Joanna Biggar

I think the author did a terrific job with this novel. It's of a newpaper journalist who did a series of stories about the women with whom she spent a year in France. Her editor wants her to do another series about the same women, only quite a few years later. Here's the rub. One of the original women has now completely disappeared. It's up to this journalist to try to figure out what happened to the missing woman, Melanie, while finding and interviewing the other remaining women.

I loved how the author created this story in small chapters, making it fairly easy to read although there are many characters. The characters are vivid and interact in various ways in an impressive display of managing a complex plot.

A fun aspect of this story was that it took place originally in the late 1960s, early 1970s, so it took me back to a time to which I could well relate.

This novel was based on a previous novel by the same author with the same women friends. If this novel is any indication of how good the previous novel was, I need to go back and read that one, too!… (más)

I liked the idea of this book, and the book itself was a lovely object but the contents disappointed me.
I enjoyed the descriptions of places, food, drink, buildings – inanimate objects – but found it difficult to remember the different characters – who was who and who paired with whom – and surely people should be easier to distinguish? I’m a reasonably intelligent reader and have had no trouble coping with considerably more than five characters in other books but it took me a good way into the story before I could remember which character went with which name.
The narrative style seemed inconsistent; sometimes the story was told from the narrator’s viewpoint – what J.J. could reasonably have observed or learned from conversation – and the next paragraph is written as if she is inside the head of another character and knows exactly what that character has thought and done.
This was an exciting and interesting time in history, and to spend a year in studying in Paris would have been a fabulous dream for me, but this book made it seem almost dull and unpleasant.… (más)

This is the story of 5 young American women spending a year studying in Paris, in 1962. JJ, the narrator, is recounting their experiences 10 years later, in a talk to students at her fomer US college.

The appearance of the book was a bit contradictory, a thick trade paperback with an attractive cover but rather nasty thick, poorly cut paper inside. I liked the artwork which drew me to the book, but I was very put off by the blurbs on the back and inside covers, signed by writers or critics I’ve never heard of with references to Proust, Malraux, Colette, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir (no Zola, Mauriac, Sagan?) I really like some of those French literary greats but this seemed unlikely to be a new addition to the canon.

It turned out to be quite a good read – no literary masterpiece despite the references, and I don’t even remember there being much about the writers mentioned in the novel. This is a sort of coming of age story, with a bit of Parisian atmosphere, love affairs, future dreams and teenage angst. It’s quite long and some of the presentation doesn’t make sense – how would someone have time to tell the whole story in one talk. While reading, I cared what happened, although I’ll soon forget it.

With a better known publisher and a tough editor to rein in some self indulgence, I think Biggar could write intelligent commercial fiction.… (más)

From the publisher's description...

"A group of young Americans, inspired by the revolutionary ideas of André Malraux, the sensuality of Colette, the existential angst of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, and the feminist theory of Simone de Beauvoir, arrive seeking adventure and fun. [...] As they move from the grueling demands of the Sorbonne by day to late nights of discovery in smoky cafes, they learn that seduction is intellectual as well as sexual."

Oh, my. Five young American women-- students abroad from an all-female college in California-- drunk on Colette, de Beauvoir, and the Existentialists. All during the watershed of 1962-63. Could it get much more fun? I couldn't wait to read this book.

Alas. The five classmates are jejune and silly things, not in that charming way youth can sometimes be, but in a vain, shallow way that does not bode well for later character development, real or literary. And they're nearly indistinguishable; I found myself reminded of the old Archie comic books, wherein Betty and Veronica are drawn identically except for hair color and outfit. The one exception is the poor, ethnic (Italian! gasp!) "ugly" classmate, of course the brainy one, who is continually tormented by her own lack of sex appeal.

The girls (and they are girls) seem to spend most of their time in Paris flirting with suitable or unsuitable men, savoring or worrying over petty social triumphs and slights, or losing their virginity in picturesque places. They seem to have nearly no intellectual curiosity, and when the occasional reference to Baudelaire or Colette or Pascal comes along, it's jarring in its incongruity. No scenes of scholarly discussion among them, no delirious private moments of literary discovery, no passion beyond painting themselves as sophisticates to be desired or admired.

Two more things that I just have to mention. One, and I think another reviewer has already mentioned this, is that the classmates are not merely apolitical, but anti-political. It's 1962-63, and their male friends (who I also had a hard time telling apart) are variously involved with the civil rights movement, the Left, etc. The girls are downright contemptuous of it all. This might be consistent with their silly selves, but this book is narrated by one of them ten years later, in 1972 or 1973. You'd hope that the political upheavals of the decade would have affected the narrator enough to remark at least once about their privileged ignorance back then, but nope. Two... is it really necessary to quote "yes I said yes I will Yes" not once, not twice, but four times (or is it five?) when assorted characters are about to have sex? None of them seem to have the wherewithal to have read Ulysses anyway, and the repetition is cloying.

The only bright spot is that Biggar can handle a sentence reasonably well. I rather liked her descriptions of Paris.… (más)