The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
by Paula Fox
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In this elegant and affecting companion to her "extraordinary" memoir, Borrowed Finery, a young writer flings herself into a Europe ravaged by the Second World War (The Boston Globe)In 1946, Paula Fox walked up the gangplank of a partly reconverted Liberty with the classic American hope of finding experience or perhaps salvation in Europe. She was twenty-two years old, and would spend the next year moving among the ruins of London, Warsaw, Paris, Prague, Madrid, and other cities as a show more stringer for a small British news service.In this lucid, affecting memoir, Fox describes her movements across Europe's scrambled borders: unplanned trips to empty castles and ruined cathedrals, a stint in bombed-out Warsaw in the midst of the Communist election takeovers, and nights spent in apartments here and there with distant relatives, friends of friends, and in shabby pensions with little heat, each place echoing with the horrors of the war. A young woman alone, with neither a plan nor a reliable paycheck, Fox made her way with the rest of Europe as the continent rebuilt and rediscovered itself among the ruins.Long revered as a novelist, Fox won over a new generation of readers with her previous memoir, Borrowed Finery. Now, with The Coldest Winter, she recounts another chapter of a life seemingly filled with stories a rare, unsentimental glimpse of the world as seen by a writer at the beginning of an illustrious career." show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Short, tight and affecting prose pace a journey through Europe a year after WWII. Beautiful travel writing; makes me want to go on a journey.
I asked library to reserve The Coldest Winter, a book about the Korean War, and they sent me this one. Same title but this one, a pallid, bloodless wandering memoir covering a 22 year old's travels in Europe post WW2. Best feature--it's short. How could someone who went thru those times remember only the inane. Or maybe she thought someone had already written everything else.
I wanted to really like this, but had a hard time. It was perhaps too spare, the writing distilled a little too much for my taste. I found it interesting the things that made impressions on her. They seemed somewhat random. I wish she had added photo credits, identified photo contents and used captions. I found myself curious to know when exactly she had written this, recently, many years after the actual experiences, or closer in time to 1946 and just recently published it.
This is a perfect book. Quiet, exquisitely lean choice of exactly the right word and image and thought and feeling at exactly the right time, evocative
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47+ Works 8,937 Members
Paula Fox was born in Manhattan, New York on April 22, 1923. She briefly studied piano at the Juilliard School and spent 3 years at Columbia University but didn't graduate. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a salesgirl, a model, a worker in a rivet-sorting shop, a lathe operator at Bethlehem Steel, and a teacher of troubled children. She show more wrote books for children and adults. Her children's books included Maurice's Room, Traces, Blowfish Live in the Sea, One-Eyed Cat, and The Eagle Kite. She received the Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer in 1974 and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her body of children's work in 1978. Her books for adults include Poor George, The Widow's Children, A Servant's Tale, and The God of Nightmares. Desperate Characters was adapted into a film starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. She also wrote two memoirs entitled Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe. She died on March 1, 2017 at the age of 93. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Gallimard, Folio (5621)
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- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.58)
- Languages
- English, French, German
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- Paper, Ebook
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