Enchanted Prose

Life-affirming, love at first sight (Palo Alto, California; April 2019 – March 2020): Do you believe in love at first sight? Enduring love until death do us part? “Few regrets” in life? If you do, this book is for you. If you don’t, this book is for you.

Expect to be teary-eyed while wrapped in a comforting blanket as two distinguished professors and prolific authors candidly offer “two minds rather than one” as they look back on sixty-five years of a joyful, caring marriage and overflowing, rewarding lives until one is diagnosed with multiple myeloma (“cancer of the plasma cells”) and the other overwrought about losing the “most important person in my life.” One fearing so much of his past will be lost as his soul-mate was at the heart of it all, while also experiencing disturbing memory issues. All triggering “obsessional thinking” and “traumatic repression.”

Unthinkable it would seem for a man who devoted sixty years to psychological healing with devotees all around the world. A pioneering existential psychotherapist who treated countless bereaved clients now fears living as an “independent adult” for the first time in his life. Faced with the “inevitability of death” not unlike all of us when you strip the meaning of life down to its core. “How do we live meaningfully until the very end?” Two graceful people also ask in graceful prose, “How can we gracefully leave this world to the next generation?”

That man is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University, Dr. Irvin Yalom. That woman was Dr. Marilyn Yalom, who also had an immense reach and resonance as a Stanford professor of French language, literature, and culture, and a feminist pioneer in women’s studies. Trailblazers in their respective fields.

With four children and eight great-grandchildren, a tight-knit, supportive family, plus an endless list of admirers – students, colleagues, researchers, readers – it’s hard to imagine more loving, fulfilling, good, and generous lives. Their last year together is remarkably life-affirming as each lived with few regrets. Each, though, taking a different perspective on how long to hold on for the other when your dignity is being chipped away with intolerable physical pain and hope dimming by the day.

Among the many themes packed into this short, provocative memoir (222 pages, including two beautiful photos and the poignant cover sketch) is the thorny topic of choosing when to die if it’s legal in your state. California is one of the states that has passed compassionate physician-assistant death with dignity laws, the word suicide rejected.

By a twist of fate, Irvin Yalom is supremely qualified to write about this as he’s known for his ability to counsel through “difficult dialogue.” Including baring his personal feelings, considered part of why he’s been so successful in changing lives. You’ll find Marilyn Yalom equally capable and frank, coming across as more practical-minded compared to his existentialist thinking and struggles with “death anxiety.” Both painfully honest in sharing their “torrent of pain”: hers more physical, his more psychic. Both philosophical as they document the worst year of their lives. She calmer and accepting, he more fearful and denying. Both grateful for all their blessings.

Which explains the emphasis in the title of death before life. And yet, above all else this intimate memoir is a wondrous celebration of two lives, and the grief that comes when their journey together is ending. “Mourning is the price we pay to have the courage to love,” the opening epigraph, speaks to all of us about “living meaningfully.”

“Evanescence” is a lovely word appearing in the title of one of Irvin Yalom’s chapters. It embraces a love story kindled when a fifteen-year-old boy fell in love with a girl about his age in ninth grade. That man is now 88; Marilyn was 87. 

If you haven’t had a reason to become acquainted with Irvin Yalom’s psychotherapeutic work, you may have read one of his “teaching novels.” Spanning forty years, from 1974 to 2015, they include Every Day Gets a Little Closer; Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy; When Nietzsche Wept; Lying on the Couch; Momma and the Meaning of Life; The Schopenhauer Cure; I’m Calling the Police! A Tale of Regression and Recovery; The Spinoza Problem; and Creatures of the Day (https://www.yalom.com/books).

I was personally influenced by Yalom’s landmark textbook, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, as a graduate student at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where they both were born and raised. (The influence of their East European Jewish parents described with wonderful introspection.) I still recall the third edition’s purple cover and circles at the bottom for its surprisingly eloquent prose for a text, the bible in my group counseling course. The jacket colors have changed over the years; multi-colored with circles everywhere for the sixth edition co-written with Dr. Molyn Leszcz, President of the American Counseling Association, while Irvin Yalom was also writing this memoir.

In the forty-minute TED talk below, How a Life Shape’s a Life’s Work, Leszcz shares the stage with his forty-year old friend and collaborator, an “iconic figure” who “inspired generations of group therapists” on the “human condition.”

It’s “rare for a psychiatric text” to stay in print for so long, says Jeffrey Berman, an English Professor at SUNY Albany who wrote the only book that’s examined the full body of Yalom’s writings, Writing the Talking Cure: Irvin D. Yalom and the Literature of Psychotherapy.

Marilyn Yalom matches her husband’s compassion and slew of admirers, inundated with so many wanting to visit her during this precious time. Having to pace herself not to overtax how much she can extend of herself while she’s in wretched pain and dying.

She too has a long list of published books, including Before the Chess Queen; How the French Invented Love; A History of the Wife; The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship; The History of the Breast; and The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love released in 2018 (myalom.com). She too was committed to another writing project while writing this memoir: Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of WWII, with an introduction by bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton, whose WWII novel, The Last Train to London was reviewed here: https://enchantedprose.com/the-last-train-to-london/. One of their sons, Ben, finished it. (Yes, planning to read it.)

To glimpse Marilyn’s presence, eloquence, and knowledge watch her give a fourteen-minute TED talk on How the Heart Became a Symbol of Love:

That’s what this memoir is: a symbol of love.

In commenting on an art exhibit that recently opened at the New Museum in NYC on Grievance in Art and Mourning in America, Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee asks, “How do you translate mourning into community?” That too is what this memoir is about.

It’s not only a gift for us but for a profoundly grieving widower who discovers the hours he spends completing the memoir over four months brought him solace. Recounting it’s only “120 steps” from his Palo Alto home flooded with memories to his office, he still finds happiness while writing. Marilyn knew he would because writing the memoir together was her idea.

Lorraine

Would you marry the man if it meant restoring the 400-year old Scottish country estate he inherited? (Lowlands, Northeast Scotland, near Arbroath on the North Sea; 1990-2000): “I knew when I married the man that I married the mansion,” biographer Belinda Rathbone opens her immensely entertaining and evocative memoir, echoing Charlotte Bronte’s classic line when Victorian-era Jane Eyre declares, “Reader, I married the man.”

Reader, it will be up to you to decide whether restoring a four-centuries-old “crumbling” British estate in rural Scotland (near Dundee on the map below) – essential to accepting a marriage proposal – was a fairy-tale come true, or something else? Keep in mind this romantic notion meant stepping further back than Britain’s Victorian times to the Georgian and Regency eras when the Guynd estate was envisioned and built.

In 2021 the Regency era is hot owing to the Netflix series Bridgerton, inspired by the historical romance novels of Julia Quinn. So, it’s a fitting time to read this charming, good-spirited memoir originally published in 2005, republished in 2019.

When single 39-year-old Rathbone, raised in New England living in a Manhattan apartment said yes to marrying 53-year-old Scottish bachelor, John Ouchterlony, living in a flat in London, she thought she knew what she was getting herself into. She’d fallen in love with a boyish man “cut of the old cloth,” a mechanical engineer who had a deep respect for his ancestors and cultural Scottish heritage. She paints broadly how both her parents influenced her appreciation for art, antiques, history, and nature.

Googling, we discover both her parents had distinguished careers. Her father was an international art expert who’d been the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for seventeen years (The Rathbone Years). We’re told her mother had British roots, subscribed to Britain’s gorgeous Country Life magazine, and was skilled in the “art of entertaining.” Looking further, we learn she was a ski racing champion on the slopes of the Swiss and French Alps. Fascinating biographies, but this is their daughters’ British story, fascinating too.

Belinda Rathbone, schooled in the fine arts, comes across as charming: eloquent, good-natured, good-humored, passionate, curious, resourceful, and literary. As a book lover, she imagined herself as “a character in a Jane Austen novel” when John proposed his fantastical proposition. But once married and moved into the Guynd mansion house she saw herself closing Austen’s Mansfield Park opening the Dickensian world of Bleak House. It didn’t take long to realize John was wedded to the past, adverse to change as he couldn’t bear to throw anything away, down to the torn stockings she’d thrown out. There’s no such thing as “waste” to a man intrigued by how everything works, and a savior for someday.

When does saving things cross the line? Psychologists diagnose hoarding as a disorder when it interferes with relationships and the quality of life. Yet, the couple found ways around their differences, with the author seeming to embrace the challenges, fully invested in bringing the Guynd back to life.

A different type of new life was awaiting amidst mind-boggling chaos and decay when Rathbone soon becomes pregnant. Now, she has even more reason to make her mansion home warm and comfortable. Her son Elliott is the biggest beneficiary, beginning life as an infant carried on his mother’s back seeing a fairy-tale world of ancient woodlands and parklands that offered a “sanctuary for birds and wildlife.” Four hundred acres worth. Early on he makes a pal, Christopher, often by his side. He’s treated to Christmas decorating parties, old-fashioned game-playing parties, parties at castles. All while his mother balances with remarkable ease dinner parties (making pains to use antique wares); hosting American and Scottish friends and relatives; enjoying the daily British ritual of afternoon tea; digging into family genealogies; and inviting a slew of historical societies to offer restoration advice and consultation on historical preservation grants as the estate is deemed a national treasure.

All while renovating, designing, and decorating a thirty-room estate home and gardens, and much more as the Guynd had been an “agricultural estate.” A farmhouse and farmlands are still occupied, minimally maintained by an old farmer barely seen. An overview map depicts these sites plus the original old house, the early-19^th century mansion house, the walled gardens, a lake, and a lodge near the front gate.

What you don’t see is how grim the structures were; how dark, neglected, and threadbare the house and furnishings were, essentially untouched since soldiers were housed in it during WWII; the boathouse and temple by the lake; the terribly overgrown gardens disturbed by forty Christmas fir trees planted that failed to provide a thriving business; the shabby flats rented out on the east and west sides of the main house that attracted problematic tenants; cattle grazing in the distance; two horses boarded; and two dogs running free.

This is an overwhelming, overflowing mother’s plate, heightened by acclimating to another country used to a hard life. For a modern woman who expected modern-day conveniences unnecessarily exasperating, to be asked to wash clothes in an outdated washing machine housed outside the estate in the garage, which meant trekking in miserably cold and wet weather (Guynd means “high, marshy place” in Gaelic), and then discovering there’s no dryer! These revelations and obstacles happen over and over, but in Rathbone’s telling they feel part of the compromises made in a good marriage, though on a far grander scale.

Until we start to sense something else may be afoot. 

When did things start to take a toll? When the newlywed had to tell her husband she needs a space to hang her clothing? When she can’t find a single working vacuum cleaner among a collection of vintage ones cluttering a hallway, enough for a “museum?” Humor is required and Rathbone has a flair for it, but when does this cease being funny?

To be fair, John relents to buying a Dyson machine for its high environmental marks as it’s bagless, thus no waste. What about wanting to paint the dreary yellowed walls fresh new yellow? The dining room Williamsburg Blue for soothing appeal? John eventually agrees to all, but not to equipping the frigid kitchen with an Aga stove ubiquitous in British kitchens for those who can afford it. He does find a substitute, and other inventive ways to assuage his wife.

For a home hidden five miles from any road, there’s a menagerie of people coming and going. One with staying power is an artist, Stephen, living long-term in one of the flats. He along with others join John in heavy labor jobs. Temporary tenants offer a perspective on how the British class system works between the landowner called laird and the working class. From how it used to be to how it operates in the 21^st century.

Delighting in Elliot’s wistful and healthy nature-nurtured childhood, Rathbone’s professional work also explains why she devoted herself to the centuries-old estate. Referred to as a “photography historian,” she wrote the first biography of the photographer J. Walker Evans, whose famous black-and-white imagery depicted the Great Depression in America’s Deep South. Remarking she went from one plantation to a vastly different one, she now calls herself “a biographer of a country estate through the ages.”

Since Rathbone’s memoir ended a while ago, you can search where her story went after 2000. Suggest you wait until you’ve finished this outstanding book. It will leave you wondering: Did the marriage hold together after the estate was wonderfully brought to life?

Lorraine

The arc of a 20^th century life (rural Indiana, through the Depression, WWII, contemporary times): In William Zinsser’s classic book On Writing Well, he advised writers to “simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.” Award-winning, Brown University Professor of Literary Arts Laird Hunt’s latest novel embraces that lofty goal. Zorrie is a magnificent read, boiled down to a slim 176 pages packed with humanity.

The tender prose sends an existential message about an honest, hardworking life of basic yet deep values that strikes a melancholy, nostalgic, and hopeful tone. It feels as if Hunt sat down to craft soulful words for the purpose of comforting us through dark times into the light.

A “life is everything” message written with such gentleness, grief, sorrow, and hopefulness, remarkable for how it touches us in so few words as we mourn the lives of loved ones we’ve lost during historic times. Pained by so much suffering and isolation, and yet offering a message of finding a way to “think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” Words one of the characters says, inspired by the words of a brave young girl, Anne Frank, in her famous WWII diary.

The novel’s overarching theme is about finding ways to seek the light amidst the darkness. It’s prefaced by a lovely quote from the French writer Gustave Flaubert from his short story A Simple Heart, imparting the same theme, referencing “light sparkling in the night sky like a company of stars; beyond the sea stretched dimly.”

Hunt tells us in his Acknowledgements Flaubert’s story was among the books he “kept close to me as I wrote.” Also in this list: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl; Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; and the philosophical writings of France’s Michael de Montaigne and Greece’s ancient Herodotus. Other classical works appear in the book, offering wisdom and puncturing stereotypes about rural life as Zorrie is set in the fertile farmlands of Indiana’s Clinton County.

Zorrie loves Indiana’s soil, “the smell of the clay-rich dirt.” “Dirt she had bloomed out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.” She’s a “giver of gifts” straight from nature’s bounties: “an abandoned nest, arrowheads, monarch wings, and turtle shells.” Someone who hears birdsong as a harbinger “to sing the world back into being.” Nature is fundamental to Zorrie’s ability to see lightness. As are warm, sustaining memories of love, friendship, and companionship as the novel opens when she’s in her fifties and then looks back on her life.

This is not the only novel Hunt has set in Indiana. For instance, Indiana, Indiana apparently (to-be-read) introduces the male character who quoted Anne Frank’s poignant words, Noah Adams. In it is the woman he fell in love with, Opal. In Zorrie, Opal is living in a mental institution with Noah longing for her. He’s the son of the scholarly farmer, Virgil, and his wife, Ruby, close by neighbors and dear friends over many years. 

Organized into six parts, each a chapter written in long, flowing narrative prose, each prefaced with a few poetic words that allude to the same sad versus hopeful theme, starting with Part I’s: “Out of this shadow, into the sun.”

In quiet, assured prose, the opening sentence serves as a prologue to Zorrie’s backstory:

“Zorrie Underwood had been known throughout the county as a hard worker for more than fifty years, so it troubled her when finally the hoe started slipping through her hands, the paring knife from her fingers, the breath in shallow bursts in her lungs, and smack down in the middle of the day, she had to lie down.”

Already we’re drawn to her industrious, down-to-earth, noble life. Orphaned young, both her parents died from diphtheria, an infectious disease essentially eradicated in the US thanks to a childhood vaccine, which in the 1920s killed hundreds of thousands. Ever so timely as we’re hoping new vaccines will bring us light after a dark year.

Raised by a bitter aunt who scolded Zorrie’s positive attitude, saying “hope’ll lead you straight into the bushes,” she dies when Zorrie was twenty-one, leaving her without any family or means of support. Despite her aunt’s chronic grumblings and her lonely plight, “hope had nonetheless often found a way to seep out and surprise her, bow graciously, extend its hand, ask her to dance.” The novel is full of grace.

Aware from the start that Zorrie’s health was compromised, we soon learn why. Tragic for Zorrie, and historically, as she was one of those young women who worked at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois before it was known that painting the face dials of clock pieces with radioactive powder was slowly poisoning them.

Hunt calls the yellow, glowing-in-the-dark powder “Luna powder,” a name that refers to the Moon, symbolic of the novel’s eternal theme of the perpetual cycling of seasons, the cycles of life. Indeed, Zorrie’s story cycles through the years and seasons of her life from early childhood to coming-of-age to adulthood to growing old till eternity. “Divine,” “eternal,” and “eternity” are prevalent words and universal themes seen from religious, spiritual, and philosophical perspectives.

The radium factory is key to the story health-wise and in terms of how powerfully attached someone’s image of Home can be. Zorrie made two dear friends on the job, Janie and Marie, the first real girlfriends she had, but she missed Indiana’s soil so much she left them when she didn’t even have a physical home. Returning to her homeland, she finds that farmhouse through the blessings of love and different kinds of friendships. Virgil, Ruby, and Noah, most significantly. 

Zorrie and her girlfriends called themselves “Ghost Girls” after they realized the powder on their hands and faces, having licked it onto their paintbrushes, glowed. Unaware of how sinister it was, they rejoiced in how they could “stand luminous under the stars” like Flaubert’s quote, feeling special, valued, for the first time in their lives.

While Zorrie stays in touch with Janie and Marie from time to time throughout the years, sometimes desiring to see them, mostly they remain fond memories of happy times. As other friends and neighbors cycle in and out of her life more memories buoy her as her life narrows and becomes lonely once again. A dog named Oats enters her life unexpectedly, beautifully evoking the soul-mate companionship dog lovers feel, especially people living alone or isolated. No surprise, then, that one of the outcomes of pandemic quarantining has been a surge in animal adoptions. Also, more baking and gardening, both of which comfort Zorrie too. The “gift of music” another pleasure.

In these ways, Zorrie’s life reminds us of ours. Nostalgic in our memories of loved ones we’ve lost, and for simpler times when neighbors truly watched out for each other.

Another quote from the above mentioned French philosopher Michel de Montaigne reinforces the life-affirming theme: “We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud.” Hunt expresses this sentiment in fewer words: “The fragile film of the present must be buttressed against the past.”

The poetic rendering of a singular life humanizes the fragility of life, and shows us where to find strength and humanity.

Lorraine

P.S. The novel really hit home as my husband engraved our wedding bands with the inscription “Till Eternity.”

How a remote mountain setting and atmospheric prose intensify an already intense plot (Crans-Montana, Swiss Alps; 2015 to present day): Warning: The Sanatorium is like nothing reviewed here. Psychologically suspenseful novels characterize books blogged about, but none single-mindedly focused on a crime, a murder. Actually, three murders and several failed or thwarted attempts.

The publisher categorizes The Sanatorium as mystery fiction – a different literary genre for this blog, and different from a thriller. Both include subgenres, whodunit and hard-boiled detective in the mystery category. British author Sarah Pearse’s gripping debut is a whodunit involving a detective: Elin Warner in her thirties on leave for the past year from her job in England due to traumatic professional and personal events. But the novel isn’t only a mystery. The rest is part thriller and part Gothic. Why tell you this?

Because: if you’re expecting a mystery without the horror of a thriller, this is not that novel as the murders are gruesome. You’ll viscerally squirm, feeling the way Elin does, feeling your adrenaline pumping. The Sanatorium is not for the faint of heart.

The set-up: Elin has been invited by her brother Isaac to the “absolute remoteness” of a mountaintop high-up in the Swiss Alps to celebrate his engagement to Laure, someone she was friends with growing up. They haven’t been in touch for years. The invite surprises her since she hasn’t heard from Isaac for four years, and didn’t know he and Laure hooked up. The party will be held at a newly opened, architecturally striking hotel appropriately named Le Sommet, a former sanatorium for TB patients. For someone under pressure to decide whether she has what it takes to return to her detective job, accompanied by her boyfriend Will whose also pressuring her to make a commitment about their relationship, her stress and the stakes are already high. Elin’s wits and stomach will be tested. Yours will be too. 

A funicular carries them from the town of Sierre to the ultra-modern yet Gothic feeling mountain resort. As soon as Elin sees it, “her body is reacting to something here; something living, breathing, woven into the DNA of the building.”

Meanwhile, Will, totally her opposite, is so easygoing the contrast between the two contributes to more stress when someone at the hotel goes missing and is later found dead. As if that’s not enough tension, an avalanche is approaching that will close every means of transport down (car, helicopter), so no one can get in or out of the hotel. Add to that mountains with sharp, jagged edges, along with some “edgy in that paired-back, European style” characters, you have the ingredients for a nasty brew. The weather is brutal, the hotel “austere” and “clinical,” and the murders are brutal too. So why review The Sanatorium on a blog called Enchanted Prose?

From a prose perspective, a Gothic element related to setting that enables scary atmospheric prose makes the novel a standout.

Pearse chooses specific words to elicit dark foreboding, creepy emotions that would not prime us as forcefully without the powerful setting and atmospheric prose. The prose is cleverly crafted to propel us forward in spite of the horrors. Another perspective is the crimes are so beastly you’re compelled to figure out who the perpetrator is and what’s the motive, echoing how driven Elin is. We cannot stop reading any more than Elin can’t stop putting herself in danger. We’re as baffled as she is as none of the few clues presented connect until we’re about 90% done, and then Elin and the reader are foiled again, and then one more time until the whodunit and why is finally revealed.

All the murders have a similar “signature” (the ritual unique to the offender): copper bracelets with numbers engraved on the back, the attacker is grotesquely masked, with another calling card left by the victims, a glass box with something repugnant inside. The glass, though, fits the excessive use of glass in the hotel rebuilding. So much glass, Elin feels more vulnerable than she already is.

Which brings us to a theme common in this blog: fiction inspired by history. The novel was inspired by the history of sanatoriums in the 1920s and 1930s through the fifties until the advent of antibiotics cured tuberculosis patients. Located in crisp, high-altitude, sunny mountain air in Europe (in the US too) for healing, Switzerland’s Alps, particularly in Davos, and other places like the Crans-Montana region setting were highly regarded treatment locales. Pearse once lived in Switzerland in Crans-Montana, so when she read about sanatoriums in a Swiss magazine it sparked the idea for the novel.

Staying true to history, once sanatoriums had served their purpose many were converted to other types of establishments, including hotels. Fictionally, the original structure of Le Sommet was built in the late 1800s by the great-grandfather of the new developer/owner, Lucas Caron, who spent eight years on his luxury project, which we learn was inspired by Joseph Dirand, a Paris architect, who designed in the minimalist style.

A chilling quote by Dirand prefaces the novel: “I have loved constraints. They give me comfort.” Constraints a key word to the murderer’s style, comfort twisted hinting at the motive. Since we weren’t aware of the significance of the quote, it’s easy to skip over it. Yet Pearse is announcing pay attention to her words. Turns out the conversion of sanatoriums did give rise to minimalism architecture, retaining the concept of airiness, lightness, cleanliness. Le Sommet embraces minimalism with “the air of the institution in stark lines, the relentless rectangular planes and faces, the modernist flat roofs,” and all that glass.

The novel oozes with prose that ups the ante of fear. Words like “sinister” depict the mountains; “smothering,” “suffocating,” and “choked” for the snow; “terrifying” wind; “lurid” and “obscenely bright” describing the sun reflecting on the water in the outdoor pool.

As for the whodunit: The novel opens in 2020, so Erin doesn’t know about the first victim, Daniel, the hotel architect, who was murdered in 2015, in the Prologue. Brother Lucas becomes a suspect as he’s obsessed with paying tribute to the hotel’s history incorporating cringe-worthy artifacts, yet he delayed the hotel’s opening for a year grieving Daniel, a close friend. Let’s say he’s a person of interest, and not the only one grieving. One by one other suspects are identified; some of these characters go missing and we’re back to square one.

Ellen sometimes frustrates us to such a degree we want to shake her shoulders as she does foolish things putting herself in harm’s way. We’re also in awe of how much she’s willing to risk to find a killer on the loose in the hotel before another crime is perpetrated. Will is frustrated too as he had high-hopes for what he thought would be a vacation, a chance for Elin to relax, to come back to him. Will she?

Feverishly we flip pages, finishing this edge-of-your seat 400 page novel in no time. Be grateful you’re reading it from afar.

Lorraine

Taking risks to pursue dreams, secrets, and love (rural Australia, Sydney, and Paris; 1922-1951): This splendid, twists-and-turns historical novel shows the power of grit, perseverance, and courage to change the trajectory of one’s life. It assumes “a world without risk is small and safe,” and asks if this is the right path to follow?

So many novels have Paris in the title, some about the fashion world, so we assume we know what this debut is all about. While we’re partly right about the glamour, it’s far more than that because Australian author, Alexandra Joel, tells us she’s “a keen student of art, fashion, history, and politics” and passionate about Paris. Incorporating what she loves, knows, and impressively researches (cited in her informative Author’s Note), The Paris Model has everything you’d want in page-turning suspense fiction against the backdrop of history in the early postwar years when Paris was liberated.

Joel was the editor of two Australian fashion magazines and wrote two books on Australian fashion, and splits her time between Australia and Paris, so she’s adept at writing atmospherically about the “wild beauty” of Australia as well as eloquently evoking the elegance of a European city that wasn’t destroyed during WWII.

The model at the heart of the novel is Grace Woods. Grace is a perfect name for her as she straddles two continents gracefully. Joel, though, didn’t invent her name as the real Grace Woods inspired the novel. The emerald green-eyed beauty turned heads and now turns pages. In the Author’s Notes, Joel shares how her novel came to be, when she was:

“Sipping tea in the fragrant garden of a good friend when, unexpectedly, she began to tell me the extraordinary story of her beautiful model mother, Grace Woods. As soon as I learnt about the mystery surrounding Grace’s birth, the tragedies that engulfed her parents and the astonishing coincidence that provided this beautiful, green-eyed girl with an entirely new identity, I was captivated.”

Grace isn’t the only character whose identity is kept secret.

Another interesting tidbit, from an interview, is that Joel’s mother was a Christian Dior model. Grace’s fictional mother was a fashionista even on the family’s sheep and wheat farm in New South Wales, Sydney its capital.

Grace’s mother’s name Olive isn’t as graceful as hers, perhaps for harboring a secret Grace overhears yet was too young to catch the meaning of, although she has her suspicions. Olive subscribes to fashion magazines Grace pages through, and hired a well-dressed French governess to tutor her daughter in the French language and culture when she was twelve, when the novel begins, instilling Grace with a fashion sense and “dreams of travel and adventure.”

Still, it took an enormous leap for Grace to leave the rural “bush” countryside of “wild beauty” to a “wildly different way of life,” to become a sought out model for the exclusive fashion House of Christian Dior, a demanding role that demanded “perfection.” Or as Joel depicts it, to go from exotic flora, fauna, and animals – kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras, eucalyptus, and gum, melaleuca, red bottlebrush trees – to “an enchanting world, one that would fit her as perfectly as Cinderella’s glass slipper.”

Of course, nothing is perfect, which you’ll see in Grace’s childhood of losses and young adulthood innocence and despair, which led her to flee to Paris in 1948 at twenty-six with another secret. She arrived with an invitation to work as a “Parisian mannequin” for a fashion designer who “saved Paris fashion.” Later, she takes another leap into romance when she meets a handsome, charismatic man, Phillipe Boyer, a journalist who also has a secret. Which evolves into another leap: into a political spy story. He shows her another side of Paris on the eastern side: slum neighborhoods in Belleville at a time when Communism was rising.

One thing both Australia and Paris call for is the kind of quiet “daring” Grace Woods possessed, learned from a hardworking life gathering up sheep and wheat and enduring tragedies.

The novel opens with a brief Prologue dated 1922. Cryptic, it’s soon followed (page 18) with another hint about the mystery of her identity. Just enough of a clue to keep the reader guessing until it’s resolved much later.

Grace was blessed with a physique that could “show off the most desirable clothes in the world to the richest, most glamorous, and most demanding inhabitants.” Ravishing gowns made with the most extravagant materials that required modeling them with exquisite sophistication, including an ability to “disguise the complexity.” Grace’s early years taught her how to hide complex secrets.

At Dior, she models for celebrities like Princess Margaret, Jackie Bouvier (before she became a Kennedy), the Duchess of Windsor, and the red-headed “Love Goddess,” actress Rita Hayworth who had a traumatic childhood as did Grace. You’ll also be treated to other famous people, such as Pablo Picasso, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Child, and lesser-known Evangeline Bruce, the elegant, finely dressed, socialite wife of the US Ambassador to France back then.

When Grace came to Paris she’d self-imposed a protective bubble because of what she’d been through. Eventually, she decides to enter the heady world of Paris’ legendary cafes, nightclubs, bars, and a ball. She’d already been dazzled when she’d left her isolated farm to visit a palatial hotel in Sydney to hear her father’s close friend Sibby play glorious classical music on the piano. Grace adored him; he called her Princess. In Paris, she becomes a fashion princess at Dior who “revolutionized” women’s fashions in the post-war years with the New Look. Dior saw in Grace a “cleaner, brighter outlook compared to that of the ‘tired people’ of Europe.”

During the postwar years, Dior was the “most important courtier alive today,” a statement that reminds us that by this time Coco Chanel had been rumored (and arrested) for being a Nazi spy. His New Look was characterized by “tiny, cinched waists” and “voluminous skirts” using “sinful yards of sumptuous fabrics” coming after five years of rationing, still going on.

Grace Woods experienced the impact of the war on Australia, reflecting the history of Australians helping England during the War.

Imagine what Grace felt like when fitted for an “ice-white ball gown with a tightly fitted satin bodice, a tiny waist, and a skirt composed of an unheard-of-quantity of silk organza and tulle”? With “mother-of-pearls, rhinestone beads, and sequins, each one painstakingly sewn on by hand.” Grace’s sadness lifts, but she doesn’t forget the secrets she carries.

Partaking in some of what Paris offered awed her. Like the Left Bank’s Le Chat Noir, where “a grander type of bohemian” clientele gathered, where artists, philosophers, and authors hung out. That’s where she meets Jacqueline Bouvier who befriends her, perhaps seeing their mutual elegance. Jackie’s appearance gives us a charming picture of the type of woman Grace was.

This is a novel you wish doesn’t end. Thankfully, we can look forward to Joel’s next novel, The Royal Correspondent, when it reaches America’s shores.

Lorraine