Today I bring you the letter F, which gave me the chance to read Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, a book my big sister gave me as a birthday present last year. Set in Paris, this novel brings together two characters who seem to have very little in common. There is Hannah, an American postdoctoral researcher who is looking into the lives of women living in Paris during the German Occupation of the Second World War, and Tariq, a Moroccan teenager who has run away from his home in Tangiers, who thinks he might be able to find out something about his mother's history. Tariq ends up living in Hannah's spare room and, occasionally, helps her to translate some of the narrated histories of the women Hannah is researching. To earn money, he works in a fast food restaurant, but he becomes swept up in the boulevards, Metro stations and people he meets in the city. While Hannah begins to uncover the lives of the women, it stirs up memories and feelings from a previous relationship which has affected her more deeply than she would probably admit to. Tariq is full of wonder and keen to experience pretty much everything, whereas Hannah is more reserved and thinks only of her work, at least until an old acquaintance appears on the horizon. This is an exploration of a city the author obviously loves and the people who inhabit it, both in the past and the present. Sometimes it's hard to get a grip on it and the narrative has a dreamlike quality in places, but that kind of worked for me. There are sections to do with the Occupation that are incredibly hard to read, but stick with it and you will be rewarded. This book has received quite mixed reviews and while it may not reach the heights of, say, Birdsong (one of my all time favourite books), there is still much to admire and enjoy.
My STAR rating: FOUR.
Length: 320 print pages.
Price I paid: free.
Formats available: print, unabridged audio download, ebook
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