Category Archives: Book Reviews
One book two covers
In July, on Bastille Day, Weidenfeld & Nicolson will publish Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. In October (in the book trade that’s considered simultaneous) St Martin’s Press in the US will publish Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died under Nazi Occupation.
Spot the differences!
This is not the first time that one of my books has been published simultaneously in the UK and US but I had assumed that since this book had been planned with and commissioned by both publishers together five years ago it would be the same product. Actually it is, exactly the same inside. But both publishers have chosen not only slightly different subtitles (one has the word Nazi while the other points to the fact that I have written about a whole decade) but very different jackets in which to clothe the words. Since I am constantly asked why, I shall try to explain!
The British cover tells a story. In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (just to make sure you know where this is happening), a slightly wary, elegant Parisienne is chatting up a German officer who, even from the back, looks highly relaxed. His head is sympathetically angled to one side and he has one foot perched on a ledge. What he is saying to her we can only guess at but this cover is so wonderfully evocative that everyone who handles it will want to know what on earth is happening and (I hope) have to buy the book to find out.
The American cover is more subtle but also features an elegant Parisienne, this time she is striding purposefully towards a shelter perhaps, or a doorway protected by sandbags, but into where? This cover too has an air of mystery and needs some explanation. Paris, once defeated in 1940 was declared an ‘Open City’ which was the deal between Vichy and the Nazis which prevented it being attacked by the Germans and saved its most iconic buildings and bridges. But the sandbags were put in place in 1939, when there was huge fear of German bombings, and largely not removed until the Liberation even though it was unlikely that the Allies would bomb civilians when they needed to concentrate their fire power on German and other targets. By 1944 however the Allies considered they had to bomb strategic targets in the vicinity of Paris and there were of course civilian casualties.
When I was first shown the UK cover (yes, authors are consulted!) I was worried the picture was almost too good and therefore must have been staged or even doctored. But, as I should have realised, the truth is always more interesting. It is a genuine photograph by Roger Schall who was given special permission to take pictures in occupied Paris (others were not and if your were caught with a camera there were serious consequences). He had also published during the Occupation several books of views of the monuments of Paris and of France, under the imprints of Verlag Schall, Odé and Kremer with captions in German and obviously directed at a German audience. According to a French museum curator, Catherine Tambrun at the Musée Carnavalet, Schall was probably paid by the Germans to take photographs during the Occupation and the most obvious destination for such photographs would have been the German propaganda magazine Signal. He used his talent to survive. Is it worse than a vegetable seller?
This is another kind of deal, then, and as my book tries to make clear, surviving in Paris was for almost everyone, dependent on doing some kind of deal. After the war this was often punished as collaboration and it was assumed there was a sexual element to many deals. Sometimes there was, but it was rarely as clear cut as that. I have tried over the last few years to understand where the line between survival and collaboration should be drawn and it shifts constantly. I think my two covers lead you enticingly and with great style into that debate.
Buy the book at your local bookshop please! or else through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or IndieBound
Les Parisiennes Reviews
Read Negotiating with Silence by Lisa Hilton TLS (October 7th 2016)
One of the distinctive features of Anne Sebba’s richly intelligent history is the author’s evocation of sound. Sebba has deliberately eschewed a focus on well-known primary documentation for her history of Parisian women during World War II, choosing instead to alert her readers to a “quieter and frequently less well-known” set of voices. Those voices, belonging to women of all classes, ages and educational backgrounds, weep and sing through this extraordinary book, and through them we also hear the soundtrack to the city’s occupation, the “clackety-clack” of improvised wooden- soled shoes, the sinister clang of iron shutters banging closed on abandoned businesses, the squeak of a bicycle carrying hidden messages after curfew. Sebba’s story is also a negotiation with silence, the silence of the dispossessed, the vanished and the unacknowledged, many of whose stories, through the author’s indefatigable use of letters, diaries, objects and interviews, are heard here for the first time.
From the moment the French government retreated to Bordeaux on 10th June 1940, Paris became a ‘significantly feminized city”. It was women, Sebba argues, who represented the front line as the Wehrmacht poured in, who had to confront their country’s defeat both practically and ethically. The patriarchal nature of pre-war French society was the first obstacle: women without cheque books or bank accounts of their own were financially marooned, attempting to provide for their children without access to cash. For many, the obligation to resist became as urgent as finding food, but as Sebba delicately and compassionately demonstrates, this was, at least initially, no simple matter in the unprecedented atmosphere of moral ambiguity which pertained. Yet even as Paris emptied, life was just beginning for many disaffected women, and whilst resistance demanded both intense courage and sacrifice, the years of occupation were to prove richly fulfilling.
“Resistancialisme”, the term coined in 1987 by Henry Rousso in reference to the myth coined post-war by both Gaullists and Communists, and according to which the French unanimously and naturally resisted the Occupation, remains a vexed issue. As Margaret Atack observes, this myth was not in “monolithic domination”, and discordant voices of collaboration and complicity have found their place in a continuing examination of the legacy of French fascism and anti-Semitism, yet Sebba’s work demonstrates the extent to which, in contrast with Jewish experience, that of women who resisted, who were deported, tortured and killed has remained relatively unexplored. Sebba delineates the unutterable disgrace of Vichy’s treatment of French Jews- from the dehumanizing effects of the expropriation of their property to the deportation of Jewish children on the initiative of Pierre Laval, the head of the council of Vichy ministers. The youngest child sent to Auschwitz under Laval’s direct orders was 18 months old. Of the total of 76 000 Jews deported, just 3%, 2,500, returned to France. In contrast, 50% of resistants returned, designated as patriotic combatants, rather than victims by the provisional post-war government.
Within this vastly unjust disparity, Sebba detects another, that of the women, Jewish or not, whose bravery and suffering were largely discounted as de Gaulle welcomed home his nation’s returning sons. The General’s own niece, Genevieve, was deported to Ravensbruck, “where God”, she described “had remained outside”, yet pitifully few accounts of women’s lives there were given any public attention. The activities of the forty women who served actively in the F Division of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive created by Churchill in 1940 to assist resistance activities in occupied countries have also been neglected- since their very presence in France was in defiance of the Geneva convention, much of their work has been written out of history. Yet they fare better than the many prostitutes who were deported, victims of Vichy’s obsession with moral recovery, women who had perhaps hidden escaping airmen in brothels, but whose many acts of kindness and courage went undocumented. It was women who did penance for the emasculation of their nation- as Sebba describes, during the épuration sauvage in the immediate aftermath of the war, 20, 000 tondues displayed their shaven heads as exculpation for the men who had failed to protect them. Economic collaboration – the practice of a predominantly male commercial elite – was not nearly so severely punished as sexual submission to the enemy. And what constituted collaboration? As the writer
Colette discovered when she relied on the help of Suzanne Abetz, wife to the German Ambassador, to recover her Jewish husband Maurice Goudenet, when family members began to vanish, no one was above using highly placed contacts to help them.
Resistance is evoked here in two uniquely “Parisian” forms -art and fashion. Anyone who dismisses the latter as trivial would do well to observe the courage of Lucien Lelong, president of the Chambre Syndicale, who pleaded the case for French couture so successfully in Berlin that 25 000 women workers were saved from deportation. As a German visitor to Paris remarked, the resourcefulness of the women in remaining fashionable brought colour to an otherwise grey everyday life, whilst the re-establishment of the fashion industry after the war was an essential component of France’s economic recovery. Sebba’s definition of a ‘true” Parisienne is captured in the spirit of one woman, who, though nearly starving, preferred to use her daily allowance of an ounce of fat as hand-cream, a stubborn gesture of elegance which suggests the psychological power of chic. Aesthetic defiance was the stance of Jeanne Bucher, a gallerist who staged at least twenty shows of ‘decadent” cubists and surrealists during the Occupation, and whose premises served as a safe house- one man hiding from the Gestapo was amused to find himself sharing a hidden bed with a stack of Braques and Picassos.
Sebba is adept at explaining the changing political climate of Paris as the war progressed, but she never allows politics to overshadow her subjects’ voices. This book does not judge – instead, in the breadth of its humanity, it achieves some of the recognition which the Parisiennes own heroic
Read Clare Mulley’s review of Les Parisiennes in the Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/keeping-up-appearances-in-1940s-paris/
(June 2nd 2016)
This is a valuable book, not least because it doesn’t shy away from the physical misery of women’s lives — the indignity of having a period in camps with no sanitary protection, the abortionists who were put to death under Vichy while prostitution was legal, the children who died because their mothers were too weak to breastfeed. Although Sebba salutes the bravery of Les Parisiennes, such as Geneviève de Gaulle, who made great sacrifices to resist the enemy, she is careful not to condemn the ones who chose simply to survive. ..To read this book is to admire female bravery and resilience, but also to understand why the scars left by the Second World War still run so deep.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/les-parisiennes-how-the-women-of-paris-lived-loved-and-died-in-the-1940s-by-anne-sebba-f8p6s8dnk
(July 2016)
” Anne Sebba’s tour de force of research and reflection…is a testament of silk and sacrifice of choices to resist or collaborate … Keep this extraordinary and evocative book close by and you will never lift a lipstick insouciantly again.”
By Madeleine Kingsley https://www.thejc.com/arts/books/162416/review-les-parisiennes
“Sebba has found an enthralling way of looking at the story by focusing on how the choice was made by French women, and, in particular, by the women of Paris.”
By Sarah Helm Observer https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/31/les-parisiennes-anne-sebba-review
Read latest review in the Sydney Morning Herald: Accomplished biographer Anne Sebba has uncovered some extraordinary stories…. The author has also produced some extraordinary statistics …Sebba has produced a clear-eyed view of a bitter decade in the life of the City of Light.
Read latest review in the Sydney Morning Herald: Accomplished biographer Anne Sebba has uncovered some extraordinary stories…. The author has also produced some extraordinary statistics …Sebba has produced a clear-eyed view of a bitter decade in the life of the City of Light. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/anne-sebba-portrays-womens-wartime-hardship-in-les-parisiennes-20160905-gr8yo6.html (Sept. 2017)
” Anne Sebba’s tour de force of research and reflection…is a testament of silk and sacrifice of choices to resist or collaborate … Keep this extraordinary and evocative book close by and you will never lift a lipstick insouciantly again.”
By Madeleine Kingsley https://www.thejc.com/arts/books/162416/review-les-parisiennes
“This is a valuable book, not least because it doesn’t shy away from the physical misery of women’s lives — the indignity of having a period in camps with no sanitary protection, the abortionists who were put to death under Vichy while prostitution was legal, the children who died because their mothers were too weak to breastfeed. Although Sebba salutes the bravery of Les Parisiennes, such as Geneviève de Gaulle, who made great sacrifices to resist the enemy, she is careful not to condemn the ones who chose simply to survive. ..To read this book is to admire female bravery and resilience, but also to understand why the scars left by the Second World War still run so deep.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/les-parisiennes-how-the-women-of-paris-lived-loved-and-died-in-the-1940s-by-anne-sebba-f8p6s8dnk
(July 2016)
Caroline Moorehead in the Literary Review described it as “Sebba’s book, with its phenomenal amount of detailed research and its vast cast of characters, is rich in stories about the tricks of life under occupation, the heroism of those who carried out acts of defiance, the slipperiness of collusion and the vast profits made by fixers, contacts, middlemen and entrepreneurs. She is particularly good on the fashion world and the scheming equivocating social luminaries…”
https://literaryreview.co.uk/occupational-hazards
(July 2016)
Read Clare Mulley’s review of Les Parisiennes in the Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/keeping-up-appearances-in-1940s-paris/
(June 2nd 2016)
Ice Cream for the Soul or Reading for Pleasure
ICE CREAM FOR THE SOUL: ANNE SEBBA ON READING FOR PLEASURE
Council member Anne Sebba reflects on reading for pleasure.
I fell asleep last night with a book in my hands. There were just 40 pages to go until the end but, after a long and tiring day, much as I was desperate to know who lived and who died, I just failed to make it to the finish. Luckily I woke at 5am, before the rest of the household, and raced to the end, sorry it was over but happy to have shared a few days of my life with those heroic yet flawed characters. It was the most gripping and poignant story I have read for ages and urge anyone looking for a beautifully written tale in an original voice, who wants to understand how the heart functions and learn something about twentieth century history along the way (thats all of us, right?) to read Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel, One night, Markovitch although you have to get to the end of the book to find out why it is so named.
It’s hard to convey, in a black and white, matter-of-fact sentence why reading can bring such intense pleasure. Why getting immersed in a good book really does take you to other places, other times. Why, when youre engrossed in a good book, you really cant put it down. Like most things (playing an instrument, running or hiking) the more you do, the better you get and the more you like it but, unlike most things, you dont need any training to start. Reading is not exactly therapy but reading about someone who has experienced the same pain, sorrow, jealousy, elation, fear as you may be experiencing is a wonderfully comforting feeling. We are not, after all, entirely alone in the world.
I realise how lucky I am to have a job (as a writer) where I have to read. But most of what I read for work is factual, has source notes and demands that I take notes as I read. It has its own delights of discovery of course but it simply isnt the same pleasure as reading a novel. I cannot imagine a life where I dont have several books on the go, some on my bedside table, one always in my bag (how often have I been stuck on a train or even in a broken lift?) and others in various places.
But mostly, when we try and tell others, especially children who havent yet caught the bug, about the delights of reading the phrases that creep in have an earnest ring to them: reading is good for you, reading will help you do well at school, etc. That may be true but now at last here is a report that tells you yes, people who read for pleasure do benefit from a huge range of wider outcomes including increased empathy, alleviation or reduction in the symptoms of depression and dementia, as well as an improved sense of wellbeing. People who read for pleasure also have a higher sense of social inclusion, a greater tolerance and awareness of other cultures and lifestyles, possess better communication skills and are better able to access information. But, above all, reading is a pleasure. So why deny yourself?
Go on, have fun – read a book. Its ice cream for the soul.
Get involved
Share the report (commissioned by The Reading Agency) and your responses online using the hashtag #readingforpleasure.
About the author
I’ve got prison on my mind right now!
I’ve got prison on my mind right now!
This weekend I spoke in the beautiful old Town Hall in Devizes and right next to the entrance way was the old lock up cell for the town, ‘more of a dungeon than a prison,’ I was told. ‘You wouldn’t want to spend a night in there.’ I don’t suppose anyone who got thrown in to it especially wanted to either. But rough and ready justice was often doled out a hundred or so years ago.
And my current reading material is a book I picked up at San Francisco airport called ‘Orange is the new Black’ and was completely hooked throughout a long flight before I knew anything about the current phenomenon of the TV series based on the book.
For those who aren’t watching, the story concerns a pretty young middle class woman, Piper Kerman, who foolishly delivered a suitcase of drug money as a young jobless graduate from the prestigious Smith University keen to earn money. Ten years later, engaged to be married, her past caught up with her and she is convicted and sentenced to 15 months inside.
What saves her are books. Books by every post. Books from her adored family and books from people she doesn’t know. Books that she lends out in prison. Books that enable her to stay sane and enter another world.
Yet, bizarrely, the British government recently ordered that prisoners are no longer allowed to receive any small packages, which effectively means that books are banned in UK prisons. Yes there are libraries, but these are often not open at the brief time when a prisoner might visit and the book selection is often old and torn. Books are one of the few means prisoners have to improve their life inside and prepare for a life beyond. Often the books needed are legal books to help them prepare their cases for appeal. Or just books to read to pass the interminable time of day. Many leading writers, actors and poets have campaigned against the government’s bizarre ruling. Next week six leading figures from the publishing world are hoping to spend a night in a cell themselves to highlight the need to overturn this ban. I hope to be one of the ‘lucky’ ones who can spend a night on a cold stone floor in this important cause. If you want to support me please do NOW go to www.justgiving.com/AnneSebba1 where you can read more about the campaign, press the button for Anne and donate. Thank you!