THE PARIS EXPRESS: A Novel
by Emma Donoghue
S&S/Summit Books. 288 pages, $26.99
Compared to Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room (2010), say, The Paris Express is about a more mundane reality, a regularly scheduled train run that really happened in October 1895. The trip’s conclusion, however, was anything but ordinary. Arriving at Montparnasse Station in Paris, the train crashed through a wall and emerged from an upper level, its locomotive coming to rest against the station at about a sixty-degree angle. This image was so bizarre that photographic drawings were widely printed in the newspapers of the day. Amazingly, no one on the train was killed.
In the absence of a natural disaster, a premeditated crime, or a scandalous relationship, this novel is a poignant study of a cross-section of people from different social classes in fin-de-siècle France. The journey is meticulously chronicled, beginning at 8:30 a.m. in Granville on the Normandy coast and ending at 4 p.m. in Paris. Throughout the day, characters arrive, form tentative acquaintanceships, and depart.
The first passenger to be described is the only one that presents a queer possibility: 21-year old Mado Pelletier, described as “stocky” and “plain,” clutches a metal lunch bucket as though it contains something valuable, as several other passengers observe. At first glance, she seems to be a lesbian, or possibly a militant feminist. More importantly, she is a radical with a burning hatred of the bourgeois establishment, and her willingness to harm innocent bystanders in order to kill three politicians creates suspense until a medical emergency derails her plans. Other characters appear and subplots unfold, but little does anyone imagine what fate has in store for this random group of strangers when the train’s brakes fail.
Jean Roberta
THE ART SPY
The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
by Michelle Young
HarperOne. 400 pages, $29.99
The journalist Michelle Young has written a riveting biography of the most unlikely of spies, Rose Valland (1898–1980). Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation, The Art Spy explains how Valland, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum, risked her life gathering lists of art stolen by the Nazis from museums and private collections, especially those owned by Jewish collectors. Young details how Valland thwarted Hermann Göring’s theft of priceless art through subterfuge and bluffs, and how the lists she gathered were used at the war’s end to find thousands of works hidden in Austrian salt mines and German castles.
Valland was awarded the Légion d’honneur and the Médaille de la Résistance by France and the Medal of Resistance by the U.S., and her resistance work has been portrayed in such films as The Train (1964) and The Monuments Men (2014). Young’s research into her life has added an important detail to her amazing story: Valland was a lesbian who lived with her partner Joyce Heer for fifty years.
When France fell and Vichy law was imposed, lesbians were considered practitioners of an “unnatural act” and were imprisoned when caught. Valland and Heer survived the war undetected, though Heer, a British national, was incarcerated for a time in an internment camp as an “enemy alien.” America was not yet at war with Germany, so the American Embassy remained open in Paris and secured the release of Heer, an embassy employee, in February 1941. Valland practiced the art of hiding in plain sight as both a lesbian and an art spy, camouflaging herself through self-effacement and pretended incompetence. This biography offers hitherto unavailable information about Valland gleaned from meticulous research, telling us the truth of Valland’s sexuality and providing us with important information about this amazing woman’s life.
Irene Javors
MEMOIR OF A RELUCTANT GIANT
by David Cameron Strachan as told to Davi Barker
Independently Published. 262 pages, $35.
Despite its seemingly YA cover illustration, which depicts David Cameron Strachan as a giraffe and his considerably shorter husband Peter as a stack of turtles, Memoir of a Reluctant Giant is definitely not for kids. Its unflinchingly frank sexual episodes include one-night stands and enduring relationships with both men and women. David identifies as a 6’10” bisexual, HIV-positive, nonbinary intersex person (he uses he/him pronouns). His recounting of his life’s journey is an entertaining and educational exploration of gender, sexuality, and the diversity of human experience.
Growing up in a religious family in Walnut Creek, California, David experienced early bullying because of his height, which also allowed him to see “the world and everything in it from an extraordinarily different perspective.” In straightforward prose laced with humor, David details many episodes from his long life (he’s now 78), including international adventures in Europe, Thailand, and Malaysia. At age 29, David learned he was sterile because of Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition that had given him an extra X chromosome. Prescribed testosterone injections by a doctor without his consent, he was blindsided when he became hairier and hornier. He and intersex activist Cheryl Chase would go on to establish the Intersex Society of North America, seeking to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries.
Having collaborated with David on various projects over the years (full disclosure), I’ve been impressed by his courage in facing the challenge of living as his authentic self, and now by his willingness to document and share his life in this book. David’s poignant story, co-authored with his friend, namesake, and godson, is an important addition to the growing body of first-person narratives addressing the intersex experience, especially in this current climate.
Jim Van Buskirk
Julian’s Debut is an inventive novel that raises questions about memories, success, and writers’ obligations to their subjects. Social worker Julian publishes a revealing personal essay in The New Yorker, sharing deep secrets about his dysfunctional family. He follows up by writing a TV series about several family members featured in the essay, while contemplating a book-length memoir. He meets with each relative, all hurt by his assertions, begging him not to write the book. Written from Julian’s perspective, the novel explores his shifting awareness of the harm he’s causing his family, sometimes acknowledging it, at other times surprised that “not everyone sought … to be written about.” He outs a nephew, has a bomb-making uncle investigated, and implicates others in criminal activities. At times he admits that his memories may be unreliable, and after meeting each family member considers using the book to exact revenge by presenting more of their actions in a sinister light. Playing with form, the novel excerpts both Julian’s essay and the teleplay, chronicling one nephew’s rebellion against his parents through letting homeless people stay with them and forming a throuple with his sociology professor and a sex worker. Julian’s relationship with Raul, who disparages his family and literary connections while having kinky encounters with him, encourages and inspires the teleplay. Art and reality blend as Julian’s famous writer friends are clearly based on real authors, including Edmund White, Édouard Louis, Salman Rushdie, and Fran Lebowitz, capturing their books, habits, and even significant events, such as the attack on Rushdie. Charles Green
This new collection edited by author and activist Roxane Gay aims to promote a more expansive feminist canon, one that rejects the exclusivity with which other literary and intellectual canons are produced. In her introduction to The Portable Feminist Reader, Gay writes: “[T]his feminist reader is not a fortress; it is not an end point. It is the beginning of what I hope will be a vibrant and vigorous conversation about historical and contemporary feminist thought.” And she has succeeded in every way. This dense tome represents perhaps as vast a swath of feminist thought as can be contained in a single volume. Its contributors run the gamut from 16th-century (male) occult writer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa to early suffragist Susan B. Anthony, from the legendary Audre Lorde to the more contemporary Sara Ahmed. Its nine sections introduce readers to the intersectional implications of feminism through diverse considerations of race, class, geography, ability, sexuality, and gender. The final two sections may be of particular interest to readers of this magazine, as they wrestle with the nuanced interactions between feminism and LGBT experiences. I was particularly drawn to Gabrielle Bellot’s “Volcano Dreams,” which explores transgender embodiment and, as Gay writes in her introduction, “is an essay about navigating what it means to live in an unruly body.” The wealth of perspectives represented in this collection is illuminating, providing a holistic understanding that’s both intellectually complex and emotionally profound. Gay has done the hard work of bringing together these gems of feminist writing to create a radical foundation for further study. Casper Byrne
This history of same-sex-oriented men in 20th-century Ireland is a surprisingly emotional ride. The decades after Irish independence, otherwise known as the Free State, marked a turbulent forging of Irish identity bolstered by the fear of losing it again. Moral superiority was the order of the day: a marriage of Catholicism and politics for social and economic control. Author Averill Earls demonstrates how legal homophobia was shaped by these circumstances in her examination of court records of men arrested for “gross indecency.” Although an academic work, Love in the Lav puts real humans at the center of the story, striking a balance between being respectfully clinical about homoerotic matters and a little titillating in its focus upon actual lives. From the thousands of records detailing hundreds of arrests, Earls fleshes out the lives of about a dozen named offenders to exemplify the fact that these were real people with agency and feelings. “I adopted the methodology of social biography,” she explains. I was surprised by how much I learned about Irish politics, culture, and class stratification from this book, which constructs a big-picture narrative that academic treatises often lack. In the final chapters, Earls pivots into stories of love and loss that unexpectedly had me in tears. Julia Colborn
JULIAN’S DEBUT
by Brian Alessandro
Rebel Satori Press. 346 pages, $21.95
THE PORTABLE FEMINIST READER
Edited by Roxane Gay
Penguin Classics. 672 pages, $25.
LOVE IN THE LAV
A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922–1972
by Averill Earls
Temple University Press. 240 pages, $34.95
