Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain

Antoine Laurain’s newest novel, Vintage 1954, is a sweet story of time travel, romance, and family. One evening in 2017 at 18 Rue Edgar-Charellier in Paris, Hubert Larnaudie, the last member of the family that built his apartment building in 1868, descends to the cellar to look around at the mess he is considering cleaning up. Among heaps of old magazines and the detritus of generations of Larnaudies, Hubert spots a bottle of 1954 Beaujolais. Then some burglars shut him in his cellar and an American named Bob, newly arrived and booked into an apartment in the building through Airbnb, notices he is trapped and helps him out, enlisting the help of two young tenants, Julien and Magalie.

To express his thanks, Hubert invites them all into his apartment to enjoy the wine. Julien recognizes the bottle which comes from his family’s vineyard – where his great great grandfather disappeared in 1978. The same man who became known in his village as “Mr. Flying Saucer” after he saw a strange craft over the vineyard in 1954. The wine, it turns out, was impacted by the spacecraft and anyone who drinks it is transported to 1954. Now the four new friends have to figure out how to get back to 2017.

Like Laurain’s earlier books, especially The President’s Hat and The Red Notebook, there is a bit of romance, some family drama, a little mystery, and some famous historical figures sprinkled through the story. It’s a sweet tale, entertaining and quick to read. Perfect for a plane ride or a day at the beach!

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Finding Phil by Paul Levy

Even though I stopped writing my review column for The New Hampshire Sunday News, I still hear from publishers, publicists, and authors. Often a book from Bauhan Publishing will appear in my mailbox — regular readers of this blog know they are one of my favorite small presses, and they are right here in New Hampshire. I can’t get to every book I’m sent, but recently I opened a package containing a copy of Finding Phil: Lost in War and Silence and it looked intriguing. Then I flipped the book over and realized that the author, Paul Levy, lives in my small city, and that his wife is a retired librarian. Bookconscious regulars know I’m a librarian, too. So for no more scientific reasons than those, I decided to read this biography/memoir. Plus, I had a great uncle who served in WWII, who was Jewish and the child of Russian immigrants, like the subject of this book.

Finding Phil is the story of Phil Levy, a young American army officer, fresh out of college, newlywed, and full of a sincere desire to rescue France and defeat Nazi Germany. And it’s the story of his nephew Paul Levy, who describes his uncle’s journey but also his own, as he uncovered the story of a man his parents and other relatives almost never mentioned.

Phil died in France in the Vosges Mountains in January 1945, after being among the first American troops to cross into Germany. Growing up, Paul Levy knew about his uncle but never heard stories about him. When Phil’s widow Barbara died in 1987, her sister sent Paul his uncle’s journal, and that inspired him to learn more. As he did research into his uncle’s childhood, young adulthood, and military service, Paul reflected on not only his family and the silence surrounding his uncle, but also on larger themes of heroism, silence, and belief. He writes about all of that as well as what makes men go off to war and the different ways that shapes them, in Finding Phil.

Along the way he muses on the legacy of social justice and service to others that runs through the Levy family, on what his uncle might have worked for had he come home, and on how subsequent generations might process the atrocities of battle, civilian suffering, and genocide that are WWII’s legacy. Levy writes beautifully, and he clearly thought very deeply about his subject. In one passage, in a chapter describing what he learned about some members of the German unit and even the particular man who killed his uncle, Levy writes:

“Through it [the story of one of these men] I could begin to imagine more nuanced human beings beneath my simple stereotype. Some people might worry that such stories give escape routes to those who want to deny responsibility and that they encourage efforts at revisionist history . . . in which nations, cultures, and peoples try to distance themselves from their histories of deep antisemitism and downplay their complicity in the Holocaust. . . . I believe it is vital to insist on full responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust and to come to grips with the profound reality of engrained antisemitism. It is equally vital to see nuanced human faces beneath our stereotypes lest we fail to recognize how susceptible we all are to cultural demons and dynamics like those that fomented the Holocaust . . . .”

Read that passage again, and think about stereotypes for a second. Paul Levy is talking about considering a German man as a whole person in the context of his life, not just his time as a Waffen SS soldier, but it’s pretty easy to substitute other “cultural demons and dynamics” and think about today’s world. About the prejudices, perhaps subtle or even unconscious, each of us may hold when thinking about people who are part of a different religion, class, culture, or ideology than we are, or whose skin is different than ours. Presuppositions abound in contemporary society about people who live in certain places or do certain jobs. It’s different than antisemitism and Nazism, but our culture is still riddled with the kinds of demons that can incite people to hate or act violently towards each other. Or fall prey to fear mongering and hateful rhetoric and respond by allowing laws or regulations that call attention to difference and deny universal human rights. levy provides much to think about, which I really admire.

One of the other things I really enjoyed about this book was that Levy did not try to artificially build and release tension in his narrative — he lets the natural ups and downs of the story carry readers along. I’ve noticed a tendency in some memoirs to jerk readers’ emotions around, and I think that’s a sign of over-writing or over-manipulating a narrative. Levy instead provides space for readers to process what they are reading. I also learned some things about the war and about people who are preserving the memories of that time, and I love a book that teaches me things.

Finding Phil is a good read whether you are interested in history, war, families, or the mysteries of long-ago memories. Reading about how Levy pieced fragments together into a story made me think again of my great uncle and what I could possibly learn about his war experience (he was stateside, because he was a chemist, but that’s about all I know). Maybe I will attempt to put my own family’s fragments together.

 

 

 

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On the Map by Simon Garfield

I’d heard Simon Garfield interviewed about his new book and knew I would love it, and it came in with a stack of other “holds” the Thursday before the blizzard. But I’ve been so busy it’s been hard to finish On the Map: a Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. This is not a book to pick up and set down in short intervals. It’s better absorbed at least one rich chapter at a time, if possible.

I’ve always loved maps and geography. I thoroughly enjoyed geography class in junior high, and looking at globes and atlases as a child. When my children were young we had a series of map place mats and puzzles, played geography games on the computer, and conducted a family “country of the month” club, where we took turns choosing a country, checked out stacks of books about it, ordered maps from tourist bureaus, read folktales, listened to music, learned a few phrases, etc. and wrapped up with a meal featuring foods from our chosen country. And on family trips I introduced them to old school AAA “TripTiks,” each flip map trip route plotted especially for us at the AAA office, with the journey unfolding page by page as the miles melt away.

My son learned to travel by map every summer for the handful of years we lived in deep southern Georgia. I’d order fresh new regional maps and we’d highlight a route according to our stops along the way. We’d set off early, the summer sky just brightening, dotted with a few lingering stars, the trees dark silhouettes, all three of us (the kids and I — the Computer Scientist didn’t usually get enough time off to road trip) nearly sick with nervous excitement, the car fully kitted out with snacks, caffeine for me, travel games, audio books and music to help us pass the time. Odds Bodkin and Jim Weiss, and later Bill Bryson, kept us company on the way.

My son would follow the route I’d marked, navigating and urging we go farther before stopping (he was always anxious to get wherever we were going). We’d stop to visit family along the way and end up back in New Hampshire, where I would never fail to point out the gorgeous boulders to my eye-rolling offspring as we drove along Rt. 9 past Keene in a particularly scenic stretch where the road follows a brook. And at the end of the visit we’d head back again, the familiar exits and landmarks leading us home as my son followed along on our maps.

My daughter likes maps too but is far more familiar with GPS. (An aside: she is the subject of one amazing map story in our family’s lore. When she was 2, she was sitting in her booster seat looking out the kitchen window and said in the matter-of-fact way of children, “Look Mommy, France.” She was pointing to a cloud, and it did indeed look like France, which was in front of her on a place mat world map!)

Garfield explains towards the end of his book that by 2005, GPS had taken off, becoming the routing method of choice for people traveling by car. My daughter knows I find GPS frustrating – it’s disconcerting to look at the little screen diagram and also at the road for one thing, and I like seeing the whole route, not just the next step. I almost always print out directions and ask her to refer to them as we go. So she’s learned, in her formative years, to navigate via Google Maps directions, and to follow along on a moving digital map with us at the center.

On the Map begins and ends by examining this current state of mapping affairs: we are the center of our own maps, as GPS devices and smartphones and apps focus on our current location. He traces this unquenchable human longing to place ourselves in the context of our world from the earliest maps traced on a stone tablet through the imaginary but incredibly detailed maps of Skyrim and even more mind boggling, maps of our own brains. He covers maps’ role in geopolitical, economic, social and cultural history, and their influence on everything from exploration to social justice.

I loved every bit of it. It’s a very pleasingly designed book, smaller than most hardcovers and stout. Every chapter is filled with illustrations and many have small sections Garfield calls “pocket maps” that offer tantalizing detours from his main narrative. From mapping Mars to the history of guidebooks, from Churchill’s map room to famous map thieves, from blank spaces and invented mountain ranges to iconic maps real and imagined (the London Tube, the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter), Garfield packs every page with fascinating people and stories. One of my favorites concerned the use of specially modified Monopoly games as escape kits sent to WWII prison camps; the boards hid clues, silk maps were sandwiched between the cardboard layers and the game pieces included a compass.

When I had time to sit down and really savor his erudite but thoroughly readable prose, I really enjoyed it. If I had just a few minutes to read, I wished for more. If all history were this palatable no student would ever find it drudgery. Garfield presents the entire course of humanity’s rise from caves to space in the story of maps. I’m going to have to add his other books to my lengthy “to-read” list.

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