The House in Paris
by Elizabeth Bowen | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0385721250 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 0385721250 Global Overview for this book
2 journalers for this copy...
The House in Paris (1935) explores the disconcerting intelligence of children — and the complexities of their innocence — as they await the unfolding of the machinations of the adults around them. Part mystery, part melodrama, part modernist experiment with narrative time, the novel centers on two English children, Henrietta, age eleven, and Leopold, age nine, who meet in transit in the forbidding house of a dying, strangely sinister old French woman. Henrietta, whose mother is dead, is being shuttled to her grandmother’s house; Leopold has traveled from Italy where he has been raised by adoptive parents. In the drawing room of a stranger’s house in Paris, he is expecting to meet his mother for the first time. Despite the efforts of his chaperone to maintain secrecy, the mystery of Leopold’s secret, illegitimate birth and the puzzle of his parents’ identities unravel in the course of the single day. Throughout the novel, the complexities of adult interactions and motivations contrast sharply with the exquisitely rendered interactions between Henrietta and Leopold, whose journeys have become more internal and psychological than geographical. While the children await their fates, they gradually discover their own identities, a process through which they find one another unexpectedly, if only momentarily, indispensable. — Lisa Fishman in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
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