The House in Paris (1935)

I know I said I wouldn't give up on this book, but much to my shame I must admit that I did....
It went so well, the past few books of the 1001-list I read were good, but this one was just a no go. I couldn't get past page 20, I wasn't interested in what was going on, couldn't get into the writing, the story.
Too bad.

This is quite a complex, psychological book. The first section in the voices of Henriette and Leopold was my favorite. The adolescent acts which drive the plot take up the middle and are difficult to read. Bowen's sentences and control are in such contrast to today's writing it can make for difficult but rewarding reading. ( )

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. ( )

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulged with serious consequences. Many of them, in fact, and they continue to reverberate through the house in Paris...the lives of each person in the house start out the day without any portentous signs that, by the end of the day, there will be no one left standing unchanged.

My Review: Oh dear, oh dear, it's just no use. I can't like this book. It's sentimental, it's melodramatic, and I just didn't get off to a good start with it, since I detested Harriet the prim, smug little dumpling and abhorred wet, sniveling, spineless Miss Fisher.

The subtext of Harriet's grandmother's Sapphic affair with the invalid Madame Fisher, and the Big Reveal of Leopold's true connection to the Fishers, were not enough to make me change my low opinion of the book. Perhaps if I'd read it in 1935 I'd've been more enrapt. Here in 2011, not so much. I don't think Bowen was all that as a prose stylist, frankly, but I don't think the novel is her form. Her short fiction is far more limpidly written, and lucidly plotted. But still and all, the book isn't the worst I've ever read. I just wish it had been either shorter or longer. The middle section set in the past is awkwardly placed in the narrative, and the present-day bits don't really need it to make sense, so it should either be snipped out like an appendix or expanded to be a full narrative of its own.

Not recommended, but no travelers' advisories posted about it either. (Male readers take note, if while reading this book you feel an uncomfortable fullness in your abdomen, that's a uterus growing in response to your new, higher estrogen levels.) ( )

Two children, unrelated and unknown to each other, arrive at a house in Paris for the day. One is merely on a journey to see her grandmother. The other is there to meet the mother he has never met.

The children's eye view of life, people, and each other is wonderful, although the younger child ultimately strikes me as more precocious in thought and language than I can quite believe.

The central story, of how the younger child came to be, is hypnotic, with protagonists of startling passivity and denial, but with passion and acute powers of observation. These qualities sound like contradictions, but are not - these people are helpless in their passions even as they observe their actions.

Beautiful writing, with strikingly creative use of language without any confusion of meaning.

Note: my book circle was quite divided about this book, some feeling the writing was awful and the book soppy and sentimental, some feeling more as I do. Although one of the members called this 'a woman's book', there were women who hated it and men who loved it. ( )