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Villa Air-bel (Paperback)

by Rosemary Sullivan (Author)

3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (Oct 18 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060732512
ISBN-13: 978-0060732516
Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13.5 x 3.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 341 g

Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #178,653 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

The outbreak of WWII took many Europeans by surprise. In France, by the time the fighting began, the papers people needed to get out of the country were difficult to come by. It was on this circumstance that three enterprising Americans concentrated their efforts in the first two years of the war. Ivy League scholar Varian Fry, sent by the American Emergency Rescue Committee, heiress Mary Jayne Gold and graduate student Miriam Davenport turned a Marseille château into a safe haven for dozens of prominent artists and intellectuals waiting for a chance to emigrate in secrecy, including Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, André Breton, Franz Werfel and perennial exile Victor Serge. Canadian writer Sullivan (her Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won a Governor General's Award) goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. She intelligently spreads the fractured narrative, with its huge cast of players constantly coming and going, over 60 brief chapters. What's palpable is the welter of shock, fear, world-weariness, cynicism and misplaced idealism evinced by the villa's transient residents as they apprehensively awaited their fate. The author never gets quite close enough to her subjects, but this is a moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times. B&w photos. (Oct. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In France of the 1940s, the Nazis were hunting down artists and intellectuals, the elites who threatened the Third Reich. Many of them, including Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Marc Chagall, found temporary shelter in a large nineteenth-century house in a suburb of Marseille, waiting for rescue by courageous members of the American Rescue Committee. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters, Sullivan offers a gripping look at the desperate and joyous days--with artists hanging paintings from trees--as musicians, scientists, and intellectuals waited for the visas that would give them safe passage out of Vichy France. Harvard-educated scholar Varian Fry led the effort, eventually saving 2,000 artists and intellectuals. An American heiress and a graduate student were part of Fry's team, coping with the petty and enlightened arguments of their diverse and brilliant charges. Sullivan captures the tense atmosphere of France as the Germans invaded and the fear and anxiety of the intellectuals, some held in detention camps and some who ignored the danger until it was nearly too late. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Magnetic Power of Villa Air-Bel, Oct 28 2006

By	Constance Rooke - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Villa Air-bel (Hardcover)

This is an important and utterly compelling story, beautifully told. The villa in France is at the centre, and circling round it, moving toward it, are a group of great (and often wildly eccentric) artists and intellectuals. The Nazis and their collaborators are after them, and the villa offers temporary refuge as arrangements are made for their escape from France by some intriguing young Americans and their friends. Charming, inspiring, instructive, and scarey. Not to be missed.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Earlier "Crossroads Marseilles 1940" is better, Oct 18 2006

By	Pierre Sauvage - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Villa Air-bel (Hardcover)

One of the main figures in "Villa Air-Bel" is beautiful heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who initially rented the villa and spent 1940-41 in Marseille torn between her participation in the remarkable rescue effort run by fellow American Varian Fry--and her affair with a young French gangster. She told it all, very flavorfully, in her published 1980 memoir, "Crossroads Marseilles 1940"--on which the new book, without permission, draws extensively and slavishly...

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