Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris / Paul Gallico
NY: Bloomsbury, 2022, c1963
320 p.

I've always known about this book but didn't read it until recently; I finally picked it up when this movie cover edition crossed my desk at the library. It's a fairly short book but it was a delight to read. It was published in the 60s but there isn't too much in it that is terribly dated to ruin it, which is always nice. 

Mrs. Harris is a London char-woman who is always positive and down-to-earth. She has her regulars who she cleans for; some are lovely and some are, well, not so much. But when she's cleaning Lady Dant's apartment, she sees the most beautiful thing she's ever seen in her life: a Dior dress. She determines at that moment that she is going to have one, despite how ridiculous it sounds. 

And so she embarks on a savings journey, squirrelling away every extra penny and even going to the track. After two years of determination, she heads to Paris on her quest. But there is so much she doesn't know, like that you don't just walk into Dior like it's Woolworths and pick up a dress off the rack. But fortune favours the bold, and despite barriers in her way, she is put in the path of so many people who decide to help this charming lady. And she passes any help and good fortune she has on to others, too, taking joy in the small things of life and valuing love and connection. 

There are some events near the end that I wished the author had decided differently about, but in the main this is a charming book with a sense of joy and community, leaving you with a definite feel-good vibe. I thought it was full of the delight of Paris and of course of Dior and dressmaking in general -- there are employees and customers of Dior who befriend and help Mrs. Harris, and even a cameo by the great man himself. There are dreamy descriptions of dresses and fabrics and ateliers, as well as of the beautiful streets and markets of Paris. It's so lovely. 

I enjoyed this one so much that I immediately watched the new movie. Unfortunately it doesn't have the same uplifting charm; it highlights a little more of the disappointments and dissatisfactions in the story. It was a good film and Leslie Manville was great as Mrs. Harris, but there is no real 'edge' to the book while there is in the film, and perhaps it was because I had just finished the book two days before the film that I wasn't completely taken with it. I'd say that with this one, as with most book to film experiences, be sure to read the book first if you can ;) This edition also included a second novel, Mrs. Harris Goes to New York, but that one is missable. There is none of the charm of dressmaking and Paris, and it definitely loses something for it, becoming more sentimental than delightful. Stick with Paris and Dior and you'll enjoy the reading!

(this review first appeared on Following The Thread)

The Paris Seamstress

 

The Paris Seamstress / Natasha Lester

New York : Forever, 2018

453 p.

I knew I was going to have to read this one at some point -- I couldn't ignore the title or plotline, in which a seamstress from Paris escapes to New York during WWII and starts up a fashion line. However, I am getting a little read out on the WWII stories these days and so had put this one off for a while. 

But this month I finally got to it. It was a pretty good read, although the plethora of "WWII in Paris" novels do start to kind of blend together at some point. In this one there is the added intrigue of famous people who our main character slowly finds out are linked to her in inextricable ways. Lots of family secrets, dashing spies, political intrigue, romance, and of course a lot of sewing.

I liked the balance among all these elements. Estella is a young woman working in a Paris atelier when the war begins, and as things get more dangerous her mother, also a seamstress, basically sends her off to America with the sudden information that Estella had an American father. Estella heads out, still in shock from this revelation, with a suitcase and a sewing machine -- although she hustles down to the port with the sewing machine "banging against her leg" in one hand and the suitcase in the other. I wonder if the author experimented with carrying a 1940s metal machine in a clunky carrying case in one hand for any length of time, when it's described like this. And at one point Estella whips up a glamorous gold evening gown from leftover lamé, about 2 yards worth, in about 2 hours after a long day of work. A real Cinderella moment; I wish I could sew that quickly with such a little bit of fabric! 

But other than those small moments that gave me pause, I found the rest of the book realistic and believable. Estella's story is dramatic, with many strong characters surrounding her - her mother, her two best friends she meets on the boat over to NY, a socialite who looks uncannily like her which leads to a friendship of sorts, and of course her dashing love interest. She also meets many real people, like Elizabeth Hawes (author of Fashion is Spinach) and other fashion leaders of the day. Plus a couple of notorious characters of NY fame; this part was leaned on extensively and I didn't find it convincing at all -- and wonder if there are any descendants of those people who might take issue with the characterizations! 

But like most of these WWII novels lately, the book also has a dual timeline format. Estelle's story starts in 1940, and to me is the much stronger part of the book. We also have a 2015 timeline, in which Estelle's granddaughter Fabienne is discovering her grandmother's secrets just as Estelle's fashion house is being celebrated with an exhibition at the Met in contrast to Estelle herself, whose health is failing due to age. Fabienne thus has to manage the discovery of many secrets on the reader's behalf, including her father's birthright, and the war experiences of her grandmother. Fabienne is, of course, also developing a romance with a tall, dark, handsome, rich and tragic man, even though he's based in NY and she's currently based in Australia. 

Oh, the tangled webs here! Lester is good at creating a complicated, interwoven set of relationships and plot points, which she then resolves neatly by the end. It's a little predictable and the drama is cranked up a little too closely to melodrama once or twice (at least for me). But the settings -- both Paris and lively New York (7th Ave, the Barbizon, the Met and more) are well drawn and the characters are memorable. Overall there is a lot of compelling detail in it, both generally and in more specific sewing areas. I did enjoy it, although I think I'll move on from the genre for a while now. 

Chalk Circle Man

The Chalk Circle Man / Fred Vargas; trans. Sian Reynolds
New York: Vintage, 2010, c1991.
256 p.

I read this one as a break from darker, more serious books on my stack for this month. Also, because it was already on my shelves and very handy! Fred Vargas is the pseudonym for Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, a French historian, archaeologist and novelist.

This is the first book in her Commissaire Adamsberg series, and the first book by her that I've read. It was quite a good mystery, set in Paris among a group of eccentric characters. It is mostly character driven; the setting and plot play a role but the characters are the entire point of the story, at least for me, although the essential "Frenchness" of the narrative really shines through. 

Since it's the first in the series, we spend quite a lot of time getting to know Commissaire Adamsberg (an unusual policeman who works on intuition and hunches rather than Sherlockian logic) and his new sidekick, the highly educated but alcoholic Inspector Danglard -- single father to five and an erudite though homely man.

In this book, Commissaire Adamsberg senses that the eccentric "Chalk Circle Man" who has been drawing mysterious blue circles around lost objects in the streets of Paris is actually dangerous, not simply an obsessive or an anonymous artist making a statement. Adamsberg predicts that death will follow, and it does: 3 murders happen in quick succession.

But why? And by whom were these murders committed? Even though the bodies were found encircled by chalk circles, it seems too easy to say it was the deranged chalk circle man. Is someone using him and his circles for their own devices?

Adamsberg and Danglard have to puzzle this out, in light of incomplete information and time constraints, plus their very different ways of working. It's satisfying and surprising, and the relationships in the book are engaging (I particularly liked Danglard and his children). 

Alongside the main characters, we meet an ocean scientist, Mathilde Forestier, and the people she gathers around her, like her lodgers, a blind man named Charles Reyer and a strange little old woman, Clémence Valmont, whom Mathilde calls the Shrew-Mouse due to her unusual features and pointy teeth. All of these characters are unusual and quirky, but I found that it all worked for me very well. I started to wonder about all of them at one point or another, with their strange and inexplicable behaviours, their actions that are as unpredictable and random as those of real people. 

I really enjoyed reading this, with all its asides to describe people and their thoughts and longings and motivations. There is consideration of motive and of a grander sense of meaning in this one too. 

The detection isn't done clearly; it's as intuitive as Adamsberg himself. So while I was surprised by the conclusion, not having seen it coming, I didn't mind at all because I was enjoying the characters and the entire set-up to this series enough to be satisfied with this book. 

Some people have loved this; some have not. I enjoyed it enough to start looking for the second book in the series now, which unfortunately I do not have on my shelves yet!