Paris Twilight
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A novel that “elegantly weaves together many strands—the political, the historical, and the romantic, richly braided with adventure” (Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs).
Paris, 1990. While demonstrations against the First Gulf War rage, Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in the City of Light from New York to be part of the surgical team performing a heart transplant—and soon finds herself falling in love with a suave Arab diplomat.
Even as her concerns mount over shadowy protocols surrounding the planned transplant, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious apartment and trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweeps Matilde through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past. As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery: the enigma that has haunted Matilde’s life.
A dizzying tale of personal transformation, Russ Rymer’s “richly plotted, ardently imagined first novel” is populated by “unforgettable characters [who] grapple with the mystery of what love means, and what it costs” (Geraldine Brooks, author of People of the Book).
“Russ Rymer is a virtuoso of mystery and misapprehension. With Paris Twilight, he has created a novel of fine intelligence that richly rewards the reader’s closest attention. An American original.” —Ward Just, author of An Unfinished Season and Exiles in the Garden
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rymer is a writer of long-form nonfiction and his first novel has good bones; there's plenty of mystery and tension to carry a reader through some overwritten passages. After a professional disgrace, prominent anesthesiologist Matilde Anselm comes to 1990 Paris as part of a surgical team that will perform a heart transplant on an unknown patient as soon as a donor heart becomes available. Suspecting that the heart will be obtained unethically, she begins a dialogue with Emil Sahran, a powerful diplomat coordinating the operation, and a romance quickly develops between the two. Meanwhile, Matilde learns that a stranger, Frenchman Byron Saxe, has inexplicably left his modest estate to her. Exploring his tiny apartment during her days spent waiting for a heart, she meets a young woman, Corie, who lives next door. Corie is a pianist, translator, and activist protesting the first Gulf War, and the two develop a shared fascination with a series of letters Byron had hired Corie to translate, written by a woman named Alba in the '30s to her lover during the Spanish Civil War, which prove to be connected to Matilde's own past. Early on, Matilde is offputtingly long-winded and the relationship with Sahran feels forced, but as the plot gathers momentum, its discoveries have real emotional pull.
