13 Rue Therese [Hardcover]

If a book can take you through a process of discovery, Ms Shapiro's '13 rue Thérèse' comes as close as any I have read. Fluid in its form, lucid in its conception, tender in its spirit, this book says much about its author's feelings for the past and its resonance in the present. With the instincts (and imagination) of a good historian, Elena Mauli Shapiro takes us through Trevor Stratton's discovery of the relics of a past life, the life of Louise Brunet. The long dead Louise's artefacts lie in a tin which is deliberately placed by the enigmatic Josianne in Trevor's room. This is not the first time Josianne has left the tin for a man to find. We are invited to open the tin.

As Trevor grows ever more engrossed in Louise's life he grows more and more feverish. In his fevered state, time begins to slip and he is seen by the living of the earlier generation sitting in the corner of Louise's dying brother's bedroom. Louise is a young woman of irrepressibly irreverent humour. She teases a celibate priest with erotic confessions, she laughs at the idea of falsely drawing men out in order to deflate their authority, she transgresses in order to make her existence bearable to herself. Louise reaches a crisis in her life at which point the slippery nature of time brings her face to face with Trevor.

As the artefacts around which this book is based are real and remain in the possession of the author, the book contains images of the letters, photographs and other items which the fictional Trevor Stratton sifts through. Ms Shapiro is, therefore, exposing throughout her narrative the veracity of her own tale, the possibility that she (or Trevor, who keeps notes on his find) is a falsifier. She is questioning the nature of history and exploring the power of empathetic imagination of which she possess a great deal.

I loved this book. It is thought provoking, pleasantly erotic, hugely imaginative and unusual in its construction.

This book is a bit of an odd mix, some bits I liked, others not so much. It starts with a box of letters, photographs and other mementos belonging to a woman called Louise Brunet who lived in Paris in the first part of the twentieth century. The box is being investigated by an American professor visiting Paris in the present day, so you have a story within a story. He weaves a tale around the objects in the box to create the life of the woman who owned it.
I liked this idea but at the start the story jiggled about between present and past in no particular order which I found confusing. The timeline did settle down after a while and some structure to Louise's life began to emerge. But after a while the professor drifted away from the clues given in the box and Louise's life became totally fictional and at times a bit bizarre. There was some blurring of time between past and present as the professor seemed to merge with the characters he was writing about. Sometimes even adding alternative actions to the story and introducing fictional documents that were labelled 'not in the record' which seemed to defeat the object of the exercise of using the box in the first place. I felt that there were too many ideas running through the book so it didn't really know which way to go. I quite liked the character of Louise even though her behaviour at times was a bit odd and if the book had stuck to her story all the way through I would have enjoyed it more.
I did wonder what the real owner of the box would have made of her fictional counterpart.

This starts off as many an academic romance; Trevor Stratton discovers a box of artefacts including photographs, letters, gloves and coins and begins to imagine or piece together the story of their owner Louise Brunet. So far so fine, the box however has been placed there for him by another woman Josianne who has apparently used this method of seduction on academic men before (charming). What follows is a decent enough novel telling Louise's story through the items that are included in the book, love letters to her childhood sweetheart, postcards from her father in WWI, photographs of her husband and calling cards that may or may not have gone unused. All of these things provide Trevor with tantalising glimpses of Louise's life and he, as expected, becomes obsessed with her. Josianne's seductive plootings are very much sidelined in his devotion to Louise.

However for me the problem is towards the end of the novel, Trevor becomes ill and it could easily be seen that he is losing his grip on reality. Is he filling in the blanks of Louise's life too much? Imagining her reactions, her affairs, her personality and even travelling through time to interact with her himself? Problematically this is a familiar plot from the novel/film 'Somewhere in Time' and whereas that works well as it is a time travelling romance, in '13 Rue Therese' it instead just seems like a complete breakdown in plot. What frustrates me most about this book is that the simplified notion of recovering a person's life from the items they leave behind (if well written) would have been enough. The undeveloped love interest with Josianne, the hint of incest, the bungling time travel all distract from what could have been an excellent novel.