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The House in Paris

3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 · rating details · 586 ratings · 96 reviews

One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most artful and psychologically acute novels, The House in Paris is a timeless masterpiece of nuance and construction, and represents the very best of Bowen’s celebrated work.

When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her gra...more

Paperback, 269 pages

Published April 9th 2002 by Anchor (first published 1935)

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Best Books of the Decade: 1930s

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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Books About Paris

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Jul 28, 2007 Ryan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: mebbe_later

I tried, man, I really tried to get through this fucking thing. Got about 3/4 and my friend asked what it was about. I told her, and she said, "That sounds really good." So I slammed it closed and said "Take it."

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Mar 16, 2009 Christina Stind rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-2006-edition, 2009, fiction, 1294-books-all-3-lists

It was an unexpected joy to read this book. I got it because of a bookclub read and had never heard of it before. But within very few pages I found myself drawn into the world of Leopold and Henrietta, two children who happens to meet in a house in Paris.
The book is seperated into three parts - present, past and present again. Henrietta is a young girl going from England to visit her grandmother and has to spent one day in a friend of her grandmother's house in Paris while waiting for the next t...more It was an unexpected joy to read this book. I got it because of a bookclub read and had never heard of it before. But within very few pages I found myself drawn into the world of Leopold and Henrietta, two children who happens to meet in a house in Paris.
The book is seperated into three parts - present, past and present again. Henrietta is a young girl going from England to visit her grandmother and has to spent one day in a friend of her grandmother's house in Paris while waiting for the next train. Here she meets Leopold, a young boy who was adopted when he was a baby and now is in Paris to meet his mother for the first time.
This is the present part - then the novel shifts to the past part where we meet Leopold's parents and find out why Leopold was adopted away. After having enjoyed Henrietta's and Leopold's banter, it was a bit hard to get into this part but once it got going, I really enjoyed it - and the story of Leopold's parents was very, very interesting.
After we've heard the story of Leopold's parents, we are back in Paris with Henrietta and Leopold - and a very interesting plot twist that I did not saw coming at all.
This was a very good book - the people in it felt so real, especially the two children. They were so amazingly well-written that they jumped off the pages. And the story was so good and convincing that I'm sure I want to read it again - and I've put it on my favourites shelf. Only bad thing about it is that it's very short - and I'm a sucker for long books - but on the other hand, this book contained a big story in a few pages and it was so complete that there was no need for any extra pages. It is just perfect as it is - and I loved it.
But at the same time as it is complete and perfect, you are left with a lot of questions. Why did Max do what he did - and why did Ray do what he did in the end? How could Karen and Naomi remain friends? What role did Naomi's mother play in it all? Did she in some way orchestrate everything? What is Naomi's relationship with Henrietta's grandmother?
But these questions just makes the book more perfect - you don't have to get it all explained - you just get a brief view into these people's life - and it's a great, brief view.(less)

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Feb 23, 2009 Marigold rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm just not sure how I feel about this book! E. Bowen writes brilliantly in that detached, British pre-war kind of way, leaving questions strewn in her wake! OK, so in a very cold & detached way, this is about innocence, betrayal, sex, death, lies, & what horrible things may await the children who learn about all these before they're ready to deal with them. (Leopold is clearly the literary son of that creepy little boy in The Turn of the Screw.) But what happens to Henrietta as a resul...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Lobstergirl rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: cornichon peelers

Shelves: fiction

"In the first rank of the brilliant women writers," asserts the New York Times blurb, offensively. Actually Bowen is in the first rank of the brilliant writers. Her craftsmanship is exquisite, she is masterful at having her characters express the perfect emotion, and if there's a writer of adult novels who can write from a child's vantage point better, I don't know who it is.

The House in Paris is divided into three sections. The first and last, titled "The Present," take place over the course of...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Rhonda rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who likes British women's lit beyond Woolf

"But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time."

What a coincidence--I just stumbled onto this group at the precise moment I'm reading The House in Paris! In the 90s, I wrote my diss on Bowen and other neglected British women authors (Olivia Manning, Storm Jameson, Antonia White, Betty Miller [Jonathan's mother:], Rebecca West), but mainly Bowen; she was my portal into the work of these women writing in Woolf's shadow. Last week, I reviewed Victoria Glendinning's biography of Bowen a...more "But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time."

What a coincidence--I just stumbled onto this group at the precise moment I'm reading The House in Paris! In the 90s, I wrote my diss on Bowen and other neglected British women authors (Olivia Manning, Storm Jameson, Antonia White, Betty Miller [Jonathan's mother:], Rebecca West), but mainly Bowen; she was my portal into the work of these women writing in Woolf's shadow. Last week, I reviewed Victoria Glendinning's biography of Bowen and was reminded that for all her resemblance to James, Bowen was an Impressionist, which approach Glendinning attributes in some degree to the fact that Bowen was extremely nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses. Thus those long, blurry, inferential descriptions of landscapes and interiors, as well as the extremely detailed accounts of faces (Max's, for instance). As with James, the reader has to surrender to Bowen's primary sensibility of life with the lid on--what's going on inside, what heated it, what's radiating unseen, how powerful those invisible, usually unconscious motives. You have the easiest time if you just let her take you where she's going (right down to the bone); those moments when you suddenly find yourself trying to decode pronoun reference happen when you come up for air, try to frame what you're reading in some more familiar shape. You just get in your own way.
That said, I must also confess that The House in Paris is the one of her novels I remembered having tried twice to get through and failing both times, chiefly because Henrietta and Leopold didn't seem like children but like miniature adults. But this time, she got me with "It is never natural for children to smile at each other." Now I am loving what a workout she is. And planning to reread several others, the more obscure (Eva Trout, To the North) as well as my well-worn favorites, The Heat of the Day and The Little Girls.

P. S. The end is brilliant. She earns everything. I wouldn't spoil it for you even if I hated you.
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Apr 11, 2009 Lisa Vegan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Lisa by: Christina Stind

Shelves: fiction, orphaned-and-quasi-orphaned-kids, reviewed, novel

There’s a great introduction by A.S. Byatt, particularly interesting because it contained personal reminisces of multiple readings of the book.

I almost arbitrarily chose the star rating for this book. I’ve never had such a difficult time rating a book. Honestly, at times during reading it, I could have chosen anything from 1 to 5 stars. It was a bizarre reading experience for me. It’s the most exasperating book I’ve read in the almost 2 years since I joined Goodreads. With many books I’ve had a...more There’s a great introduction by A.S. Byatt, particularly interesting because it contained personal reminisces of multiple readings of the book.

I almost arbitrarily chose the star rating for this book. I’ve never had such a difficult time rating a book. Honestly, at times during reading it, I could have chosen anything from 1 to 5 stars. It was a bizarre reading experience for me. It’s the most exasperating book I’ve read in the almost 2 years since I joined Goodreads. With many books I’ve had a difficult time choosing whether to rate a book 4 or 5 stars or 3 or 4 stars or 2 or 3 stars, but I’ve never had any dilemma more challenging than that. If I wasn’t so compulsive about rating every single one of my read books, I’d be tempted to leave this unrated.

I had a difficult time getting used to the author’s writing style which was spare and unusual, but lovely too. I felt stupid while reading because the writing style made reading this book feel challenging for me, but I felt as though I shouldn’t find it difficult. Because her language was so precise, I caught at least some of her grammatical errors, notably split infinitives. The fact that I noticed such things in a novel meant I was sometimes almost bored or at least not completely engrossed. Despite the beautiful prose, it took some effort on my part not to skim at certain points, but I never wanted to stop reading.

The liberal use of quotation marks for all the dialogue was distracting for me until I became used to them about 2/3 through the book.

This book was full of melancholy. I enjoyed the two children Henrietta and Leopold; she doesn’t underestimate children, which I appreciated. She captures emotion very well, and pain and loss and how neglect feels, and childhood. However, I didn’t find her depictions of the motivations of some of the adults completely believable. There were many absolutely beautiful passages but overall the cohesiveness I wanted was lacking for me. My favorite parts were the beginning and the end.

Overall, this book was a challenge, but what I’m disappointed in is myself for feeling that way. I’d like to say I’d read it again someday to see if I could get more out of it, but there’s just too many other books I’d rather read.

Edit: After reading and rating/reviewing this, after just a short time has elapsed, this book is growing on me more & more.
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Aug 17, 2012 Shovelmonkey1 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people with a stiff upper lip

Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: 1001 books list

Shelves: 1001-books, read-in-2011

I bought the 1940's penguin edition of this book which is really appealing in its simplicity. No gimmicks, bells or whistles. It has a minimalist post war cover and the most animated looking penguin logo ever. In hindsight perhaps the austerity was a nod to the emotional austerity shielded between the cover. Slightly less appealing is the back page with the author photograph. While I have no doubt that Elizabeth Bowen was probably a delightful woman, the photographer has managed to catch her in...more I bought the 1940's penguin edition of this book which is really appealing in its simplicity. No gimmicks, bells or whistles. It has a minimalist post war cover and the most animated looking penguin logo ever. In hindsight perhaps the austerity was a nod to the emotional austerity shielded between the cover. Slightly less appealing is the back page with the author photograph. While I have no doubt that Elizabeth Bowen was probably a delightful woman, the photographer has managed to catch her in a pose which has left her looking like Aunt Sally from the Wurzel Gummidge TV series which was probably not the look she was going for (I like to think she was aiming for worldly and erudite but falling wide of the mark).

I chose the House in Paris from the 1001 books list based on the name alone, as I knew nothing of the plot and being incredibly lazy did not bother to investigate prior to purchase. About Paris? hmmm, sounds lovely. It's not a lively book, nor is it particularly romantic or evocative of any kind of Parisian joie de vivre, and for the majority of the time I was reading I kept imagining all the characters with those impossibly clipped BBC accents that were so prevalent in the 40's and 50's amongst the upper middle classes ( if you don't know what I mean listen to the Queens speech). Needless to say this didn't help me to take them or their dilemmas more seriously.

I disliked Leopold and Henrietta and found Charles the plush monkey (who was only a toy) to be a far more animated and likeable character. As for the adults (who were responsible for the accidental conception of Leopold); I found their story to be the most emotionally neutered love story I've ever encountered. Max and Karen plan their lovers tryst with stiff upper lips and military precision leaving the story with the residual romance of an abandoned fish supper on a wet weekend in Barry Island. I suppose the saving grace is Madame Fisher; a sinister corpse-like, bed-bound figure who despite never making it past 15 degrees from the prone position, still manages to meddle in everyones affairs. Bowen has created a memorable villain here... who knew an old biddy in a bed jacket could be so scary?(less)

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Apr 05, 2007 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of Woolf and James

Elizabeth Bowen is an elegant stylist. It is almost as if each paragraph is a little work of art. The novel begins with two children, Henrietta and Leopold, meeting in a house in Paris. They are both only there in passing, yet over the course of an afternoon they have the shared experience of becoming privy to a dark secret and a cloudy glimpse into the world of the adults who surround them. Exhibiting brilliant shifts in viewpoints, the novel explores sex, identity, and lost innocence in skillf...more

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Feb 21, 2009 Monika rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001

I can't figure out how I feel about this book...it's beautifully written but the characters are not very likable, not one of them...well, except maybe Henrietta. But I still don't know how she fits into the whole story. The conversations and thoughts of the kids are too adult for kids their age and so one forgets that they are kids sometimes. Story line is good but the book left me feeling disturbed for a reason that I cannot pinpoint.

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Jun 04, 2012 Claire rated it 1 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book, I just didn't. It started out promising, the first section, of which there are three, was a little odd but the story seemed interested. However the middle section really let it down and it was such a slog to get through. The last section picked up a bit and I found myself looking forward to reading how it ended, but on the whole the book didn't excite me and I didn't like the writing style, plot or indeed any of the characters.

There were some things in the book that...more

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Nov 16, 2011 Richard rated it 2 of 5 stars

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulge...more Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulged with serious consequences. Many of them, in fact, and they continue to reverberate through the house in Paris...the lives of each person in the house start out the day without any portentous signs that, by the end of the day, there will be no one left standing unchanged.

My Review: Oh dear, oh dear, it's just no use. I can't like this book. It's sentimental, it's melodramatic, and I just didn't get off to a good start with it, since I detested Harriet the prim, smug little dumpling and abhorred wet, sniveling, spineless Miss Fisher.

The subtext of Harriet's grandmother's Sapphic affair with the invalid Madame Fisher, and the Big Reveal of Leopold's true connection to the Fishers, were not enough to make me change my low opinion of the book. Perhaps if I'd read it in 1935 I'd've been more enrapt. Here in 2011, not so much. I don't think Bowen was all that as a prose stylist, frankly, but I don't think the novel is her form. Her short fiction is far more limpidly written, and lucidly plotted. But still and all, the book isn't the worst I've ever read. I just wish it had been either shorter or longer. The middle section set in the past is awkwardly placed in the narrative, and the present-day bits don't really need it to make sense, so it should either be snipped out like an appendix or expanded to be a full narrative of its own.

Not recommended, but no travelers' advisories posted about it either. (Male readers take note, if while reading this book you feel an uncomfortable fullness in your abdomen, that's a uterus growing in response to your new, higher estrogen levels.)(less)

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Jun 08, 2011 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

I read this book while I was in Paris, which gave reading it a kind of chachet. I bought it at Shakespeare Books just across from the Notre Dame cathedral, which added another layer of meaning to it. The book is constructed in three parts, and has several different points of view. First, the present, through the eyes of a young girl who is spending a day at this house with an older woman friend of her grandmother. A young man visits unexpectedly at the same time, and a pithy and compressed narra...more

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Mar 04, 2010 Tal Goretsky rated it 2 of 5 stars

The amazing thing is how fast I read this book. The writing is so good that you just breeze right through it, even though it was written in the 1930s and is very challenging. I enjoyed the plot about a young precocious girl who spends a few hours one day in a mysterious house in Paris on her way to the countryside. What I hated is how annoyingly precocious the children in the book were - so freakin annoying! Most of the book is digestible, but the last fifty pages are the biggest pain in the ass...more

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Sep 08, 2012 Ali rated it 5 of 5 stars

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this through the literary blog hop giveaway in June. I think I may have read it before – but I am not sure – I happened to read a couple of reviews of it on other book blogs and both times the description of the book resonated strongly. The title was also very familiar and I knew I had read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen before I re-read it in July – so it’s possible I also read this one around the same time – probably twenty years ago now. I was so...more
I was lucky enough to win a copy of this through the literary blog hop giveaway in June. I think I may have read it before – but I am not sure – I happened to read a couple of reviews of it on other book blogs and both times the description of the book resonated strongly. The title was also very familiar and I knew I had read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen before I re-read it in July – so it’s possible I also read this one around the same time – probably twenty years ago now. I was so looking forward to reading The House in Paris – I decided to start reading it just days after it arrived from the USA.
This is the third Elizabeth Bowen novel that I have read so far in 2012, and I think I love her. I loved this novel as much as The Death of the Heart – which I adored.
The House in Paris is almost mesmerizingly beautiful, at once haunting and quietly powerful. Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences are works of art, creating a mood and atmosphere that is actually tangible. This is the kind of book that is written to be read slowly and never at a gallop, it is a master class in understatement.
The first and third section of the book takes place over one strange day in Paris, where two children meet in a house in Paris. The house is that belonging to Mme Fisher, where once young ladies from England and America came to be “finished”, and where she now lives alone with her daughter Naomi. The Children are Henrietta and Leopold, Henrietta, travelling to her grandmother is eleven, and must wait out the day between trains at the home of her grandmother’s friend. Leopold a precocious nine year old is at the house to meet his mother, whom he has never met. Henrietta, travelling with her soft toy monkey Charles, is delighted to be in Paris, longs to see the Trocadero, but only gets to view the city from a taxi.
“They crossed the river while Miss Fisher was speaking. In a sort of slow flash, Henrietta had her first open view of Paris –watery sky, wet light, light water, frigid, dark inky buildings, spans of bridges, trees. This open light gash across Paris faded at each end. It was not exactly raining. Then passing long grinding trams, their taxi darted uphill: the boulevard was wide, in summer there would be shade here.”
In the house while Mme Fisher the ageing matriarch is dying upstairs, the children begin to get to know one another, watched over by an anxious Miss Fisher when she isn’t rushing away to her mother. Within the narrative which takes place in the present, not an awful lot happens, but the atmosphere of the house and its inhabitants is built up beautifully, and remains present throughout. Over the course of that one day, much is due to be revealed, the relationships between Henrietta, Leopold, Mme and Miss Fisher, Leopold’s dead father and absent mother are explored and slowly fully revealed through the larger middle section of the book which takes place ten years earlier.
The story of Leopold’s mother, Karen Michaelis a great friend of Naomi Fisher’s is a familiar one in some ways, and yet as told by Elizabeth Bowen it is entirely new. I don’t want to reveal this story here – as there may be people wanting to read it themselves. Leopold’s parents are seen at a distance of ten years, with the image of a waiting child in an unfriendly house always in the back of the readers mind. Some of Bowen’s most beautiful writing is in the story of the lovers and their brief affair, which results in Leopold’s existence.
“At nine they went out and stood on the canal bridge; the band pavilion was empty, the chairs stacked up. Hearing the sea creep on the far beach, they walked that way, along the Ladies’ Walk. Along this tunnel of trees lights hung quenched under arching branches, rain glittering past, no June moths. On a bench back from the walk another couple of lovers blotted out, faceless, sheltered by the unfrequented night. On the embanked sea-front a house with a tower stood up; next door, in the lodging-house, someone played a piano, but then stopped.”
There is timelessness to this desperately touching story that captures perfectly the loneliness of childhood. Leopold and Henrietta yearn to be loved, they are innocent but with a burgeoning awareness of what is happening around them, nothing is yet fully understood. This is a novel that will live on in my mind for a long time, and also one I can imagine re-reading with as much pleasure as I read it this time.
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Mar 24, 2009 Leila rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-list, favorites-fiction

I'm torn between 4 and 5 stars. This book is a bit clunky in the beginning, but the development of the backstory and the Karen character in the middle of the book was interesting and unexpected and, for me, brought more life to The Present (parts I and III). Bowen describes inanimate objects in beautiful (and sometimes confusing) detail, but for the most part left me puzzling over thoughts and motives of the people in the book. Karen is the exception. While there is lovely prose throughout, my f...more

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Sep 07, 2007 Zilli rated it 4 of 5 stars

A friend of mine borrowed this and thought it was the best book she'd read in a very long time, but couldn't explain why exactly. I'm not entirely certain why it works either. The pacing is good, the story is fairly simple, but there are several things hinted at that are either never fully explained, or seem extraneous to the story. It's a fairly quick read, and a good introduction to modern fiction for people who may be a bit weary of it.

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Oct 12, 2009 Jayme VA rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

I did not know what I was getting into with this book and I was unsure about my star rating for this one. It took me a very long time to adjust to the writing style, and while that set the tone for the novel, I think it took away from the book overall for me.

Eleven year old Henrietta is staying with friends of her grandmother's while on her way to stay with her grandmother. At this house is also another child, Leopold. He is there to meet his mother for the first time. The two strike up a conver...more

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May 16, 2012 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bowen, irish-authors

One day in February two children meet, Henrietta (11) and Leopold (9), both are briefly visiting “The House in Paris” owned by Mme Fisher. Henrietta is on her way to her grandmothers and Leopold is waiting to meet his mother for the first time. The book is divided in three sections: (1) the “present” what happens in the house; (2) the “past” - the story of Leopold’s mother Karen as imagined in Leopold’s mind; and (3) the “present” which finishes out the day. This is such a strange and intriguing...more

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Jan 02, 2009 Caroline rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is extraordinarily good. I can't wait to read more of her. The novel takes place, essentially, in one day during the lives of two children who meet unexpectedly at a house in Paris. By the time the novel ends you learn learn so much about them and the adults surrounding them. It reminds me of Mrs. Dalloway. Just as good as that.

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Mar 18, 2013 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant portrayal of two lonely, smart, sensitive children who can intuit a great deal about people around them without understanding the convolutions of adult sexuality. It is in the tradition of European novels about female adultery, but here the real villain seems to be sexual repression. Two of the most powerful characters are elderly women, Mrs. Michaelis and Mme. Fisher, both of whom dominate and manipulate others, one by her silences, the other by her words. The characters who have bl...more

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May 19, 2012 Ruth rated it 2 of 5 stars

This may be my last Elizabeth Bowen. I read her Death of the Heart, some weeks ago. Had high hopes that this would be better. Her writing is lovely. Most of the time. Other times it seems straining too hard to be lovely. Many times I had to backtrack and reread in order to make a sentence scan into sense. Way too much mulling and discussing of the unmullable and undiscussable. Some things cannot be put into words, are best left for us to interpret through images and actions.

The little boy (whose...more

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Nov 12, 2011 Esdaile rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: bloomsbury-genre, my-library

A fair number of people writing about this novel in Goodreads have expressed extreme disappointment while others have expressed enthusiasm and others have said that they had mixed feelings about it. I feel the same. The story is in at least one respect very powerfully presented and in at least another respect a compilation of very poor writing indeed. a reader is likely to be confused and torn between rejection and attraction.

First the negative: Elizabeth Bowen's writing is pretentious and date...more A fair number of people writing about this novel in Goodreads have expressed extreme disappointment while others have expressed enthusiasm and others have said that they had mixed feelings about it. I feel the same. The story is in at least one respect very powerfully presented and in at least another respect a compilation of very poor writing indeed. a reader is likely to be confused and torn between rejection and attraction.

First the negative: Elizabeth Bowen's writing is pretentious and dated and the two are connected because her kind of pretentiousness what typical for its time. Pretentiousness in modern writing, it seems to me, is characterised by slickness, understastement, by the writer's showing how fast thinking and comprehensive he/she is, above and beyond ideological or religious commitment, regarding all commitments and even true passions from a height. Pretentious writing in Elizabeth Bowen's time, I would suggest, was marked by showing off an ability to "see below the surface" to be profound and cryptic in obervation and the recounting of observation, a tendency to the overstatement even to bathos, to show that one was of immense sagacity, to be unbound by conventions of chronological succession or mundane concerns, to be out-and-out intellectual. This novel is so intellectual (in the true sense of the word, of acting from mental observationa nd decsiion never from impulse or intuition or instinct) that even the children sound like Wittgenstein!
The writer does not manage to escape from under the coat tales of a far superior writer, Virginia Woolf, the influence, or at least the influence of the kind of writing which VW initiated, the intense observation of small moments, of repeated personal quirks: "Aunt Violet would lift off the tea-cosy by it sfrill and Uncle Bill raise the lid of the muffin-dish to see what kind of hot cakes there were today. The hot cakes were always running with butter: she would loook to see if he were pleased, he always was pleased.." Similarly to VW, the observation is all about a very small section of society at a very short moment of history. The other influence I think, and not a happy one, is that of Henry James. Elizabeth Bowden's sentences often have the same eccentric syntax but with her it looks like someone trying to write like someone else, with Henry James, we are confronted with a new and very compley style of narrative. Elizabeth Bowen also plays with the sequence of the story, like Proust. Much of this novel read for me like an unsuccessful attempt to follow in the footsteps of a superior predecessor.

And yet, and yet... The front cover of the Penguin edition is a detail from a painting by Adolf Menzel (en passant-where English publishers excel and Americans and French so often do not pass muster and where German publishers have often been- until relatively recently where I have noticed an improvement- simply abject and pitiful failures is in the matter of deciding on the design of front covers for paperback books)so entirely appropriate for this book and highlighting not only its smallness (not necessarily meant here as a negative criticism) but its devotion to detail,. its subtelty, its intensiveness. What I felt reading this book, the first novel of Elizabth Bowen that I had read, was that it would not surprise me in the least if this writer were a painter, and a better painter than a writer. The depicition of scenes, attention to detail, care for detail, adding words often repeated, like so mayn dabs of colour, capturing of moments, simple moments but intense and unforgettable ones, depicted often with reference to light and shade, tone and colour, is the writer's great strength. I would almost go so far as to say that you wil enjoy this novel as far or as little as you enjoy or do not enjoy looking at paintings.

There we have it-one the one hand, pretentious, too clever for its own good, too earnest for its own good, all intellect no red blood, all namby-pamby, extremely effeminite (never would anyone dream that this novel was written by anyone with a thimbleful of testosterone!) on the other hand drawn (and I mean pretty well literally drawn, she retruns to themse in the story like a painter retrurning to another corner of the canvas, another detail of the painted scene) with intense feeling, with a love and attention to detail that many more established writers could never achieve however hard they tried, so that the memory of thios novel will linger long after you may think you should have forgotten everything about it. Despite herself, Elizabeth Bowen "packs a powerful punch" all the the patience, the attention to the small moments of life. That maybe something she learned form Virginia Woolf too, namely how to use her eyes. Most of us, and that includes novelists, are half-blind most of the time. Elizabeth Bowen is anything but blind. Colour is more important to her than grammar and the obervation of charcater and reaction more important than telling a tale. She is for me a painter disguised as a novelist. Many of her descriptions read like painting turned into words-"Trees growing up here, and deep silent grass, make the walk round the ramparts dark green. Between the branches there were rifts of blue; the bright sea-lit day shimmered and broke in."
Awarding stars is too abitrary "It was ok" seems such an inadequate defintion-ditto "quite liked it". I award it three stars because I enjoyed this story not because I am much convinced by the writer's ability to tell a story and if it realism you are looking for let alone social realism, stay well clear, but because I empathise with the writer's attempt to capture small moments, hold them in her hand and say "look deeply at this". I sympathise with anyone who disliked this book and I sympathise who anyone who liked it. I have tried to make clear why. (less)

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Mar 17, 2010 Sharon rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: about-france

I'm always on the lookout for books set in Paris, which is why this one made my list. However, it was written in 1935 and set in the twenties, and I found it very dated. It told the story of a boy who had come to Paris to meet his mother. She had given him up at birth and never seen her. Another child is passing through the same house on her way to the south of France. This story covers the beginning and the end of the book. The middle section is the story of the boy's conception. This was all f...more

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Jul 20, 2009 Justin Evans rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I found this very uneven while I was reading it. Bowen is great with character, psychology and dialogue, but her 'descriptive' passages (of the "the golden sun shone brightly through the purple clouds on the ashy gulls, bleating from their magenta bills as the azure sky opened above their fluffy heads" variety) are just awful. The same goes for the 'metaphysical' passages, which are almost impossible to understand - not because the ideas are difficult, but because the presentation is **so** tort...more

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Apr 07, 2009 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001, old-school

Told in three parts, clearly delineated Present, Past, and Present again. The story of a boy born out of wedlock, and adopted out, who is to meet his mother for the first time. It then flashes back to the story of how he came to be, and how it is that his mother can't bring herself to come and meet him, for she dreads the past.

"While it is still Before, Afterwords has no power, but afterwords it is the kingdom, the power and the glory. You do not ask yourself, what am I doing? You know. What yo...more

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Jan 23, 2008 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this. Bowen writes beautifully, and the set-up of the story keeps you reading. The conflicts the characters face seem remarkably relevant today, even though the plot involves some now somewhat outdated morality concerns.

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Apr 15, 2013 Jennie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"how illness martyrized her -- he diagnosed her as prey to one creeping growth, the Past, septic with what happened. Knowing this, how should she not be ill?"

"Henrietta and Leopold shook hands for the first time, like people attempting some savage rite. His hand was nervy and dry. Their eyes dropped and they edged away from each other. Henrietta looked lost. Ray held his hand out and she put hers into it gratefully. His overwrought eyes held no reflection of her, but, bending, he said: 'Henriett...more

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May 23, 2011 Barksdale Penick rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book has a complex plot, with layers of relationships between the protaganists, none of whom are particularly likable. Except maybe the worrywort uncle in Ireland, whose imagined fears over being late for the arrival of a ship from England is portrayed in a very funny way. But while the book begins in quite an interesting manner, with two children thrown together in a house in Paris, it becomes melodramatic, at least for my sensibilities. I also found some of the writing a bit forced, as wh...more

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Jul 21, 2009 Nina Shockman rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have to admit: I love a good melodramatic, Edith Wharton-esqe novel with plenty of hand-wringing over lost innocence and the ruined lives that follow. That being said, I'm not sure whether to check the spoiler alert box or not. I loved this book but I realize it's not for everyone. Besides melodrama; there's humor, a couple of really cool kids, and a sinister interfering matriarch. Get the edition with the introduction by A.S. Byatt but don't read it until you've finished the book. Recommended...more

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Sep 16, 2012 kasia rated it 4 of 5 stars

It took me awhile to warm up to this book. The prose isn't as beautiful as that of Bowen's other works; it has that carefully wrought quality, but it just doesn't rise to the same level. What it does have though, is the trademark Bowen tip-of-the-iceberg quality, where what seems like a drawing room story turns out to have quite the murky depths. It's somewhat confusing and strange at first, but turns out to be quite brilliant.
More detail (with spoilers) on the blog.

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