Monday Review: Lovers as the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

image via goodreads

The Short Version: a culturally, sexually, professionally displaced young Frenchwoman looking for her place in the world and finding it with the Gestapo.  Everyday folks who become members of the resistance along with desperately bored members of the aristocracy.  Oblivious artist with wonderful hearts.  Asshole writers who aren’t all wrong.  The collapse of an era, the coming of war, glory days and those that come after.  A global catastrophe on an individual scale.

The end of the world and those who survive it.

The Long Version:  This book is awesome.  And not in the surfer dude way, but properly, in the manner of a deity.

A fictional biography compiled from several different “sources” (letters, memoirs, biographies), each source is crafted in a different voice and each voice most definitely belongs to a single, well defined individual.  Each has quirks of language and personality, powerful emotions and foibles; so realistic are they I checked several times to make certain they weren’t based on for-reals people.  And by checked I mean searched the book jacket for clues, scrutinized the fiction disclaimer at the beginning, and Googled each character’s name more than once.  I’m still aghast that one’s imaginary friends could be so very true to life.

The main story is that of Lou Villars, a transgendered Paris club dancer who, displaced over and over again in the course of her young life, is seduced into the Nazi party by Hitler himself, eventually becoming an interrogator for the Gestapo.  Her story is an exploration of nature versus nurture, of the profound effect abandonment and manipulation can have on someone who is simply searching for love and her place in the world.  While I wouldn’t call Lou sympathetic, one can’t deny her course is logical to the point of forcing one to wonder what course she would have taken in the same situation, what indefinable something allows one person to retain control of her moral compass despite the worst of life while the other abandons the same at the slightest (or not so slight) provocation.

The people surrounding Lou: her lovers, friends, rivals, enemies are equally compelling in their roles, each touching her but independent agents, each with his or her own story to tell, tied together by their orbit around Lou Villars.  They are allowed to roam to give a sense of the wider world, the epic change that is coming, but always return to Paris and Lou.  I’m often wary of books with this many voices crowding the pages; they either drift so far apart as to need separate books or the characters come to mirror one another so closely, they may as well be a single narrator.  Prose, however, nails the multi-POV thing.  Sticks the landing.  Perfect score from the judges.

The exposition on setting is perfect as well: enough to give the reader a sense of Paris’ dichotomous nature in the thirties and forties: liberal and reactionary, accepting and confirming, submitting and resisting.  An eternal place that never changes and also becomes a new world with each moment.  Humble and proud, rich and poor, beautiful and vile.  A place where lines were drawn and crossed, redrawn and shattered in a hail of gunfire.

My own character building will be stronger for having read this novel, my world building, my ability to create tension.  And my plot bombs, well… You may think I’ve given a lot away but, kids, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Five out of five melty hand of glory fingers for Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.  I finished reading the library copy and immediately purchased it so I can read it again whenever I want.  Which will be at least a couple times per year.  At least.  Planning on checking out more of Prose’s work as well.