The Perfume Thief by Timothy Schaffert

The Perfume Thief by Timothy Schaffert

Published

Source: courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Clementine is a seventy-two year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down in 1930 and opens a shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.

Now it's 1941 and Clem's favorite haunt, Madame Boulette's, is crawling with Nazis, while Clem's people—the outsiders, the artists, and the hustlers who used to call it home—are disappearing. Clem's first instinct is to go to ground—it's a frigid Paris winter and she's too old to put up a fight. But when the cabaret's prize songbird, Zoe St. Angel, recruits Clem to steal the recipe book of a now-missing famous Parisian perfumer, she can't say no. Her mark is Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who wants the book and Clem's expertise to himself. Hoping to buy the time and trust she needs to pull off her scheme, Clem settles on a novel strategy: Telling Voss the truth about the life and loves she came to Paris to escape.

Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.

My Thoughts:

I've read all but one of Schaffert's books (and it's sitting on my bookshelf) so it will probably come as no surprise to anyone who's read my reviews of his books (The Swan Gondola, The Coffins of Little Hope, Devils In The Sugar Shop, The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters) that this is one of my favorite books of the year. Clearly I'm biased. But I'm not alone in my praise. 

• "Other authors have had clever takes on World War II spy novels, but none has created a voice like Clem’s..." - Los Angeles Times
• "The Perfume Thief is a pulse-pounding thriller and a sensuous experience you’ll want to savor." - Oprah Daily
• "Schaffert concocts a memorable work that oozes atmosphere and originality. . . It boasts beguiling characters who gain depth with each unveiled layer." - Book List

Kirkus Reviews is not so nice. They complain that the bad guys are not menacing enough and that the terrors are mostly offstage. To the first point, I disagree. There is a constant low hum of unease in this book because we understand what these men are capable of doing. To the second point, yes, terrors are mostly offstage; for that I was grateful. We've all read enough books about World War II and the Nazis to know that they did terrible, unspeakable things to people. We understand that trust is a hard thing to come by in an occupied city, where some people will do whatever they have to do to save themselves and others may well agree with the occupiers. There are an abundance of characters here Schaffert doesn't need to make that the focus of his book. 

Voss and Clem are playing a cat-and-mouse game and we're never quite sure who is the cat and who is the mouse. Schaffert could have crafted a book wherein his hero never made a misstep, where her plan worked perfectly and they were always one step ahead of the Nazis. But that's not this book. While Clem understands exactly what might happen to her and the people she cares about, she still believes that she is clever enough to outsmart Voss...until she isn't. I never once felt entirely comfortable. Kirkus Reviews is wrong - I spent this entire book worried that Voss was on to Clem, that Lutz would kill Zoe, that Day would push her luck just a bit too far. 

What Kirkus Review should have focused on was Schaffert's amazing (as always) characters. Clem is a character unlike any you've read before, with a story you've never heard before. Day, Blue, and even Voss have stories that could stand on their own. Or, instead of writing off the beauty of Schaffert's writing, they could have focused on his amazing descriptions and his beautiful writing.

"And the fields of war are full of ghosts who wish they could go back to that one split second that separates them from life and death. There've been so many lives undone by a misstep, a wrong turn, a hair trigger."

"Paris, our village, has fallen victim to a fairy-tale curse. The sun rises; the moon drops. The cogs of the clockworks tick-tock north-south, or east-west, in whatever direction they've always turned but time itself has turned to fog. The days: they don't seem short. They don't seem long. What day even is it?"

And, despite what Kirkus says, Schaffert does make us see what life in occupied Paris was like.

"The other night, we got our hands on a roasted chicken that was more likely some songbird, a back-alley jackdaw dropped by a slingshots. nWe cut into his plump breast and found it mostly empty, like he's died with his lung puffed up with a half-whistled melody. We ate the little bird like tender wolves, stripping it down to its skeleton, going so far as to break off bones to suck. Food is scarce in Paris, but the Nazis eat fine."

I recently said that a book was 100 pages too long, in no small part because it was overflowing with descriptions. But here Schaffert awakens every sense here and it never seemed to much. 

"My building has become a factory, a distillery, cellar to attic, a gasworks of copper pipes corkscrewing through the parlor's ceiling and up through the kitchen floor, winding around the bedposts, whistling like snakes with a lisp. The building's strange acoustics, and all the perfumery's pipes and vents, warp and bend our voices. Sometimes you can whisper in someone's ear from another room." 

"I suggest the ballet dancer (the scent o talc, sweat, leather, the sharp sour-sweet of roses turning to mold), and she says no. I suggest the journalist (typewriter ribbon, a struck match, the tart ash in the bowl of a hasish pipe) and she says no to that too."

"The tapestries and wallpapers, the sofas and chairs, are all in powder blues and rose pinks and sea greens, like dusty meringues in a pastry-shop window. Zoe grew up among antiques, probably tiptoeing across the Aubusson carpets women with portraits of unicorns in the fields of thistle. She sat in the walled-in rose garden behind the house hosting tea parties of her own, with dolls with human-hair pompadours and sait ball gowns, with felt mice in bow ties infesting her paper macarons and glass candy. Such a life."

 This is a book to delight the senses. It is also a book of truths and lies, love and hate, deceit, romance, secrets, forbidden love, and friendships. I loved it. It's the book I've been waiting months for. 

Tin Man by Sarah Winman

Tin Man by Sarah Winman
Published May 2018 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: from my local library


Publisher’s Summary:
 This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

 My Thoughts:
That’s not quite right. This is absolutely a love story. It’s just an unusual love story, complicated by loss, thwarted desire, and sacrifice.

The Guardian says Tin Man “is a story about alternative lives that might have been lived had circumstances been different.” Agreed. What if Ellis had been allowed to study art instead of being forced by his abusive father to work in a car factory? What if both Michael’s and Ellis’ mothers hadn’t died? What if Michael and Ellis had stayed abroad instead of returning to Oxford? What if there had been no Annie?

In just over 200 pages, Winman illustrates the many ways our lives could be different “if only” and how many ways there are to love someone. The first half of this book is told from Ellis’ perspective, looking back on his life with Annie and Michael. Ellis is a man so filled with sadness it is palpable but he is finally trying to work his way back to a better place when he is hit hard with the past. The second half of the book is Michael’s story which is filled with loss, fear, and longing.

Winman has written her story in such a way that it evolves something like a mystery, so it’s hard to say much about the book without giving away too much. This is unlike any book I’ve read before but I can’t help but think that it’s a story that’s been lived by too many people which is part of what makes it such a poignant story.

*On a side note, this is the second book I’ve read recently that involves gay men. I haven’t gone out of my way to look for them which makes me hope that their stories are starting to be considered “mainstream” and no longer a separate category of books.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Published May 2018 by Little, Brown, and Company
Source: bought for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.

My Thoughts:
I've started this review three times. What remains of two of those opening paragraphs can now be found at the end of this review. They included points I wanted to make but they didn't say enough about this book. This book that won the Pulitzer Prize despite being a book that includes humor that made me laugh out loud. How often do serious prizes award books like that? How did that happen? Well, it probably happened because Less is really so much more.

This is a travelogue, the story of a man reaching middle age and feeling that he hasn't accomplished anything, a tale of friendship, the story of one man's life. Less is, above all, a love story. It is filled with pain and sadness, it is self-deprecating and funny, it is filled with yearning for the past without hope for the future.

Poor Arthur. He is a man who feels broken in so many ways! He travels the world with a glass half empty view on life and finds, time and again, that life is full of surprises, some of them amazingly wonderful. As Arthur travels, Greer moves the book back and forth in time, effortlessly, so that we learn just how Arthur became the man whose most prized possession was a medium blue suit, lined in fuchsia - "There is no Arthur Less without the suit."

Greer is a master at painting a picture, using the mundane to make the scene come alive:

"It was the year the cicadas returned: less had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth. But now they returned: tens of thousands of them, horrifying but harmless, drunk driving through the air so they bumped into heads and ears, encrusting telephone poles and parked cars with the delicate, amber-hued, almost Egyptian discarded shells. Girls worse them as earrings. Boys (Tom Sawyer descendants) trapped the live ones in paper bags and released them at study hour. At night, the creatures hummed in huge choruses, the sound pulsing around the neighborhood And school would not end until June. If ever."

"...the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine, coffins and telephones, pet fish and cigarettes, hot tea and "homely" food, Communism, mattresses, handicrafts and dumbbells and gold by the ounce; the low, flat temples appearing at regular intervals like the colorful, elaborately frosted, but basically inedible sheet cakes displayed at Less's childhood bakery; the women sitting roadside with baskets of shimmering silver fish, terrifying manta rays, and squid, with their cartoon eyes; the countless men standing at tea shops, variety stores, pharmacies, watching Less as he goes by; the driver dodging bicycles, motorcycles, lorries (but few cars), moving frenetically in and out of traffic, bringing Less back to the time at Disney World when his mother led him and his sister to a whimsical ride based on The Wind In The Willows  - a ride that turned out to be a buckle-whitening rattletrap wellspring of trauma."

When we talk about reading more diversely, my brain always goes to the idea that I need to read more books by people of color. Which, of course, I do. What I tend to forget, in that conversation, are all of the books about people whose lives are nothing like mine, even though their skin color may be the same - inner city youths, back country "hill billies," and gay people. It's a shortcoming I'm going to work to remedy in the future. Because everyday I'm reminded that it's incumbent upon us to learn more about each other if we have any hope of understanding each other and coming together. And Greer taught me so much in this book.

I knew in 2009, after I read Greer's The Story of A Marriage, that I would read more books by Greer but for some reason I just haven't gotten around to it, even though I have two others on my Nook. It may be hard now to go back to those. Because Less won the freaking Pulitzer Prize for literature. I mean, how can those other books live up to that?! I suppose they may not. But, given my track record with Greer, I imagine they will still be well worth reading.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot this little gem that reminded me so much of watching baseball when my brother was playing and when my sons were:

"Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada."

It's a funny line but one that always reminds me how sad it was to watch those boys (including my younger son) who were stuck out in right field. They are so often the boys who have no interest in the sport, but whose parents so badly want them to be part of the team. Like Arthur's father, we parents often need to do a better job and finding the things that bring our children joy, instead of trying to make them fit into our expectations.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Published 1964 by University of Minnesota Press
Source: Care of Care's Online Book Club (see Care's review of this book here)

A Single Man is a single day in the life of George, a college professor in 1962 Southern California.  Because the book is only 186 pages long and only chronicles one day in a life, it might be assumed that not much would happen, that not much could be learned.  You would be wrong.  Isherwood packs a lot of life into this novella.

George is a sad, middle-aged man, trying to come to cope with his grief following the death of his lover and struggling with his conflicted opinions of his own self-worth.
In this day, George will teach a class; visit, in the hospital, the woman who tried to take Jim away from George; have dinner with a female friend; and enjoy a drunken romp on the beach with a student. 
George is an outsider--he is British, he is gay, he lives in a neighborhood filled with families.  George doesn't even feel like he fits in with the other professors in his department.  He is conflicted in so many ways.  "He does so hate unpleasantness" but he is deeply angry about what he thinks of a "The Enemy," developers, politicians, his neighbors, any one who is anti-gay.  George has even developed an internal persona, "Uncle George," who will orchestrate a terrorist retaliation who will fight back against everyone George feels is responsible for Jim's death.  But, no, George's British restraint will not let him go far with this line of thinking. The idea of actually teaching his classes appeals to him; at the beginning of class when he has prepared himself and before the students begin to lose interest.

"His lips curve in a faint but bold smile.  Some of them smile back at him.  George finds this frank confrontation extraordinarily exhilarating.  He draws strength from these smiles, these bright young eyes.  For him, this is one of the peak moments of the day.  He feels brilliant, vital, challenging, slightly mysterious and, above all, foreign.  His neat dark clothes, his white dress shirt and tie (the only tie in the room) are uncompromisingly alien from the aggressively virile informality of the young male students."

You may never read a book in which you learn more about a character.  George's struggles to define who he is are brilliant.  In the opening pages we see George "composing" himself in front of a mirror, literally putting on the face he will present to the world.  But there are many different "faces" of George.  To the neighbor children, he is "That Man," that man that doesn't want them on his lawn, who will "roar" at them.  He hates this about himself, while at the same time realizing that this is exactly the role the children want him to play and so he does.  I never could decide how I felt about George.  A part of me felt very sorry for him.  A part of me wanted to slap him upside the head. 

"Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope.  And the hope is not false.  No.  It's just that George is a like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street.  The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real."

Thanks, Care, for sending this one to me and introducing me to Isherwood.  Can't wait to pick up the movie and see Colin Firth as George.

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff
288 pages
Published February 2001 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Tall, beautiful, rich Greta Waud, born and raised in California, doesn't really fit in with the "in" crowd and doesn't particularly want to. When her family moves to Denmark for her father to be an ambassador, Greta falls in love--with Denmark and with her art teacher, the petite, pretty, shy Einar Wegener. Rumblings of World War I send the Wauds back to California where Greta meets ceramics artist Teddy Cross. He is entirely the opposite of Einar except in one key point--Greta's mother is not pleased and that makes Teddy all the more appealing. Teddy and Greta marry but life is not easy for them and before the war ends, Teddy has died. Greta returns to Denmark and immediately seeks out Einar.

Soon the two are married and settled into an apartment where both of them have room to paint. Einar is modestly successful; Greta is not. But one day, when the model for the portrait that Greta is working on can't come to Greta asks Einar to put on a pair of women's shoes and stockings to pose. When he does, it awakens something in him. When Greta convinces Einar to also try on a dress, she teasingly calls him "Lili." But several days later, Greta returns to the apartment to find that "Lili" is sitting in her studio. So begins the emergence of the woman that has been living in Einar all of his life. Greta, who may stand up to anyone else, devoted to doing what makes her husbands happy so, despite misgivings, she allows Lili to become more and more a part of their lives, going so far as to convince everyone else that Lili is Einar's cousin and taking her for outings. Soon Lili is appearing more and more frequently, taking over the body entirely. Greta is terribly conflicted--on the one hand, she appears to be losing her husband; on the other hand, Lili has become an inspiration for Greta's painting and Greta is now becoming very successful. The fight is taking it's toll on the body with frequent bouts of unexplained bleeding, loss of appetite and an inability to get enough sleep. Mentally, Einar/Lili have become so separate that one can often not recall what the other has done.

Greta, with encouragement from her brother, Carlisle, in whom she has confided, begins to look for ways to help make Lili whole. Carlisle tries to find psychiatrics who can help but Greta finds a doctor who says he can physically make Lili the woman that she is mentally. Now Greta has to find a way to live with Lili/Einar's decision.

You may have already heard the premise of this book and think that it is a book about gender and sexual identity. It is but it is much more a love story, a book that examines how much one person is willing to give to make another person happy. It's a book about finding our true identities--here the main focus is Einar but the book looks beyond Einar at Greta as well. Ebershoff does a wonderful job of making this a story about people and their motivations and feelings rather than a sensationalist story. I found Greta, in particular, fascinating. As we learn more about her history with Teddy, we learn what may be the reason she is so willing to do whatever it is that will make Einar happy but Greta is also encouraging Lili to come to the fore for her own selfish reasons. And for a woman who is forward thinking enough to encourage her spouse to act out on his desire to become a woman, Greta is terribly old-fashioned in that she remains faithful to Einar despite the fact that they are clearly not a married couple any longer in the usual sense.

"Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life."

"Although she didn't like to admit it, she was like many young women from Pasadena who thought of divorce as a sign of moral faccidness...She found herself unusually concerned about what others might think and say about her--as if she were so week-minded that she had simply married the wrong man."

Ebershoff has a terrific way of making the setting a true part of the story--using just enough words to convey the scene without making the reader's eyes glaze over.

"Inside the Radhuset there was a covered courtyard decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. On three sides were open galleries supported by pillars. Above, a canopy of crossing timberbeams. On the stage was an orchestra, and there was a long table with trays of oysters. Hundreds of people were dancing, hands of handsome men on the slender waists of women whose eyelids were painted blue. Two girls on a bench were writing a note to someone, giggling over it. There was a circle of men in tuxedos with their hands in their pockets, their eyes roaming."

Although the book is divided into four place/time periods, it does go back and forth in time within those parts and it was, on occasion, hard to get back into the main story after a flashback. Some of the time spent exploring the past began to feel repetitive to me, as did the descriptions of the paintings of bogs that Einar was known for. But Ebershoff handled what could have been a sordid story without making it sordid. There is some talk of sex and, of course, bodily parts but only what felt like was necessary.

This is not a book for everyone and I'm not sure that I would have picked it up on my own. But I did enjoy it very much and think there would be a lot here for book clubs to talk about--provided the members of your book club are openminded. Thanks to Lisa and TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour!

"The Danish Girl," starring Nicole Kidman as Einar, will released as a movie sometime in 2012.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810819/.


For more opinions on the book, check out these tour stops:
Monday, May 3rd: Peekin’ Between the Pages
Tuesday, May 4th: Bermuda Onion
Thursday, May 6th: Rundpinne
Friday, May 7th: Redlady’s Reading Room
Monday, May 10th: Wordsmithonia
Tuesday, May 11th: Book Addiction
Wednesday, May 12th: Shooting Stars Mag
Thursday, May 13th: The 3R’s Blog
Monday, May 17th: The Zen Leaf
Tuesday, May 18th: Eclectic Eccentric
Wednesday, May 19th: Luxury Reading
Thursday, May 20th: Worducopia
Monday, May 24th: She is Too Fond of Books
Tuesday, May 25th: The Feminist Review
Wednesday, May 26th: Regular Rumination
Thursday, May 27th: Book Club Classics