Review_FICTION
40 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 2, 2020
Review_FICTION
deeply patriotic Reinach family escape
unscathed. The elderly Achilles returns
to the house to seek a treasured relic of his
past, and while the nominally suspenseful
premise of Achilles’s hunt falls slack
amid extended digressions into the past,
Goetz pulls off an impassioned portrait of
Kerylos as “a place that makes you want to
travel, do somersaults and stretches, drink
champagne in evening dress, read, think.”
Goetz’s deeply felt novel has an equally
intoxicating effect. (May)In the Lion’s Den
Barbara Taylor Bradford. St. Martin’s, $28.99
(352p) ISBN 978-1-250-18742-0
Bestseller Bradford adds a leisurely
paced installment to her House of Falconer
series (after Master of His Fate), set in
Victorian England. The story tracks
aspiring merchant James Falconer’s rising
career at the shipping and real estate firm
Malvern Market, run by Henry Malvern.
While Henry’s middle-aged daughter,
Alexis, the company’s expected successor,
grieves for her dead fiancé, Henry promotes
the ambitious James, 21, to second in
command. After a family member
embezzles from the firm, James proposes
building a gallery of shops as a way to
recoup those losses, but arson strikes the
half-built gallery. (Though, curiously, no
suspects are suggested, leaving readers to
anticipate a reveal in a future series
installment.) Bradford does offer a secret
from James’s past love life, staging a
seductive tryst between James and the
lovely Irina, a dress designer, while a
highly charged love affair between James
and Alexis moves the plot. Bradford
evokes the Victorian setting with aplomb,
but a ham-handed intervention by Alexis’s
late fiancé’s adult daughter, who professes
to have looked up to her while telling her
to “get back [her] looks,” muddles the
author’s apparent appeal to current values
with its adherence to Victorian convention.
Series fans will enjoy following along as
the plot deepens. (May.)I’d Give Anything
Marisa de los Santos. Morrow, $27.99 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-06-284448-4
De los Santos’s heartfelt latest (after I’ll
Be Your Blue Sky) illustrates how tragedy
can be overcome by love, honesty, and
forgiveness. In 1997, the bonds of teenageVilla of Delirium
Adrien Goetz, trans. from the French by
Natasha Lehrer. New Vessel, $26.95 (324p)
ISBN 978-1-939931-80-1
A young man comes of age in the artistic
and intellectual milieu of belle époque
France in Goetz’s lushly detailed English-
language debut. Scholar Theodore Reinach
hires teenage Achilles, son of servants
employed by Gustave Eiffel, to make
sketches for Kerylos, his new seaside villa
in the Côte d’Azur. Despite the anti-
Semitism directed at the Reinachs over
their support of Alfred Dreyfus, the house
is acknowledged as a creative marvel upon
completion. Achilles soon comes to live at
Kerylos, where he studies Greek, becomes
Theodore’s protégé, and grows closer to
the Reinach circle: Theodore’s erudite
brothers, Joseph and Salomon; Theodore’s
wife, Fanny; and Joseph’s son, Adolphe,
who becomes Achilles’s best friend. Goetz’s
tale spans both world wars, which bring
tragedy and destruction to the Côte
d’Azur, and neither Achilles nor thewhile Ana, once an aspiring documentary
filmmaker, works in advertising and has
become the breadwinner. Despite their
cramped living quarters, they live in
separate spheres. While Ana befriends
and fantasizes over a coworker, Joe stays
out late drinking and, while home,
develops a heavy porn habit. After Ana
catches Joe at the screen, she expresses
doubts about their relationship and
ongoing living situation. Things don’t
get any easier at work. Ana questions how
far she’s willing to stray from her progres-
sive values to serve a Christian client, and
Joe is reduced to a “telemarketing Willie
Loman,” selling ads for a newspaper.
Zadoorian’s comedy of contemporary
manners resonates by virtue of its intro-
spective characters and depictions of the
small moments in life that, taken together,
have great significance. Piquantly titled
chapters (“Out Come the Freaks”) provide
additional comic snap. Zadoorian’s subtle,
timely story hits the mark. (May)★ Tropic of Violence
Nathacha Appanah, trans. from the French by Geoffrey Strachan.
Graywolf, $16 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-64445-024-6O
rphaned gang members and desperate refugees
live on a machete’s edge in Appanah’s blistering
depiction (after Waiting for Tomorrow) of postcolonial
chaos in Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique
channel. A carousel of first-person narrators recount the
abrupt life story of Möise, abandoned as a baby and taken
in by Marie, a white nurse in Mayotte. After Marie dies,
the teenage Möise’s simmering identity crisis leads him
into the island’s unforgiving slum, a “violent no-man’s
land” called Gaza. There, the book-loving Möise, who
names his dog after the author Henri Bosco, falls sway
to gang leader Bruce, whose child soldiers run Gaza’s economy by drug dealing,
burglary, and political graft. Marked as a middle-class interloper, Möise is ripe for
Bruce’s exploitation. The calamitous chain of events that follows is narrated from
beyond the grave by players who are helpless to change it and can only affirm its
inevitability. “This country turns us all into beings who do wrong,” Marie says in
her ghostly narration. A journalist and native Mauritian, Appanah has a knack for
reportorial detail that crystallizes the characters’ commentary. Seen from above,
present-day Mayotte is adrift in its own history, neglected by France, its parent state;
at ground level it’s bloodstained and redolent with “sour urine on street corners,
ancient shit in the gutters, chicken being grilled on top of oil drums, eau de cologne
and spices outside the houses, the sour sweat of men and women and musty reek
of laundry.” Appanah skillfully lets these perspectives merge in the short, brutal lives
of her characters. This heralds Appanah as an essential cosmopolitan voice. (May)