Customer Reviews

Resistance: A Novel

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a fan of this author's novels. As always, she writes with great clarity and sureness in her assessment of complex human emotions, engaging the reader in an intimate narrative. It is a talent that enables the author to keep the reader riveted to the pages of this book. She weaves a deceptively simple story about courage, love, and betrayal, set against the backdrop of the horrors and heartbreak of war.

The author sets the story in the war torn, Nazi-occupied Belgian village of Delahaut, where the resistance works behind the scenes to defeat the enemy. While flying on a bombing mission, American fighter pilot, Ted Brice, makes a last minute decision that causes his plane to crash in that village.

When a ten year old boy, the son of a Nazi collaborator, finds the wounded pilot hiding in the woods, he finds a way to secrete him in his father's barn. He then notifies twenty-something Claire Daussois, who has a secret room in her home where she has hidden others during the war, of the pilot's plight.

Claire, along with her husband, Henri, take the pilot in, before he can be discovered by the enemy, and Claire nurses him back to health. When an event occurs that angers the Nazis, causing reprisals amongst the villagers, Henri is forced into hiding. As time goes by, Claire and Ted engage in a brief, but passionate, affair, only to discover that, in war-time, betrayal is a two way street.

In the foreground of WWII, a young wife named Claire Daussois and her husband, Henri are members of an underground resistance movement in a small Belgian village. There is little romance between the two, indeed Claire takes extreme precautions to prevent conception, fearful of bringing a child into the unpredictable chaos of war. Commited as they are to the resistance, one feels the emptiness of their relationship, and in this environment falls Ted Brice, an American pilot, injured in a crash landing of his plane in their town of Delahaut.

Saved by a spunky ten year old Jean Benoit, he manages to find his way to the Daussois home. There he is placed in protective hiding and must face his future at the hand of strangers.

A tense story line unfolds as the town is caught up in the deception. Who can you trust? Citizen turns against citizen and everything is at stake. One must realize that this kind of activity happened. This is not just fiction, but based on realities of many villages across Europe and the horror of it all is almost unbearable.

There is love in the hole of hell itself. There is forgiveness and strength in moving on. This is a lovely novel of a time many of us have no knowledge of. Therefore, it is very important to contemplate these stories, for in so many other words, most of them did happen. There was just no one left to write the story.

I try to read classics and the award winning books but when I need a break from the technical stuff I pull out a Shreve novel. This is her best novel that I have read. I hope like the others they make this one into a movie. I would say the Weight of Water is next and the Pilot's Wife is last. This would make an excellent novel for a vacation read on the beach.

I had previously enjoyed several other books by Anita Shreve, but
somehow had missed RESISTANCE . . . so when I recently found
myself in Florida without a book to read (having finished the one
I brought down on the plane), I was pleased to find this novel at
my folks' home.

It is the readable account of a British flyer shot down over the Belgian
village of Delahaut . . . he somehow manages to survive the
crash . . . when a brave 10-year old finds him, he is hidden first
in the boy's farm and then in the home of a resistance fighter.

An intense love affair ensues until the flyer is caught, as is the
woman hiding him . . . I thought that might happen, so it came
as no real surprise . . . yet that said, the story is almost heartbreaking
in its account of the tragedy of war.

Also, I was impressed by Shreve's research into the topic . . . she
presents a feel for the era that made me feel as if I was actually living
through it.

There were several memorable passages; among them:
Ted listened t the chatter, scanned the skies. The fighting he knew,
could sometimes be a thing of such beauty it took your breath away.
The graceful arc of a fighter that had put its armored back to you, even
as it glided down and away, out of sight, out of range. The flashbulb
pops from silver planes that came at you from the sun. The way a
B-17 seemed slowly to fall to earth with great dignity, as though it
had been inadvertently let go by God. The odd inkblots against the
blue, floating curiosities twenty feet wide and filled with exploding
steel. Long white contrails in formation, road maps for German
fighters. A plane, severed at the waist, that made your heart stop.
Count the chutes. And breaking radio silence, shouting wildly at the
doomed crew to bail out, bail out. It was the worst thing you had ever
witnessed, and when it was over there was no place to put it. No
part of you that could absorb it, and so you learned to transform the

event even as it was happening, a sleight of hand, a trick of magic,
to turn a kill into a triumph.

A stillness in the barn. Henri felt a throbbing in his right temple. They
all knew what Léon meant. In the cities, where the Maquis was
better organized and had more funds, more access to materiel, each
Resistance fighter was given a single tablet of cyanide. To contain
the damage in the event of torture. Few men or women, no matter
how brave, could withstand the prolonged and creative torture
of the Gestapo-he'd heard it all-the electric prods and needles
to the testicles, the gouging of the eyes. Without the cyanide,
every man was a traitor.

And when she was not working or they were not reading or talking
or listening to the radio or performing the tasks necessary for their
survival, they made love. It pleased him how often they made love,
and sometimes it frightened him. It was as though they both knew
that what they had could not last. When he touched her, she never
demurred, never pulled away from him. She seemed to have the
same need as he, a need he did not now think of as physical, or
purely physical. He thought of it rather as the desire to be known--the
desire to know and to be known by the one person. Sometimes
he was truly baffled that the one person should be a Belgian woman
who was married to another man, a man critical to his own
survival-and yet at other times he made himself believe that their
loving was fated, as the fall of the plane itself may have been fated.

This was my second book by Shreve, Fortune's Rocks being my first. Without a doubt, Anita Shreve is one of my favorite authors. She astounds me with her brilliant writing and ability to touch emotions to the core.
The fact that I've visited the area in Belgium she writes about and also the fact that my father was at Normandy for the invasion made this story all the more powerful for me.
I believe when one chooses to read a book called "Resistance" one cannot expect a "happy" ending. It was a horrific time in our history and Shreve did an incredible job of portraying this. I admit some parts of the story on what the Gestapo did in the villages were very graphic.....graphic but real. Yes, the story was disturbing when one realizes it is fact. But I also feel (and I'm paraphrasing) "When one forgets history, one is doomed to repeat history."
The love affair Shreve tells of Claire and Ted was not only poignant but I'm sure based on thousands of stories very similar. I thought she captured it best with Ted's thoughts, "And he himself knew that the war itself had changed the rules, twisted them beyond all recognition." This is exactly what war does. It's unavoidable. I feel people hurt more and love more during war.....just as Claire and Ted did. Shreve beautifully captured this love and the pain and horror that surrounded all of it.
Realistically, the story/love affair could end no other way. I believe the reader knows this from the first page and this particular reader wants to thank Anita Shreve for a passionate love story combined with a realistic account of the heartbreaking tragedy of war. I highly recommend this book and at just 222 pages, it's a quick read difficult to put down. To quote the LA Times, "I reached the last chapter with hungry eyes, wanting more." And more for me is to now read "Eden Close" and continue soaking up this tremendous author and her powerful prose.

This is my fifth book of Ms. Shreve's that I have read and it was by far my favorite. I felt as if I were in WWII Europe myself.

I need a book that can be read for short periods of time and put down... but when I pick it back up I can continue without having to reread a few paragraphs. (Ms Shreve is very talented in that all her books are good that way for me. ) The story was so intense that in RESISTANCE you didn't forget a thing. There were days I missed a class bell because I was sucked in to the story.

The only reason I scored this with 4 stars instead of 5 is I would have liked a bit more on the ending. It was a bit rushed as someone else mentioned.

As this is a typical Anita Shreve novel, the reader should not expect a happy ending. As in her other popular offerings, "The Pilot's WIfe" and "The Weight of Water", this well-written book probes to the bone the depth of human emotions stretched to the limit of endurance. The characters are well drawn but painful and desperate. As in her other novels, the interplay between man and woman is imperfect; this time stunted by circumstance and the inert sense of duty enflamed by the cruel reality of war. Ted and Claire come together briefly with no real connection; their love does not have time to settle and die as the other characters Shreve has focused upon, it sparks like an engine whose wires are wet; its only fruit is flawed. For the most part this book like other Shreve selections tries to mingle the sweet with the inevitable. In this case, the sweet---the love affair between the Ted and already married Claire is an almost wordless ballet of emotions. She, married to older Henri, is a pragmatic villager. wise enough to not wish a child born during the war. She goes about her business housing wounded soldiers and helping refugee Jews make their way to France and freedom through Spain in the almost gruff and nonchalant way a normal woman would make dinner or drive her kids to school in the morning. Perhaps some readers will get the sense that she and Henri do not have a great love and that she is just waiting to be ignited by someone that speaks more readily to her soul. I did not get this sense. I felt she loved Ted as a defiance to the stagnation and betrayal surrounding them. Perhaps Ted felt more. Nevertheless, the relationship is doomed to be ephemeral in terms of actual history, yet everlasting in its impact on their lives. Bottom line: the story is engrossing in parts but ultimately disappoints the more romantic reader who hopes against hope that the lovers will somehow be reunited in happiness rather with the stabbing and dour pain of which Shreve allows us to partake like a cyanide pill.
The most notable aspect of 'Resistance' for me was a glimpse, real or fictionalized into the mindset of the occupied people who bravely 'resisted' the Germans during WWII. When asked by Ted, the downed American pilot she is hiding from the Nazis & collaborators, if given a choice between saving a busload of children and a jeep full of American aviators,Claire, immediately selects the American aviators because they are helping to free her country from the German grasp. Ted is fascinated and a little surprised by her response, but then his definition of war is much different from hers--he is surrounded by death and suffering but not on his home turf.
As this is not an escapist romance novel, I would recommend this book only to those who want to get an excellent feel for what war does to real lives and are not expecting a happily-ever-after tale. As Shreve seems intent to deliver a vision of the 'real' with all its warts I must wonder how she pulls herself out of the emotional slump writing such novels must engulf her in. Although fine-tuned, her vision of modern woman is a Greek tragedy of sorrow and pain; her Pandora's box is devoid of ironic hope.

"Resistance" was a most readable story that took place in a small window of time during World War II in Belgium. An American B-17 plane crash-lands and the crew is spirited off to nearby safe houses by members of the Belgian Resistance. The story focuses on Claire, a local woman in an unhappy marriage, and Ted Brice, the pilot.

Shreve depicts the seemingly hopeless situation, tempered by hope, in the face of wartime hardships and the risks that the Resistance members took on a daily basis.

I found the ending a bit contrived and rushed, with some questionable aspects.

This is a story that encompasses only a little more than a month in the thousands of days of war, but it is a story of great emotional intensity. I cannot remember when I read a book this quickly.

I love Anita Shreve books but when I started to read this I realized it must be based on the true story of a village (in France?) that hid soldiers (British, I believe) during World War I and a daughter was conceived between one of the soldiers and a village girl. There is a nonfiction book about it entitled "The Englishman's Story" or something to that effect. The premise was unoriginal. I felt like I was reading a wartime version of "The Bridges of Madison County." But aside from that I admit I still enjoyed it to some extent and found it hard to put down. Then I came to the part when the couple go into another village that was too simply and conveniently explained away by stating that they wanted to be together in public. (ARE THEY CRAZY!?) It seemed as if she was rushed to come up with a way that he is caught (or how you think he is caught) but it was so bizarre. Up until then they barely walk out the door for fear of being discovered, then suddenly decide to go have a drink in a public cafe. I found it ludicrous and one small detail like that can almost ruin a book for me.

This book caught me from the first page. Magnificent writing with a simple but wonderful story. Even a week after finishing, I am remembering the book and wishing I still had pages to read.