As The House in Paris opens, two
children arrive for a brief stopover in the Paris home of Mme Fisher.
Henrietta, 11, is en route to her grandmother, an acquaintance of Mme
Fisher. Leopold, 9, the foster child of an Italian family, is about to
meet his birth mother, a friend of Mme Fisher’s daughter Naomi, for the
first time. Just how central the Fishers were in Leopold’s story will
become clear. Henrietta’s role in the novel is to interact with Leopold
and observe the riddles of the house with the eyes of a child.
The beginning and ending sections of The
House in Paris take place on a single day (“The Present” ). They
bookend the middle section (“The Past”), which relates the backstory of
how Leopold came to be. His British mother, Karen Michaelis, boarded
with the Fishers in Paris. The bitter Mme Fisher wronged her own
daughter and wrecked Max Ebhart, Naomi’s then fiancee.
Blameworthy mothers, secrecy, disappointment, passion, lost innocence,
identity — there are so many themes in this complex, nuanced novel, it
needs to be read slowly and perhaps more than once.
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