-fashioned ideals, racism, and propriety. Zelda has none of the accustomed flair for fitting in, all the way down to not wanting to wear her corset or shoes. It is here in Montgomery that Zelda meets Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here they flirt, and he finds she was named after a gypsy. Here we find them falling in love with one another's dramatic personalities. Scott is from St. Paul, Minnesota (my own home!!!), and Zelda is infatuated with this former Princeton University man, who freely confesses that he is a writer, and that anything else is his second occupation at best. We will later come to find that being a husband is one of these second occupations of his.

They flirt, they dance the southern Alabama night away, and when her friends come to join her they discuss the value of smoking, where Zelda proclaims "It's good for making you feel good, which is why the law and my daddy have always been against women doing it." Here we go, we see what this young vixen is all about. Feeling good and making daddy angry, breaking laws and living life. We see the themes of her times emerging rapidly, politics, the first world war, feminism, anti-feminism, young love, ideals being broken and reshaped, and a young woman ready to break free of the bonds that can never hold a free spirit like hers.

Immediately, Zelda's parents dislike F. Scott Fitzgerald, this dashing writer from the north. Her father bluntly points out that she does not ever want to have to work for her support, and she can't deny her father is right. She, as a young southern woman, wants nothing more than to be married to a rich man who will take good care of her, but she comes to the conclusion that she must prove daddy wrong, and make sure that Scott is right. She starts the fight against the strict southern culture to which she was brought up in by falling in love with a Yankee, and a writer at that.

Still fighting against the deep southern culture, she views Scott as a man she wants to be with, but she has trouble imaging what it feels like to really be in love; she has trouble imagining leaving her home.  Who will she be, away from Montgomery? Either way she keeps falling in deeper with this soldier, and her black nanny warns her that trouble doesn't need an engraved invitation. Her sister Tilde sits down with her at one point to express the family's worry that the two of these young lovers would wear each other out, and maybe, just maybe he isn't the one for Zelda. But our young narrator's mind had already been made up. She knew without Scott her life would be simpler, but all she could say was "I wish he wasn't [the one], but I'm afraid he probably is." Scott proposes, Zelda accepts. Zelda waits and waits, knowing that she can't possibly meet him up in New York until she knows he can support her. Now that the war has ended and he's up there trying to make his writing career take off, Zelda looks forward to their union, but the longer it takes the more impatient she gets. She survives a pregnancy scare between the two of them and constant chiding by her father, but eventually she gives up on Scott, and the two break up. He comes to visit her, but still they fight and can't agree to keep it going. But Scott has an impossible plan, he will make everything happen at once - new job, new wife, time for writing, theater, parties, great book, literary fame - or he will die trying. "We're not going to do things the same old way," Zelda eventually says to her mother. And her mother says "Honestly, I don't know whether to envy your optimism or pity it."

His book, This Side of Paradise is published and he sends for Zelda to come to New York. Cue up the parental doubt at what will become their extravagant lifestyle, and plot events suddenly become rushed, and Zelda's sister remarks that Zelda has hot pepper rushing through her veins, and that hot pepper thrusts us into a whirlwind marriage at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, a place Zelda can hardly fathom in its immense and towering beauty, indeed the beauty of all New York. She wants to lie down right there on the floor and marvel properly at this strange new place. We continue reading about their constant parties, drinking (even though it's prohibition), and all this starts to occur through their charged honeymoon that lasts for months. They spend money, money they don't have, and Scott is determined to take care of his wife, and indeed exceed just caring for her by spoiling her.

Early on we see the pressure Scott places on himself to be an extraordinary author, and we see he has a need to keep Zelda playing the parts of the heroines in his novels. The two are constantly playacting, and some of the parts are ones that Zelda isn't sure she wants to play. They took the southern girl out of the south, and she doesn't know quite how to behave in the metropolis of New York City. She's stuck in some kind of Manhattan carnival and isn't sure she wants to ride the Ferris wheel, but was game enough to give it a try. She and Scott's constant influx of friends live life like it's going to end tomorrow, but they have no idea that "the future would be grander, stranger, and more precarious than any of us knew."

We're about 100 pages into the book ladies and gentlemen, and we can already see Zelda and Scott are both jealous, impulsive, unpredictable ... or rather predictable in that we know Scott expects Zelda to be his arm candy, his inspiration, his muse, his entertainment for his friends, and we know that Zelda will act out to ensure that Scott truly does love her joie de vivre (or joy of life). Their honeymoon starts to end as their constant partying leads to fighting, outrageous behavior, and black eyes. Their whirlwind romance is consistently impulsive, similar to Fowler's writing style. We see chopped memories, a scrap book of the start of the marriage, their quick life successes, their quick obstacles, a lack of sense when it comes to saving money; this starts as a moment to moment life, and indeed it begins as a moment to moment book - no true depth into who these two are. In reality, maybe they didn't even understand who the other person was. In the novel, they continue to fight, to push each other, to be better than the other, and finally they end up pregnant. They attempt to move back to Montgomery, but realize that now even to Zelda the south seems backward and slow. They move then to St. Paul, Minnesota where their daughter, Scottie, is born. Zelda now recognizes they are the people who move from place to place, never seeming to be able to settle down for long, and they can't seem to stay out of trouble. Any kind of trouble you can think of they've tried, and even become experts at some of it. Zelda says "I've come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flower turn their faces toward the sun." Even with the birth of their daughter, however, they fight. They fight over what to call her, and here Scott gets his way, he wins. And this is the start of many arguments where Zelda will be incapacitated in some way, and Scott has no trouble taking over the decision-making on her "behalf." Zelda starts to realize that even with a child, Scott continues to party on and invites drunk people over at all hours, and it's always Zelda who must go and calm the crying and disturbed infant. She knows that even the love for her daughter can't stop her growing resentment.

The two eventually move to Paris for good, after having visited Europe and particularly the Riviera before. Even in Paris, in the land of expatriates and art, their reputation proceeds them. They are known as the famed miscreants. Here, just as in The Paris Wife, we start the name dropping of famous writers, artists, singers, etc. from this era. People that the Fitzgerald's become friends with, party with, rely on. These people in Paris, they're cultured, they're intact, and Scott and Zelda are hooked. Here though, Scott's alcoholism becomes worse, the partying becomes obscene - for both of them. Scott starts to blame Zelda for sabotaging his work, and the fighting carries on, the drinking continues. Always drinking. At one point, Scott's remark that Zelda is bent on sabotaging his work after she chides him for drinking so heavily hurts her enough that she replies heatedly "That's right, I want you to fail at everything. That's why I followed you to New York, and Westport, and St. Paul, and Great Neck, and now France - all in what, four years? Yes, I gave up my family in Montgomery, gave up my house and my friends and everything that so good about our Great Neck life, in order to follow you halfway across the earth and then sabotage you." The two love each other deeply, but their love often is dangerously aflame.

I could continue to talk about this novel for hours, and give you the brilliant quotes, the brilliant resentments, the rapidly deeper holes that the couple digs for themselves. I could give you Hemingway and Zelda and show you the pure utter hatred they had for one another, and the poisonous words that Hemingway drips into Scott's ear about his crazy wife who drives him to drink and who makes him unable to finish his great work. I could give you Hadley, Ernest Hemingway's wife, who is dull and an event in the spring that appears both in this novel about Zelda, as well as The Paris Wife, where Hadley and her son are cast out of a Riviera villa because her son is sick, and where is Ernest? Out with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's soon to be second wife, once he tortures Hadley for a while before finally giving her a divorce. Zelda starts to see that these "artists" don't believe in fidelity, they don't believe in moderation, they live everything in excess, beyond their means. At one point, Zelda thinks that Hemingway and Scott are in love with each other, and breaks into her husband's chest to see if she can find any evidence that they're "fairies." Zelda also becomes sick with colitis, and overdoses on sleeping pills, and becomes more erratic in her motions. When Scott is working, she becomes bored, overly so, and falls in love with another man, asks for a divorce, isn't given one. She loses all chance at a normal life, and continues on a now forever changed path with Scott. They tell the Hemingway's that the man she loved killed himself over her, which, of course, is untrue. Zelda writes stories, they're published under Scott's name. She turns to ballet again, dancing up to 8 hours a day, eating little or nothing at all. She calls Hemingway's new lady, Pauline, a whore and never has trouble telling people what she's thinking. She becomes erratic, Scott becomes more jealous, they make horrible scenes of themselves at social events and alienate friends. She hates the way that Ernest Hemingway encroaches on their lives, and it's obvious that Hemingway and Fitzgerald on their own do not always like one another. She suffers from physical and mental exhaustion and gets sent away to a sanitarium that her husband most likely can't afford. She is "re-educated," told to be a good, faithful wife. They say she has schizophrenia which today many historians refute, and more likely she suffered from bipolar disease which was triggered by her alcoholism and stress.



It's a mess, their lives. It was complicated, fascinating, heartbreaking. They danced and wrote and painted and sang and drank until there was nothing else left to them. Hadley's divorce from Ernest Hemingway was perhaps a cautionary tale to Zelda. That the men they loved were egotistical, patriarchal, competitive, and their women were only good to them when they were supporting their impossible dreams. Hadley was set free, but when Zelda tried to divorce Scott she set up for them a path of despair and melancholia that they could never quite get over. Scott squashed her dreams and believed that she was impairing his. Zelda's twenties were insanely busy and bright, and then once she was sent to the mental hospitals she would be set free and be sent back again. When she tried to write her own account of their life, Scott was furious and edited it down to protect his own feelings, and it was a flop. She was forbidden then by her husband and doctors to ever write again (not that she heeded their "advice") and by 40 we see her again at the end of the book, living back in Montgomery waiting to see her beloved torrid love affair revived. She wanted her husband back. The Fitzgerald's lives were ones that make reality better than fiction. Issues of equality, of feminism, of freedom, of art, of social hierarchy, of economic status, of the times .... all this is explored in this fictional retelling of the life of Zelda by Zelda. A saying often repeats itself in the book, comes up again and again ... Zelda looks at Scott and recounts that someone once said "He's such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end." Read this book, and you'll find yourself finding an answer to the age old question of are you on Team Scott or Team Zelda? Did either one really ruin the other? Or were they just fated out to be lovers who could never quite get on the same page; they were destined to fall apart before they even really began.

This is not a "clean" review, it's messy, it's passionate, just like the characters I talk about. It took me two days to finish this novel. I finished it at 2:30 am, this morning. I loved it, simply put. Zelda was not as crazy as her critics paint her to be, and Scott was a man stuck in the same muck that she was. They couldn't really pull each other out. Ernest Hemingway makes frequent appearances in their life, and he always comes out to be a snake slowly choking the love out of Scott and Zelda's relationship. Ernest fans the flames of their distrust of one another, and Zelda can't stand a man like Ernest who would throw away a strong and sturdy wife like Hadley. Hemingway went on to be married four times and eventually committed suicide. Scott takes care of Zelda, that is true, but he also wants her to be two things at once - the crazy exciting woman who inspires him, whose words he writes down, as well as the traditional wife who follows his orders and yes, sits by bored as he often drinks and sometimes writes. Zelda is resentful of Scott, but also of herself. Scott curtails her dreams from coming true, and the both of them never truly understand one another. The book ends after Zelda has told us her story in parts and we flash back to her as an adult in the present (the two never really learned how to grow up). In reality, after Scott's death, Zelda's life became obsolete. It doesn't say so in the book, but Zelda eventually died in a mental hospital when it was set on fire, and she was one of the few patients locked inside. Her madness manifested itself in flames and engulfed her. The daughter made sure that the two of them, Zelda and Scott, were eventually buried together in the Fitzgerald family plot, and their gravestone says the last lines from Scott's The Great Gatsby, a book that only became popular after Scott's death.

So we beat on, boats against the current, 

borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

Bring Up the Bodies

Spoiler Alert! By my own admission, when I write about books, my "reviews" are probably more true to book reports. I can't help it! When I fall in love with a book, I can't help but feel the need to repeat some of the words and tell you how amazing the plot itself is. In this case, however, how much of this novel I discuss that is actually "spoiled" to you should you read on is iffy, considering that if you know history none of this is surprising at all.

I'm not going to lie, I did not want to like the first book in Hilary Mantel's trilogy of Thomas Cromwell. When I first started reading it I found it dry and overly-complicated. The dialogue was often hard to follow and the plot seemed forced.

I cannot deny that Hilary Mantel is brilliant, as Wolf Hall is truly a brilliant book. But sometimes I found myself wondering if she lacked someone looking over her shoulder, not necessarily telling her to cut some things out, but to tighten things up. She just keeps writing. Thomas Cromwell is an incredibly interesting character and it's incredibly engaging to hear of King Henry VIII's England from his point of view. It's a truly exciting concept, and as someone who must be unbelievably geeky to enjoy English history so much, I'm OVERALL in love with this book - even when I find myself struggling to slop through it. It might not be an enjoyable read unless you already find yourself intrigued with Henry VIII and his court.

But wait! Move on to the second book in Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell's life and career and BOOM, BOOM! I say ... it picks up. I am completely, overtly, enthusiastically in love and enamored with her second book about Cromwell: the novel called Bring Up the Bodies. Sure enough the title of the first book, Wolf Hall, gives away what will happen in the second. Bring Up the Bodies picks up where the first book left off - at the Seymour's residence at Wolf Hall where the King is visiting for a portion of the summer, and Cromwell, of course, accompanies him. We all know, because history already gives the story away, that Henry will eventually get rid of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in pursuit of Lady Jane Seymour - a woman that we know he considered to be his one true wife, as she was the only woman to give him his precious son. The lack of a son, as we know, from either Katherine or Anne is what has caused all the turmoil in his marriages from the get-go.

The book begins at Wolf Hall with a brief mention of the late Cardinal Wolsey - Cromwell's patron. The King laments the Cardinal's death as if he was not the one to cause it, but Thomas Cromwell (whom everyone knows loved the Cardinal) keeps a blank face. He has hardened since the first book, and is now accustomed to his position of power and is intent on keeping himself in the King's favor.

Now let's look at Thomas Cromwell's journey thus far. When Anne was crowned Queen, many religious reformists (looking to get away from the papist religion of Rome) looked to her as an opportunity. Likewise many men, when Cardinal Wolsey fell, thought that as Wolsey's servant, Cromwell would have been ruined. As Mantel eloquently writes: "When his wife and daughters died, you might have though his loss would kill him. But Henry has turned to him; Henry has sworn him in; Henry has put his time at his disposal and said, come, Master Cromwell, take my arm: through courtyards and throne rooms, his path in life is now made smooth and clear." His life has changed from one of struggle and strife to one where crowds scatter when he walks through any of the King's palaces. He is strong. He plays a large part in dissolving the monasteries and reforming the church to create a renewed church and a better country that is purged of liars and hypocrites.

He is also set in motion by Henry VIII in bringing the present Queen down when in fact he was part of what had brought her up. Right at the beginning of the book we know that this second novel will chronicle the downfall and eventual execution of Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers. Henry immediately starts asking questions concerning the legitimacy of their marriage, as he still has not gotten a son by her. He asks these questions to Cromwell, who thinks to himself that he is like the Cardinal, "listening to the same conversation: only the queen's name then was Katherine." The only difference here, really, is that Cromwell is determined to succeed in fulfilling the King's desires whereas the Cardinal had failed.

Cromwell sees Cardinal Wolsey in the shadows and hears him speaking - "I saw you, [Cromwell], ... scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead." It is at this moment that Cromwell decides that if he were ever to write a book, it would be called The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how best to preserve him. Cromwell is not only a survivor, but people, even his enemies, must admit that in being in close proximity to him they can learn something about his cunning wit, and as they say how to "put an edge" on any matter at hand.

Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, also won the Man Booker Prize in 2012. This is the second book in what is to be a trilogy; the third book to be released sometime in the future. This trilogy attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, a powerful man in the court of Henry VIII. In this book I felt that we see a more confident Cromwell, as I've mentioned previously. We receive more clarification in terms of who is speaking, clear references to the past, repeated sayings or monikers, and everything is tied together neatly. I consider this to be a vast improvement on the first book and it goes along at a clipping pace, much preferred to the sometimes drawn out feeling of the first book. Either I'm right in my assessments, or I've just gotten used to the writing styling's of Hilary Mantel. Either way, I couldn't put this book down. Cromwell truly can be seen as the man who sold the King of England's soul.

Let's continue, though, with the brilliant plot of this book. Here we also see the first wife, Katherine, dying in exile, forbidden to see her only daughter the "Lady" Mary - no longer allowed to be called princess as long as Anne reigns. Cromwell and the former Queen have a very interesting chat, where he basically torments a dying woman by saying that it was not Henry, but her - Katherine - who split Christendom. He accuses her of choosing to obstruct Henry which forced his hand at separating from Rome. And as the two spar against one another we see that truly Cromwell is trying to get Katherine to reconcile with the King and bend to his will before her death, so that future blame and resentment will not fall on her daughter Mary when she dies. Katherine is a stubborn woman, but with her death many believe that finally a truce can be called between England and her nephew, the Emperor of Spain.

Katherine dies, but with her death questions arise. If Henry was to die before a son was born, who would lead England? And without the King's protection, Cromwell knows that he will most likely die as the mad scramble for who is to rule scuffles on. Additionally the pressure to remove Anne only grows stronger. Soon Anne is becoming the obstacle to peace, and Henry keeps going back to the plain, stupid, simple, quiet Jane Seymour. Cromwell must become friends with the Seymour's and some other prominent members of court, originally his enemies, in order to go about getting Anne ousted and ushering in Jane. All the while, Cromwell knows in the back of his mind that someday his own downfall will most likely occur, because as we've seen Henry is indeed an "inconstant lover." "You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But ... it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."

Soon England grows more tense by the moment, and everyone in court is plotting against her, hoping to get the King's concubine out. After all, if Henry could get rid of his wife of 20 years, surely he can do it with Anne, his wife of 3 years. Cromwell, of course, will get it done, even if it makes him sick. Rumors are floating around of infidelity and soon it is apparent that the idea that Anne is unfaithful must be planted in Henry's head otherwise Cromwell risks leaving himself exposed to riotous rebuttals from the King.

Henry officially stops questioning Anne's loyalty and decides yes she must be removed. Rumors are spread that she committed incest with her brother, the haughty George. When it comes time for her arrest, she tells Cromwell "I made you," but in return she is told, "And Cromwell made you." Together they rose in power, and now together they come together to see her killed. Cromwell learned from Wolsey that one must gratify the king or it will be your downfall. Anne couldn't give Henry a son, now he no longer feels love for her but he does feel love for another (Jane Seymour), and Anne refuses to go quietly (perhaps to a convent in France?), and so she starts a war that will test the strength of men's souls.

Anne takes down many a man with her including her own brother and she is even more forcefully viewed as a concubine or a common whore. Here we see Henry left with two supposedly "illegitimate" marriages, two bastard daughters, and even a bastard son whom he recognizes as his by a woman who he was not married to. In Anne's stubborness and determination to stay Henry's lawful wife, Cromwell goes on a search to find her "lovers," men that we soon find are guilty but not necessarily guilty of their charges. He has men who brought his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, down and when asked why he immediately took Mark Smeaton, a musician, down he replies simply "I don't like the way he looks at me." Funnily enough, Mark is the only man who actually admits to sleeping with and loving the Queen. However, the one man who is most likely actually guilty of some sort of treason through being with Anne is a friend of Cromwell's and therefore spared, despite many cries for justice against him. Cromwell stays loyal to those he considers true friends.

With Anne gone, Henry will be able to finally have a clean marriage and hopes to beget a son and an heir. As for Anne Boleyn, no one comes to her aid, and even the women who she thinks support her are secretly giving dispensations against her behind her back. Truly, Anne has furthered the cause of religious reform (a huge theme in this book), but nobody cares about that now that she's finally cast out. Cromwell must join sides with his enemies - those who are loyal to the Pope and Rome, while plotting to turn them away again once the deed of Anne's death is done so as to keep the reform of the Church of England in motion. When Anne's time finally does come to die, my energy in reading this book was stilled by a somber moment, the writing so well done that I finally feel sympathy for this fascinating snake of a woman, who failed in her greatest desire - being queen by gaining Henry's heart, and then keeping it. It filled me with grief.

Once, Cromwell thought he'd die of grief at the loss of his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. "But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your rib cage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone." Yes, Cromwell grows strong in this novel, that even with its horrors, politics and religions, you see moments of comedy from his hardened look on life. His realistic view of life lends itself to mocking those around him, and sometimes even himself. But as we look forward to third book in Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell installment, we know his downfall is indeed coming, thanks to history.

George Boleyn, Anne's brother, puts a question to Cromwell as Cromwell is interrogating him about his affairs with his sister. George says: "Henry killed his father's Councillors. He killed the Duke of Buckingham. He destroyed the cardinal and harried him to his death, and struck the head off one of Europe's great scholars. Now he plans to kill his wife and her family and Norris who has been his closest friend. What makes you think it will be different with you, that are not the equal of any of these men?"

So, as we wait for the third book to be released ... by all means, bring up the bodies.

Borrowing Books

Also ... please don't find me selfish, but I just lent two books of mine - the amazing Paris by Edward Rutherfurd, and The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley - anyway, I just lent these two books of mine to a good friend. It's always terrifying for me to lend out books, as I tend to like them right next to me where I can see them and appreciate their greatness. However, I feel good knowing I gave her two books that brought me tremendous joy, and I hope she enjoys them. Lend a good book to a friend, and share the wealth!!

Wolf Hall

Finally, FINALLY, I have finished Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I am now moving on to its sequel, the second book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies. 

Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The second book in her trilogy won the same prize in 2012. Yann Martel's Life of Pi was also awarded the prize in earlier years. The literary prize is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written in the English language. The winner of this prize is generally assured to have international success and recognition and thus, is a very important book for the literary crowd.

I'm not going to lie. I did not want to like this book. When I first picked it up it felt tedious to read. It was somewhat boring, monotonous, complicated, and stylistic. As the book progressed I felt more intrigue into the life of Thomas Cromwell, an important figure in the Tudor dynasty during the reign of Henry VIII. It is extremely interesting to hear about the affairs of King Henry VIII from a different point of view. We've all read stories about his life and his various wives, but we have not heard about Cromwell, a man usually demonized in popular culture for being a vicious and power hungry man from low breeding, but Mantel's book gives us another side of him - a truer side that is extremely captivating. You can't help but admire her version of this complex man.

The book starts out with us seeing Cromwell as he began. A commoner's son who eventually traveled the world and then came back to work with Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey is Lord Chancellor, the King's chief adviser. And he is the most un-humble man in the realm. He is extremely powerful and Thomas Cromwell's patron. Cromwell himself is a lawyer, and extremely dedicated and loyal to Cardinal Wolsey. The book turns more poetic as it goes on as we see Cromwell rise from Wolsey's humble follower to a man that everyone fears. In one part of the book, a painting is made of him, and he remarks that it makes him look like a murderer, and his son remarks, "You didn't know?"

Again, Wolf Hall gives us a different angle to Tudor life. It makes us care about a man that no one likes. We see him as a caring father, who undergoes various forms of redemption, and extreme familial losses. Above all else though, we see how calculating this man is. The Cardinal loses favor with the King when he fails to procure a divorce for the King from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Henry wants to marry Anne Boleyn, but to do so he must prove his first marriage was invalid, and the church (particularly the Pope) don't like this. With the Cardinal fast losing popularity and power, Cromwell stays loyal to his patron but must figure out how to avoid his own downfall. Cromwell makes nasty deals with devilish people, and finally the book starts to get interesting and heat up as the Cardinal whom Cromwell loves so well goes down.

Cromwell loves Wolsey, Wolsey loves the King, and the King, himself, is an inconstant lover. He truly only loves himself. We see the King from Cromwell's eyes as a spoiled child, even though he is a grown man. He likes people who can help him get what he wants, and at this particular moment in history - he wants Anne Boleyn. Henry remarks to Cromwell that "what is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?"

But what happens if that enterprise is cursed? We all know that while Henry got his precious Anne Boleyn - history shows us she eventually gets her head cut off.

Cardinal Wolsey goes down, and dies before they can kill him. Cromwell, however, rises from the ashes like a powerful phoenix. Another courtier remarks to Cromwell that "I know our old fellow in scarlet [the Cardinal Wolsey] almost brought you down. But look at you, eating almonds, with all your teeth in your head, and your household around you, and your affairs prospering ..." Cromwell did something the Cardinal could not. He gave Henry his divorce, and now he continues to rise in Henry's favor, and people, even those who despise him, can't help but admit that if you need something done - you need to talk to Cromwell.

Cromwell can humiliate you, make you, break you, and save you. Cromwell is the man to know, and these books give us insight into his life.

The book is cheeky, and oftentimes very humorous. Dialogue truly makes all the difference in this novel, it makes the book come alive and move faster. Through all its complexities, and moments where you want to tell the author to "take a breath, woman and stop writing!" if you can suffer through some of the confusing moments of the book, and particularly if you're an avid lover of English history as I am, then this is a book worth suffering through, because in the end you want it to continue ... and, oh wait! It does. The second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, which I'm reading now, as I mentioned before, ALSO won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, and the third book in the series should be coming out sometime in the future. At the end of this first book, we find out why it's entitled Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall is where the court is headed in the second book, and home of the infamous Seymours. A great foreshadowing to what happens after Henry's inconstant loves strikes down Anne Boleyn, the woman he thought he loved, but alas another woman who could not give him a son. Anne is still alive and well in the book, but we can see in the future that Lady Jane Seymour will soon be coming into his sights. Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn overturned all of Christendom in England. It starts a new chapter in English history. Now I go on to a new "chapter" of Cromwell's life; I go on to read about the Tudor's history, from a powerful man's point of view. I'll let you know when I've finished Hilary Mantel's second, award winning, book.

Working

I'm working on another historical novel now - hopefully it will be finished by tomorrow, but I've still got about 300 pages or so to go. Keep reading!

The Descendants

After reading Rutherfurd's Paris, I decided to read a much shorter novel that had somewhat of a similar theme. Kaui Hart Hemmings wrote a novel based in Hawaii called The Descendants. You may be more familiar with the film version which starred George Clooney. The book is about a man, Matt King, who faces the grim reality that soon his wife is going to die, and he will be left alone with his two daughters - who both terrify and repulse him.

This novel is innocently beautiful. It explores the basic feelings of human nature in their most honest form. It starts with overall feelings of negativity which mask the basic human emotion of fear. This middle aged father expresses his resentment over living in a beautiful place, Hawaii, while his wife is lying in a cold hospital bed in a coma after suffering from a boating accident. He mentions how people always assume that the people who live in Hawaii should always be happy, because after all, they're in paradise. His response to these assumptions is fuck paradise. A person isn't "lucky" to live in paradise, because in all seriousness they're still just living, and living is hard.

Matt has two daughters, Alex and Scottie. Scottie is still a "baby" but she's rather messed up. She doesn't know how to react to things so she emulates the actions of her father, or her sister, or her sister's maybe-maybe-not boyfriend. She refuses to talk to her comatose mother, refuses to believe that there's any possibility in her dying, and in order to deal with her feelings she slams her hands down on the spikes of sea urchins, or swims with gigantic colonies of Portuguese Man-Of-Wars. She manipulates boys into peeing on her wounds, she tries to make others feel just as uncomfortable or vulnerable as she feels watching her "sleeping" mother fade away.

Alex gets picked up by Matt and Scottie from her boarding school where she was sent away for being drinking and doing drugs. Really, Alex is unconsciously emulating her mother - her crazy, alcoholic mother who parties it up and who everyone loves. Alex takes on a mother role in the book, trying to help her dad become a dad and get Scottie on some sort of path of normalcy.

This book is filled with dark humor and attempts at dodging the grief that comes with losing someone you love. The book is also filled with the question of what to do when the worst you could imagine is revealed to be true. Matt King has the idea that his wife is cheating on him since the start of the book, and soon comes to find out that his paranoid fears are in all actuality true. So he goes on a journey - a journey to become a real father to his two girls, to forgive his wife, to open himself up, and to find the man that his wife loved, so that he can say goodbye to her. On the family's way to find the man who his wife cheated on him with, Matt once again lets his annoyance come to the surface. At the airport, Matt remarks that the security line is longer than it should be, but most of the people still seem content, which is irritating. "There's nothing worse than being angry and seeing tranquil faces all around you." Then Alex remarks that security, who is checking every person's bags, even though they're just hopping islands, are doing this to just feel like real security, which isn't something to aspire to. Matt reflects that "thank God my daughter isn't a happy person."

I can identify with this invasive pessimism. The irritation at other people's happiness, and the solidarity one can find with other miserable people. This book starts dark and goes to the light. It's like knowing your fate, and just trying to get there in the least painful way possible, and then finding yourself along the way. Like slowly walking in to the ocean, knowing you will drown. You struggle, until you just give up and find some sort of morbid peace in the knowledge that eventually you will sink, and then float up again.

The end of this novel made me cry. Not overflowing sobbing tears, but just a sneaky little wetness leaking out of my eyes, and that tickle feeling you get in your nose when you know you want to let some emotion go, but still you hold back. The book asks a good question, "Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?" We go through our loves hating one another, despising family members, not understanding our children or our parents. We go through live full of criticism, not realizing that it's the small moments where you show love that make life worth all the hassle. And really, revenge is futile. Through the pain of realizing that his wife cheated on him, through the sick satisfaction that her lover didn't really love her, through the forgiveness and crash course in being left in charge of his own children, Matt eventually learns to let love in and let disappointment go. He learns to be an actual father, and though it's hard to say - he discovers that his wife dying may be the best thing to happen to him and his girls, in a difficult and honest way.

When our loved ones die, we can't revere them for being something they weren't. We can miss them, we can still love them, but "we need to come to terms with the dead and the people they truly were." We can't let the dead rule our lives forever. We have to move on.

Part of the reason I loved the novel Paris was that is told the stories of family lines going from the 1200s to the 1900s. It let us see families evolve and grow, change and follow old paths, it let us see how history repeats itself. In this novel, it also talks about how we descend from a long line of people that we can never truly know. Matt reflects on some of his ancestors, and remarks about how "it's funny that I think of them as the beginning, because they were also descendants of somebody, generations of prints on their DNA, traces of human migrations. They didn't come out of nowhere. Everyone comes from someone who comes from someone else, and this to me is remarkable. We can't know the people who are in us. We'll all have our moment at the top of the tree."

Read this book and go on the tremulous journey with the Kings. You will find yourself remembering your own family, your own faults, your own secrets, your own legacies. How did we get here? Where are we going? How do we, honestly and bravely, move on and say goodbye? This book is poetic, it's peaceful, it's sad and funny and disturbing. It's a good reflection on life, love, and yes ... disappointment.

Brilliant Paris

I have just finished reading Edward Rutherfurd's Paris. A brilliant (over 800 page) book that details not only the history of Paris from 1261 to 1968, but that entangles and details, entwines and develops the family histories of 6 different Parisian families, entirely fictitious, and entirely engaging. We hear of the Le Sourd family - mostly disreputable from The Paris Cat Killer Le Sourd who is a thief and a Parisian leader to Max Le Sourd of the 1900s who helps form the Paris resistance to the occupation of Paris by the Nazis along with his father, a longtime proponent of socialism. Then we have the de Cygne family - a long line of aristocrats who go from being selfish entitled people who have long served their monarchs diligently and thus earned the favor of the Kings of France, to becoming a family who also fights against the Nazi regime by harboring a young Jewish girl, and ending the family line with a bastard son of two resistance heroes - Charlie de Cygne - a leader of the resistance, and Louise Blanchard, known as Corinne, an informant to the resistance and madame of the most famous brothel house in Paris - both killed in their efforts to stop Hitler.

Then we have the Renard family - whose family dealt with the prejudices of religion, going back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism and facing the bloody battles that lie between choosing one of those sides over the other in Paris' tumultuous religious history.

The Blanchards started out as renowned doctors and then shifted into owning one of the most successful department stores in Paris. Here we meet an aunt who is friends with artists such as Giverny and Monet, and Marc who becomes an artist himself, and has a bastard daughter (Louise) who is sent to a family in England - although she soon returns to her ties in Paris as she grows up. Then there is Marie, a woman who knows how take care of herself, and herein we have one of the strongest love stories in the book - as she must choose between an American artist she has fallen in love with, an aristocrat (de Cygne) who must leave her, but who she finds again in old age, and then Mr. James Fox - a descendant of the Renard family, who takes her away to England for a time, but she too returns to Paris - a place not to be forgotten once experienced. We also have the Gascon family of Montmartre. Thomas - who meets the engineer Gustave Eiffel and helps him build not only the Statue of Liberty, but the famous Eiffel tower itself. Then there is his brother Luc, a deviant and lying delinquent, who has friends in high places as he sells cocaine to important clientele, and provides any other services one may require - as long as you can pay him. We also have the Jewish Jacob family, who faces discrimination early in France's history, as the Jews are driven out, and then again at the end of the book's account when the Nazis come to take them away and steal their precious collections of art, including works from the artist Degas.

All of these stories are connected to one another, building up alliances and creating enemies among one another; building up secrets, and falling in love. These families realize the importance of love and family; they must suffer through history as it repeats itself. They deal with many different forms of government, and the issues of religion and politics often thrust the greatness of France into chaos and turmoil, but France also sees ages of great artistic achievements, and of gilded palaces and sweeping avenues. We see the Moulin Rouge in all its finery, and visit Versailles, we see the Louvre and hear of the changing uses of the Conciergerie. We see people drinking to the idea of revolution at Le Lapin Agile, or artists talking and writing at Les Deux Magots.  We hear of people dancing and eating the Moulin de la Galette - immortalized in a painting by Renoir. One of the families become friends with Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley, a couple I read about in the book, The Paris Wife. At the end we see Jean-Paul Sartre rushing down a Parisian street.

The book, simply put, is brilliant. And if you've ever loved hearing about good stories filled with fascinating people and events, as well as ever been interested in Paris as a whole, this book will expose you to more history than you've ever been able to handle before, and it will not only inform you, but intrigue you to want to find out more. The family trees at the front of the book will be referred to often, as you try to keep track of which family member you are hearing about now, as the book jumps frequently between time periods. You may be reading about one of the first de Cygne's in 1261, and then here you are in 1875 as you meet one of his late descendants.

One example of this is that as we approach WWII, having just survived the accounts of WWI, we are thrown back in time to 1794, after the French Revolution. King Louis XVI has just been beheaded, as well as his Queen, the infamous Marie Antoinette. Now we are in the Reign of Terror - a bitter foreshadowing of a soon-to-be reign of terror - that of Hitler's Third Reich. We hear of the Widow Le Sourd getting ready to send the young de Cygne couple to the tribunal as enemies of the state of France. Robespierre, convinced of their guilt, sends them to the conciergerie to be killed. Blanchard, their family doctor, hoping to save them, convinces the "court" that Sophie de Cygne is pregnant, hoping to delay her execution. Miraculously, she ends up being pregnant - preserving the line of de Cygne's, and stopping herself from being killed for lying. She names her son Dieudonne, or gift from God. But again, this incident reminds us of the bitter rivalry between the Le Sourd's and the de Cygne's. Each generation never seems to realize that their families have known each other for centuries, and always in some form betrayed one another, until the 1940s, where WWII brings the young Max Le Sourd and the young Charlie de Cygne together to form the resistance and fight against evil.

The Le Sourd's discuss the need to get the Nazis out of Paris, but Max's father reveals something to his son in the quote that states "Yes. I want the Nazis out, of course. But my ultimate goal is to complete the Revolution, for France to reach her true destiny. And I hope it may be your goal as well." The whole book seems to come back to this point, this theme of getting France to reach her true destiny. Each leader of France, whether it be Napoleon, a King of France, or even the short-lived Paris Commune, wants France to be great, and they want the whole world to recognize the greatness of France.

Themes of Paris, government, politics, religious persecution, love, but mostly history does repeat itself - both in the personal lives of the people who live through it, and in the great city itself. Facing the possibility of French Jews being rounded up and sent away to who knows where, Jacob reflects that perhaps, if he had not known the long history of his people, he might have remained like so many in the Jewish community who refused to believe that a French government could be so evil - but being an art dealer who knows the stories of art and their characters, and the men who commission their beauty - Jacob is keenly aware of the terrible possibilities that lie within the human spirit. We see, early on in the book, that the French government at one point did in fact round up all the Jews and expel them from their country, and any promises made to the Jews by one monarch, were easily expunged by another.

The love stories repeat themselves as well. Marie wanted to marry her American lover and go away with him, but was kept in Europe. Her daughter, Claire, however, falls in love with this American's son and goes away with him as well - only to return to Paris later, just as her own mother returned to Paris after moving to England with her husband when Claire was not yet born.

I know I'm delving too deep into this giant book, but I can't seem to curb my own enthusiasm for its greatness.

The book details the evolution of families, intermingled with one another at various points in time. We start at the time of the Templar Knights, we see their downfall (which occurred to feed the greed of a King). We revel in love stories, forbidden, secret, discouraged love stories. We hear about Parisian culture, art and we experience heart breaking cruelty, and also courageous love and mind-boggling cowardice. These families bend to the times as they witness Paris growing to something magnificent, and also as they see Americans fleeing to Paris to escape a country already so free, but which lacks the rich history that France can offer their young and impressionable young minds. We see monarchists looking down upon the real people of Paris, who always seem to be fighting ruthlessly for a more free, more equal government they can't really achieve.We see people question their moral integrity as they either band together as powerful mobs or disband to save their own asses. We see honor, and liberty. Fraternity. Equality. As Charles de Gaulle liberates Paris from the Germans, thus restoring France to some sort of shaky equilibrium we recognize where this book is heading - France is an eccentric place, filled with idealists who are more than willing to fight for some crazy idea of what will be the BEST destiny for the great France. That will never change, and has never changed from the 1200s to today.

Claire, Marie's daughter, the young woman who followed the path her mother could not by marrying a young American, returns to France and revels in its romance. She loves France, and states that even after living in America all these years, she'd always followed the happenings of this country. Acknowledging not all of it had been happy (the World Wars, for example), Claire express her gratefulness that it has been returned to democracy - and "given the deep richness of France, its economy would bear fruit under almost any government." Despite some embarrassing historical moments, France is still considered by many to be a great empire. The French, and particularly the Parisians, are proud. And change is always inevitable.

Even in the 1960s, Claire witnessed young students, displeased with university conditions, tearing up the old street cobblestones and hurling them at police in protest. They are the students, the workers, the philosophers, the people of Paris - planning a new Paris Commune, and like their ancestors hoping for a new and better world. They are the heirs of the French Revolution ... and it is here in Paris where these young people will always fight to see their Paris reach its great destiny.

You must appreciate the traditional regional chaos of old France, and as de Gaulle had said "How can one govern a country which has 246 kinds of cheese?"

Read this book. As someone who first experience the greatness of Paris in the month of August, the month of holiday in France where many Parisians take vacation, and where the city itself is mostly quiet, I did not understand the deep history of France. I could not understand it at fifteen, but I did feel it. I felt the impressiveness of Notre Dame, and the wonder of the Louvre. The breathtaking views from the top of the Eiffel Tower, and the calm serenity of the Seine. I reveled in the wines and the food, and adored Versailles, where chills ran down my spine. I stood in the Hall of Mirrors and thought of the many famous aristocrats who walked down that hall, and then of the gates being stormed by the people of Paris, demanding change.

Years later I returned to France, but lived in the South - a land very different from the capital city. In revisiting Paris, however, I was reminded of why I fell in love with that city in the first place, and I can understand why Americans, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein ... I can understand why they flocked to Paris - to live in its complicated, chaotic, poetic, tragic and beautiful confines. This book will draw you into that chaos, and you may find yourself never wanting to leave - in fact, you'll find yourself wanting to do something great with your life. Find love, find happiness, make change. Bonne chance et au revoir mes amis.