A Multigenerational Historical Novel. And Only 200 Pages.
Amy Bloom's new novel emits the opposite of main-character energy. A German word might be needed to describe its contrast to a bildungsroman. Guppenporträt?
Germany, though, is an enemy in 'I'll Be Right Here,' which while not historical fiction in the traditional, door-stopping sense — its many threads are tied up in exactly 200 pages — does use the Second World War as backdrop.
Gazala and Samir are orphaned Algerian youths, a girl and her adopted brother, four years older, trying to survive in occupied Paris. He works in a bakery, and she, being in possession of 'good hands,' is conscripted to massage (innocently) its tired old owner.
For a time, the siblings meet and mingle with real-life figures. Gazala begins a job tending to, and living with, Colette — 'Famous Writer, Anti-Semite, Beloved Friend,' a chapter title proclaims — even sharing a room with her Jewish husband, Maurice, as he hides from the Third Reich.
She also meets Suzanne Belperron, the jewelry designer who made pieces for the Duchess of Windsor (stylish but notorious for her chumminess with Nazis), and swipes one of her brooches. Belperron is trying to save her own Jewish business partner and lover, Bernard Herz, from certain death, having torn up and eaten the handwritten pages of their business directory during his arrest.
As if in compensation for this grim act, and the general deprivations of war, 'I'll Be Right Here' is replete with delicious food, or thoughts of it, on practically every page, like the memory of a chicken made in 1939 with rosemary, lemon and 24 cloves of garlic. By my count this is the third Bloom book to feature fruit on the cover, suggesting sweetness, juiciness and, obliquely, sex. There is even a character named Honey, lest you forgot that life, despite its many trials, is sweet.
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