The Hungarian Lantern

 

 

July already - how can this be possible?! The weeks have flown by as I concentrated on the new novel, but The Lantern is still coming out in various translations. Here's the latest, in Hungarian, from the prestigious Budapest publishing house, Gabo.

I know some of you are as fascinated by book covers as I am, the way different countries use different marketing images for the same story, and this is an interesting one. It took me a while to work out that the night sky is actually an inverted lavender field. I do quite like it - it's definitely relevant to the novel, and the effect is weirdly creepy.

They've also played up a fantastic blurb quote from Tatiana de Rosnay, whose books are huge sellers all across Europe. This is what she wrote for the US and UK editions:

“I absolutely adored this beautifully written, modern Gothic novel, set in Provence, full of scents, colors and mystery. It will hook you in from the start and weave its dark, lush magic around you.”

—Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept 

 

So, thanks again, Tatiana!

The House I Loved

That night, when the house was asleep, I fetched a candle and I found that map of the city you used to like to look at. I rolled it out flat on the dining-room table, taking care not to spill any wax. Yes, I could see it, the inexorable northern advance of the rue de Rennes sprouting straight from the Montparnasse railway station to us, and the boulevard Saint-Germain, a hungry monster creeping westwards from the river. With two trembling fingers I traced their paths until my flesh met. Right over our street.

                              From The House I Loved by Tatiana de Rosnay

Anyone who knows what it is to love a house and a setting will empathise with Rose Bazelet in this haunting novel. The place is Paris, the year 1869. The city is being redeveloped on an unprecedented scale: by order of Emperor Napoleon III, whole neighbourhoods are being torn down to make way for Baron Haussmann’s vision of modernity.

Magnificent centuries-old homes, landmarks and churches are not spared. Streets are being hacked into rubble by armies of workers with pickaxes. But in one house, Rose Bazelet waits and refuses to go. The Bazelets were property owners; the house is her life, her place in the world and sanctuary, and that of her late husband Armand, to whom she writes the letters that tell her story.

Isolated in what is rapidly becoming “a chilly ghost land”, Rose remembers the grand house as it once was, with “a soul, a heart, living and breathing”; the dining room with its emerald-green leaf pattern wallpaper and gold, crimson and violet panes of stained glass in the windows; the view out onto the rue Childebert and the Erfurth fountain (image below).

 

Tatiana de Rosnay has a real gift for the telling descriptive detail. The prose is perfectly judged and brings the background to searing life. Lyrical and nostalgic passages – especially those of the cut flowers which I took to represent doomed beauty - are unsettled by harshly vivid scenes of the new world outside Rose’s walls: the noise and stinking clouds of dust, the soot from destructive fires, the grit in the mouths of parched onlookers.

Bitter-sweetness for the reader, too. We know that Haussmann’s new streets and six-storey buildings will make the city arguably the most beautiful in the world. Yet we are witnessing the human cost of the transformation. The failed protests. The unlikely alliances and comrades- in-arms. The sheer stubbornness of the spirit when there is nothing more to lose.

Throughout it all, we learn more of Rose’s relationships with her husband, her children and the unlikely friends she has made late in life after his death. Compelling and deceptively easy to read, it’s a multi-layered book about strength and family, a literary novel to be savoured rather than rushed through simply for the story – although I found that both satisfying and poignant too, especially when I read the final page, an extract (a real one?) from Le Petit Journal newspaper.

And if it’s a mark of a good read that you want to find out more about the book’s historical basis, then this is a great one. The next time I’m in Paris, admiring the boulevard Haussmann and the other grand streets that cut so confidently through the city, I will pause a while and imagine the other Paris, gone forever. Here is a contemporary picture, Percement de la rue de Rennes; and below it a corner of the boulevard Haussmann:

A Secret Kept

 

“He remembered waiting for the tide. Waiting for hours for the Gois causeway to appear beneath the slowly receding waves. And there it was at last, cobbles glistening with seawater, a four-kilometre amphibian road dotted with high rescue poles with little platforms for unfortunate drivers and pedestrians stranded by the upcoming flood.”

                                                          From A Secret Kept

The Gois causeway to the Ile de Noirmoutier, off the west coast of France, is a powerful symbol in Tatiana de Rosnay’s compelling new novel A Secret Kept. It is the old link to the island, and also a family’s link to the past – a past that, like the causeway which is daily submerged, cuts them off and must be approached with caution.

Antoine Rey is a successful but troubled architect, from the buttoned-up higher echelons of Parisian society. His much-loved wife has left him for another man, and his teenage children are wrapped up in their own worlds. In an attempt to recapture happier times, Antoine takes his younger sister Mélanie to Noirmoutier as a birthday surprise. Their childhood summers were spent on the island, though neither has been back for decades.

At the heart of the story is their mother Clarisse, who died when Antoine and Mélanie were young children. Clarisse, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, haunts this story, remembered but never appearing in the book, a constant but unknown and unsettling figure. When, surrounded by the beauty of the island, Melanie experiences a disturbing resurgence of a long-ago memory, it leads to near-disaster, and in the following days the life of everyone concerned begins to unravel.

As old memories surface and new facts are discovered in the present day, Clarisse becomes as mysterious to her children as she is to the reader. For this is a novel about communication: a family’s inability to communicate through the generations, and the legacy that leaves.

UK Edition

It’s a beguiling and lyrical book, with the perfect pace of a thriller, though its strength doesn’t lie so much in the unveiling of the secret that has been locked away, but in the investigation of the mysteries of human relations and families. All the relationships are tested, as each character proves hard to read by another, even the brother and sister, who have always been close. The mid-life crisis of Antoine Rey is realistic, honest and painful as he confronts the past and dares to look beneath the surface for the first time.

What I loved most about reading this novel, though, was to do with language. The author is a French citizen, who lives in Paris, but is half-English with Russian blood; until this one and her previous, hugely successful, novel Sarah’s Key, she wrote in French. But even now that she has now changed to English, she retains a French sensibility and writes in many ways as a French writer would. It’s a subtlety I find fascinating. This is no meticulously researched facsimile of French people at home in France – this is simply the real deal, the real France of a certain milieu.

It feels at times like a foreign novel, from the phrasing, to the attitudes of the characters, to its very structure and themes. Indeed, de Rosnay is currently the third bestselling author throughout Europe, after Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson. If you want authentic insight into how the French think and behave, this is the novel for you – with not a word or shade of meaning lost in translation.

The Lantern is lit

So where does all that determination to write get you? With a finished manuscript and months of waiting and hoping, followed by the gradual fading of optimism into resignation? Believe me, I’ve been there. Perhaps I’ll tell you, another time. But just sometimes – unexpectedly, incredibly – events move faster and more positively than you ever dared hope.

I didn’t intend to write anything that sat nearly as appositely with the previous post, but a parcel arrived from HarperCollins in New York this week. Inside was a gift-wrapped book: the US Advance Reader’s Editon of The Lantern. Suddenly, it was the moment you sometimes think will never come, even as an experienced author, thoughout all the long months and years of writing and rewriting and editing, then waiting for a verdict from agent and publisher.

But come it has, and with it a special sea-green package encasing a book with a shimmering cover. The front image shows a gate such as Hitchcock might have filmed and its peacock sheen makes an unearthly light against the dark background, which my photography doesn't do justice.



This is an early edition. The cover may or may not be changed before publication at the end of August, and the UK edition will be quite different. But the excitement starts here, and it is very exciting, not least because this is the first time one of my novels is being published in the USA.

And there’s icing on the cake – not just a scraping, but a huge drift of lovely topping, far more than I ever dreamed. I’m completely amazed and delighted beyond words that these very fine and very generous writers, New York Times bestselling authors all, have read The Lantern and sent these endorsements:

“I absolutely adored this beautifully written, modern Gothic novel, set in Provence, full of scents, colors and mystery. It will hook you in from the start and weave its dark, lush magic around you.”

—Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept

“With The Lantern, Deborah Lawrenson delivers a feast of sights, sounds and smells that grow and change and linger, like a wonderfully complex perfume.  I was captivated by this marvelous, haunting book—at times vivid and lush, at times provocative and chilling.”

—Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

“The Lantern is a seductive mixture of a Gothic ghost story and a modern romance that unfolds in a marvelous, crumbling Provencal farmhouse. If the story doesn't keep you up all night reading, the sharp and beautiful descriptions of the South of France will.  Deborah Lawrenson has written an alluring, dark novel that will haunt you and leave you wanting more.”

 —Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology