Monday's Reviews Today: The Paris Roundups and India’s Independence

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/25/2007

In Tatiana De Rosnay “absorbing” and “hard to put down” novel, Sarah’s Key, an American journalist in Paris uncovers some unpleasant truths about her philandering French husband when she’s assigned to do a story on an anniversary of the 1942 Paris roundups (when the Germans collected the city’s Jews and sent them to concentration camps). And in the “scintillating” debut from Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, the author charts the violent season in 1947 when the British Empire ceded power to the new nations of India and Pakistan, giving the history “dramatic sweep with dishy detail.”

Sarah’s Key
Tatiana De Rosnay. St. Martin’s, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-312-37083-1

De Rosnay’s U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand’s family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand’s family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay’s 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia’s conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah’s trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down. (July)

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
Alex von Tunzelmann. Holt, $30 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8073-5

The transfer of power from the British Empire to the new nations of India and Pakistan in the summer of 1947 was one of history’s great, and tragic, epics: 400 million people won independence, and perhaps as many as one million died in sectarian violence among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. In her scintillating debut, British author von Tunzelmann keeps one eye on the big picture, but foregrounds the personalities and relationships of the main political leaders—larger-than-life figures whom she cuts down to size. She portrays Gandhi as both awe inspiring and, with his antisex campaigns and inflexible moralism, an exasperating eccentric. British viceroy Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten comes off as a clumsy diplomat dithering over flag designs while his partition plan teetered on the brink of disaster. Meanwhile, his glamorous, omnicompetent wife, Edwina, looks after refugees and carries on an affair with the handsome, stalwart Indian statesman Nehru. Von Tunzelmann’s wit is cruel—“Gandhi... wanted to spread the blessings of poverty and humility to all people”—but fair in its depictions of complex, often charismatic people with feet of clay. The result is compelling narrative history, combining dramatic sweep with dishy detail. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Aug.)