#95 The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen (1935)
I was lucky enough to win a copy of this through the literary blog hop giveaway in June. I think I may have read it before - but I am not sure - I happened to read a couple of reviews of it on other book blogs and both times the description of the book resonated strongly. The title was also very familiar and I knew I had read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen before I re-read it in July - so it’s possible I also read this one around the same time - probably twenty years ago now. I was so looking forward to reading The House in Paris - I decided to start reading it just days after it arrived from the USA.
This is the third Elizabeth Bowen novel that I have read so far in 2012, and I think I love her. I loved this novel as much as The Death of the Heart - which I adored.
The House in Paris is almost mesmerizingly beautiful, at once haunting and quietly powerful. Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences are works of art, creating a mood and atmosphere that is actually tangible. This is the kind of book that is written to be read slowly and never at a gallop, it is a master class in understatement.
The first and third section of the book takes place over one strange day in Paris, where two children meet in a house in Paris. The house is that belonging to Mme Fisher, where once young ladies from England and America came to be “finished”, and where she now lives alone with her daughter Naomi. The Children are Henrietta and Leopold, Henrietta, travelling to her grandmother is eleven, and must wait out the day between trains at the home of her grandmother’s friend. Leopold a precocious nine year old is at the house to meet his mother, whom he has never met. Henrietta, travelling with her soft toy monkey Charles, is delighted to be in Paris, longs to see the Trocadero, but only gets to view the city from a taxi.
“They crossed the river while Miss Fisher was speaking. In a sort of slow flash, Henrietta had her first open view of Paris -watery sky, wet light, light water, frigid, dark inky buildings, spans of bridges, trees. This open light gash across Paris faded at each end. It was not exactly raining. Then passing long grinding trams, their taxi darted uphill: the boulevard was wide, in summer there would be shade here.”
In the house while Mme Fisher the ageing matriarch is dying upstairs, the children begin to get to know one another, watched over by an anxious Miss Fisher when she isn’t rushing away to her mother. Within the narrative which takes place in the present, not an awful lot happens, but the atmosphere of the house and its inhabitants is built up beautifully, and remains present throughout. Over the course of that one day, much is due to be revealed, the relationships between Henrietta, Leopold, Mme and Miss Fisher, Leopold’s dead father and absent mother are explored and slowly fully revealed through the larger middle section of the book which takes place ten years earlier.
The story of Leopold’s mother, Karen Michaelis a great friend of Naomi Fisher’s is a familiar one in some ways, and yet as told by Elizabeth Bowen it is entirely new. I don’t want to reveal this story here - as there may be people wanting to read it themselves. Leopold’s parents are seen at a distance of ten years, with the image of a waiting child in an unfriendly house always in the back of the readers mind. Some of Bowen’s most beautiful writing is in the story of the lovers and their brief affair, which results in Leopold’s existence.
“At nine they went out and stood on the canal bridge; the band pavilion was empty, the chairs stacked up. Hearing the sea creep on the far beach, they walked that way, along the Ladies’ Walk. Along this tunnel of trees lights hung quenched under arching branches, rain glittering past, no June moths. On a bench back from the walk another couple of lovers blotted out, faceless, sheltered by the unfrequented night. On the embanked sea-front a house with a tower stood up; next door, in the lodging-house, someone played a piano, but then stopped.”
There is timelessness to this desperately touching story that captures perfectly the loneliness of childhood. Leopold and Henrietta yearn to be loved, they are innocent but with a burgeoning awareness of what is happening around them, nothing is yet fully understood. This is a novel that will live on in my mind for a long time, and also one I can imagine re-reading with as much pleasure as I read it this time.
This is the third Elizabeth Bowen novel that I have read so far in 2012, and I think I love her. I loved this novel as much as The Death of the Heart - which I adored.
The House in Paris is almost mesmerizingly beautiful, at once haunting and quietly powerful. Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences are works of art, creating a mood and atmosphere that is actually tangible. This is the kind of book that is written to be read slowly and never at a gallop, it is a master class in understatement.
The first and third section of the book takes place over one strange day in Paris, where two children meet in a house in Paris. The house is that belonging to Mme Fisher, where once young ladies from England and America came to be “finished”, and where she now lives alone with her daughter Naomi. The Children are Henrietta and Leopold, Henrietta, travelling to her grandmother is eleven, and must wait out the day between trains at the home of her grandmother’s friend. Leopold a precocious nine year old is at the house to meet his mother, whom he has never met. Henrietta, travelling with her soft toy monkey Charles, is delighted to be in Paris, longs to see the Trocadero, but only gets to view the city from a taxi.
“They crossed the river while Miss Fisher was speaking. In a sort of slow flash, Henrietta had her first open view of Paris -watery sky, wet light, light water, frigid, dark inky buildings, spans of bridges, trees. This open light gash across Paris faded at each end. It was not exactly raining. Then passing long grinding trams, their taxi darted uphill: the boulevard was wide, in summer there would be shade here.”
In the house while Mme Fisher the ageing matriarch is dying upstairs, the children begin to get to know one another, watched over by an anxious Miss Fisher when she isn’t rushing away to her mother. Within the narrative which takes place in the present, not an awful lot happens, but the atmosphere of the house and its inhabitants is built up beautifully, and remains present throughout. Over the course of that one day, much is due to be revealed, the relationships between Henrietta, Leopold, Mme and Miss Fisher, Leopold’s dead father and absent mother are explored and slowly fully revealed through the larger middle section of the book which takes place ten years earlier.
The story of Leopold’s mother, Karen Michaelis a great friend of Naomi Fisher’s is a familiar one in some ways, and yet as told by Elizabeth Bowen it is entirely new. I don’t want to reveal this story here - as there may be people wanting to read it themselves. Leopold’s parents are seen at a distance of ten years, with the image of a waiting child in an unfriendly house always in the back of the readers mind. Some of Bowen’s most beautiful writing is in the story of the lovers and their brief affair, which results in Leopold’s existence.
“At nine they went out and stood on the canal bridge; the band pavilion was empty, the chairs stacked up. Hearing the sea creep on the far beach, they walked that way, along the Ladies’ Walk. Along this tunnel of trees lights hung quenched under arching branches, rain glittering past, no June moths. On a bench back from the walk another couple of lovers blotted out, faceless, sheltered by the unfrequented night. On the embanked sea-front a house with a tower stood up; next door, in the lodging-house, someone played a piano, but then stopped.”
There is timelessness to this desperately touching story that captures perfectly the loneliness of childhood. Leopold and Henrietta yearn to be loved, they are innocent but with a burgeoning awareness of what is happening around them, nothing is yet fully understood. This is a novel that will live on in my mind for a long time, and also one I can imagine re-reading with as much pleasure as I read it this time.