Paris was the Place
by Susan Conley
Synopsis:
With her new novel, Paris Was the Place (Knopf, 2013), Susan
Conley offers a beautiful meditation on how much it matters to belong: to a
family, to a country, to any one place, and how this belonging can mean the
difference in our survival. Novelist Richard Russo calls Paris Was the Place,
“by turns achingly beautiful and brutally unjust, as vividly rendered as its
characters, whose joys and struggles we embrace as our own.”
When Willie Pears begins teaching at a center for immigrant
girls in Paris all hoping for French asylum, the lines between teaching and
mothering quickly begin to blur. Willie has fled to Paris to create a new
family, and she soon falls for Macon, a passionate French lawyer. Gita, a young
girl at the detention center, becomes determined to escape her circumstances,
no matter the cost. And just as Willie is faced with a decision that could have
dire consequences for Macon and the future of the center, her brother is taken
with a serious, as-yet-unnamed illness. The writer Ayelet Waldman calls Paris
Was the Place “a gorgeous love story and a wise, intimate journal of
dislocation that examines how far we’ll go for the people we love most.” Named
on the Indie Next List for August 2013 and on the Slate Summer Reading List,
this is a story that reaffirms the ties that bind us to one another.
Release date: August 7, 2013
Pages: 354
ISBN: 978-0-307-59407-5
Buying links:
Author bio:
Susan Conley is a writer and teacher. Her memoir, The
Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011), chronicles her family’s experiences in
modern China as well as her journey through breast cancer. The Oprah Magazine
listed it as a Top Ten Pick, Slate Magazine chose it as "Book of the
Week," and The Washington Post called it "a beautiful book about
China and cancer and how to be an authentic, courageous human being."
Excerpts from the memoir have been published in The New York Times Magazine and
The Daily Beast.
Susan’s writing has
also appeared in The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts
Review, The Gettysburg Review, The North American Review, Ploughshares, and
elsewhere. A native of Maine, she earned her B.A. from Middlebury College and
her M.F.A. in creative writing from San Diego State University. After teaching
poetry and literature at Emerson College in Boston, Susan returned to Portland,
where she cofounded and served as executive director of The Telling Room, a
nonprofit creative writing center. She currently teaches at The Telling Room
and at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program.
Contact Information
My thoughts:
It is my habit to not read the cover excerpt of novels; I
prefer to just dig in. I was surprised
by the setting of Paris Was the Place; surprised in a good way and delighted to
read a novel dealing with an issue close to my heart. The plight of immigrants, especially illegal
ones first came to my attention while living in London. Perhaps because I was removed from the
politics of the United States I was more able to relate to the people
themselves. In any case, I was
horrified to learn that so many men, women and children were deported to return
to war torn and poverty stricken homelands and many faced certain death or
imprisonment on their arrival. It seemed
so unjust and innately uncivilized to return these people, most of whom were
hard working and upstanding members of their communities, deserved such extreme punishment because they had
broken the law in an effort to make a better life for themselves and their families. To me they were survivors not criminals,
despite the fact they had knowingly and willing broken the law. As my Grandmother used to tell me, when remembering her youth during the Great Depression, that sometimes laws are broken for a higher good than that which they mean to protect.
Paris was The Place is set in the 1980s and follows a group
of young girls awaiting trial, which will either grant them asylum or see them
deported to their native county.
Despite the desperate nature of these young women the author still
provides the reader with lush descriptions of Paris which magically transport
one to the wondrous City of Lights.
Another of the novel’s characters is Willie, a California
woman who comes to Paris for artistic inspiration, but finds herself working at
the immigrant center to assist the young women in the telling of their stories
so that they might receive asylum. Willie
herself is a complex multi-layered character rich with layers of personal
tragedy. Willie’s own life story is what
fuels her empathy and invested interest in helping the girls at the immigration
center. Willie’s beloved brother, Luke,
is also living in Paris and whose health has been failing for some time when
tragedy strikes again. Like so many in
the 1980s Luke discovers that he has AIDS and very quickly succumbs to the
disease which was still an enigma to medical professionals who could do little,
if anything, for those afflicted. I myself
lost a dear friend in 1987 to AIDS and will never forget how rapidly my
vivacious friend with his infectious smile wasted away before my eyes.
One might imagine that since Paris was the Place touched on
issues so dear to my heart that I would be critical, but in truth all of the
characters were so human, so well crafted and the descriptions of their
struggles and triumphs so human that I was truly moved by such a rich well
crafted novel. A note of criticism never
passed through my mind.
I would highly recommend Paris was the Place as a well crafted story of humanity, flawed and unjust but full of beauty,
promise and hope.
I received this novel from France Book Tours for a fair and honest review.
thanks for your wonderful review! yes this book was really good
ReplyDelete