Paris Never Leaves You
Page 24
George Orwell’s “Bookshop Memories” is not a book but an essay about the experience of working in a bookshop, which, according to Orwell, is pictured as a “paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios” only by those who have never worked in one. Orwell finds the customers boorish, more “first edition snobs” among them than true lovers of literature, the kind of people “who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop,” because that’s the only place you can hang about for hours on end without spending a penny. Nor do the booksellers who run these dusty pits of pretension and despair escape his scorn. He cites one bookshop’s ad for Boswell’s Decline and Fall and another’s for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot. But he does find one redeeming feature of the book trade. Bookshops, he predicts, can never be squeezed out of existence by large conglomerates. Orwell wrote the essay in 1936.
Influenced, perhaps inspired, by Orwell’s essay, Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, who on a whim and a bank loan ended up owning The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop, also manages to puncture every romantic fantasy about the joys of retiring to a bucolic village and living with and off books. Bythell spares no one. His is a granular, gimlet-eyed view of trying to run an old-world business in a new age with Amazon breathing down his neck and cutting into his meager profits. The frustrations are endless—but there are moments of joy, as well. The thrill of stumbling upon a book signed by Sir Walter Scott and another by Florence Nightingale. The pleasure of meeting customers who truly love books and not merely the idea of being a booklover. The passion of discovering an author or book he’d never heard of. This is a witty, waspish account of the horrors of running a bookshop by a man who clearly loves doing it.
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Reading Group Questions
1. Charlotte is continually trying to reassure herself that she didn’t really collaborate. She wasn’t dining on tournedos of beef and bottles of Saint-Émilion with Nazis. She never turned anyone in. Are there degrees of collaboration, and if so, how do you determine where to draw the line?
2. Was Charlotte right to raise Vivi believing a lie? If not, how and when could she have told her the truth?
3. Mr. Rosenblum, who has survived a concentration camp, absolves Charlotte of guilt. Hannah, who spends her life listening to tales of horror and trying to minister to those who have suffered it, refuses to forgive Charlotte. What do you think their different reactions are based on? Does someone who has not suffered have as great a right to judge as someone who has?
4. Julian believes he sacrificed honor, honesty, and his family to survive. If he had refused to serve in Hitler’s army would it have done any good?
5. Why do you think Charlotte answered Julian’s letters after the war and tried to help him?
6. The book begins with a quote from a young girl who lived in Paris during the Occupation about being able to hate in the abstract but not in individual instances. This phenomenon is generally recognized as an antidote to prejudice. If you live next door to a member of a minority, it is harder to hate that minority. How does this phenomenon apply to the hatred of oppressors and tyrants?
7. Charlotte spends a good deal of time worrying and talking about moral compasses—her own, her daughter’s, her late husband’s, her lover Julian’s. Hannah spends her time doing good. Can people who commit immoral acts be moral people? How does this relate to Hannah and Charlotte?
8. If your child was caught in a moral bind between turning in her best friend for cheating and ignoring the infraction, what would you advise her?
9. In the last scene in the book, Horace tells Charlotte she would have been better off if she’d stayed in Paris and suffered the consequences of her choices rather than getting off scot-free and spending the rest of her life punishing herself. Do you agree with this sentiment? Why or why not?
ALSO BY ELLEN FELDMAN
Terrible Virtue
The Unwitting
Next to Love
Scottsboro
The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank
Lucy
More Praise for Paris Never Leaves You
“A powerful exploration of some of the most profound questions about love and loyalty that resonates strongly today: What would you do to save your child? What is morality in wartime? How do we make peace with the past?”
—Christina Lynch, author of The Italian Party
“A beautiful novel that tells the bittersweet story of a young mother’s strength and survival during WWII. From a tiny bookstore in Nazi-occupied Paris to a postwar New York publishing house, Feldman effortlessly captures the terror, immediacy, and inextinguishable human spirit.”
—Noelle Salazar, author of The Flight Girls
“A vivid and precise portrait of Paris under German occupation, but it is also an exploration of the courage and cowardice of those bitter years, as well as offering a slyly persuasive love story. The swift, engrossing narrative conceals, in the best way, the fact that Feldman is also giving us a wise and troubling lesson about the great moral crisis of the last century.”
—Richard Snow, author of Iron Dawn
“A thrilling achievement … I was thoroughly drawn into a deep, rich, vivid world of engrossing characters and emotional and moral crises … a great piece of writing in every way.”
—Fred Allen, Leadership Editor, Forbes
“‘You weren’t there’—the words that will stay with me for a long time after reading Ellen Feldman’s magnificent story. This is a beautifully woven story of a mother and a daughter, survivors. One struggling with her identity, desperate to know who she is in a world that defined her by her religion, or did it? The other holding on to deception made under circumstances of desperation and conflict. Who are we to judge if we ‘weren’t there’?”
—Heather Morris, author of Cilka’s Journey and The Tattooist of Auschwitz
About the Author
Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Terrible Virtue, The Unwitting, Next to Love, Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (translated into nine languages), and Lucy. Her novel Terrible Virtue was optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film. Visit her online at www.ellenfeldman.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
An Interview with Ellen Feldman
Books Set in Bookshops
Reading Group Questions
Also by Ellen Feldman
More Praise for Paris Never Leaves You
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and event
s portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Feldman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design: Olga Grlic
Cover photograph: woman by Jeff Cottenden; background © Ratana21/Shutterstock.com; blur © Food Travel Stockforlife/Shutterstock.com; texture © Lubov Vis/Shutterstock.com; plane © Horst Kanzek/Shutterstock.com; Paris © Park Lane Pictures/Offset
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Feldman, Ellen, 1941- author.
Title: Paris never leaves you / Ellen Feldman.
Description: First Edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054415 | ISBN 9781250622778 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781250759894 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250622785 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: War stories.
Classification: LCC PS3572.I38 P37 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054415
e-ISBN 9781250622785
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: June 2020