That Paris Year [Paperback]

This is a wonderful book. The language has a poetic quality that is sensual, evocative, graceful, and non-intrusive. The story seemingly emerges not from design but rather from the characters discovering, inventing (and hiding from) themselves against the vicissitudes of circumstance; in short, this is a novel that does not so much have a plot (though it does) as it is a writing that unfolds a story. The characters became very real and detailed for me--the author is a master of the moving, four-dimensional portrait--but within each I sensed hidden places, mysterious seas that the author wisely leaves uncharted. In other words, the author lets these characters live and breathe. We know them, but we never really know them--and in that sense also this is a book very true to life.

Beyond the characters, this is a novel that delights in place. Paris, Pasadena, Provence, the pitching swells of the North Atlantic, the Cotê de Azure; the writing is such that we not only see these places, we smell them, feel their scorching winds, gentle waves, cold winter drear, brilliant colors, faded grays and browns. These become places one inhabits.

Beyond the poetic feel of the language, the elusive unfolding of character and the evocation of place, the novel is remarkable for its play with time and memory. The narrator presents herself as a writer invited to speak to some young women considering spending a year abroad in Paris in 1970, as she did ten years earlier. This distance of a decade, as she recounts the events of that year, lends her narrative a subtle depth and mystery; the questions are never explicitly asked, but they are there, always underneath the flow of story and language. What did those ten years do to that Paris year, how it is remembered, talked about, understood? How did the missing bits and pieces, the later developments in the characters lives, shape this wonderfully told memory? And, one realizes that the book itself was written some decades after that narrative moment that recounts events already a decade gone. I read it, and I am there, in 1960, and it is alive and so real--and yet when and where, really, am I? I pose those questions in relation to the book, but don't they really go the nature of all lived and remembered experience? I don't know that the author intended it, but among the many wonders of this novel is the way that it invites us to reflect on the questions of time, memory, and meaning that go unasked in our daily live

In this age of the compressed image and the truncated novel, what a pleasure to read the expansive and luminescent work of Johanna Biggar. First, the book is physically beautiful. Those of us who were raised on paper, know the fineries of it: and so before I read the book, I felt the pleasure in holding it.The novel, above all art forms, is a testament to the use of Time. The novelist must harnass this beast, Time, to move backward and forward; for this is the structure of good prose, and the proof of a novel's value. I am in the midst of 469 pages and glad to have the long course to follow. Here is a book that hurtles our understanding into the midst of a brilliant adventure --one with a succulent sense of time and place. Surely this is a poet writing prose. Let me say, it may be the novel of the year.
Grace Cavalieri
producer/host
"The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress"

"Memory, I see now," observes Joanna Biggar in her prologue to That Paris Year, "is the vital organ of reality; our best, if fragile, link to the immortal."

With that she spills out her satchel of carefully gathered and collected memories, filters them through her finely tuned imagination, renders them in gorgeous language and loving detail for all to savor, and invites us to come along for a ride.

If you've been to France, this novel is a delicious joy ride, the next best thing to a return ticket. If you haven't, it may get you packing. It is, above all, an extended love song to a city the author knows intimately and in exquisite detail.

The novel is set during the brief flowering of `Camelot'. Dashing young JFK is President, his wife, Jackie, the elegant American stand-in for royalty. It's a time when everything looks possible to the young. The girls are going, they say, to master French verbs and study at the Sorbonne. The truth, invisible even to themselves, is they are going to re-invent themselves, running from a traditional and passé vision of womanhood, desperate for a way to avoid becoming their mothers.

It's the dawn of women's lib. Publication of Friedan's Feminine Mystique is a year away; the Pill, on the market only two years, is still beyond reach of the young and unmarried; Roe v. Wade is over a decade off. The sexy Jocelin jealously guards her virginity. Brilliant but graceless Gracie can't wait to lose hers. J.J. and friends are innocents in sophisticated Paris, making their way by trial and error in ways sometimes hilariously funny, at other times poignantly awkward, humiliating, painful.

From the lushly drawn crimson and gold falling leaves of autumn through the icy fingers of the coldest winter in centuries, the cautious return if booksellers along the Seine heralding spring, and finally to the extravagant full bloom and hot mistral of summer, J.J records the five heroines' progress through brazen adventures, inevitable heartache, perilous missteps, and improvised solutions, losing their innocence on the way to the getting of wisdom, all told through the warm patina of memory. The touch is light, the language delicious.

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