What the Light Touches
In March 2008, Barbara, a divorced 41-year-old literary agent, returns to her Paris apartment to find a stranger sleeping on her sofa. A young man, Roger, is the brother of the Catalan-French lawyer who rents a room from Barbara in the fifth-floor walkup that used to belong to Barbara’s grandmother, Margaux, who now lives in a retirement home. Taking his brother’s room while his brother is away, Roger finds himself trapped with Barbara during a massive snowstorm and discovers a mysterious magazine photo of a beautiful girl on a bicycle taken during the World War II Nazi occupation of Paris. The girl is Margaux at age 17, riding home from the theater on the afternoon of her first kiss with Damian, a promising young musician. And while the photograph, published in a magazine of Nazi propaganda, casts suspicion on Margaux and her family, her lover is facing arrest and deportation because of his association with a fellow musician who has joined the resistance.
This story of family secrets and survival under the most harrowing of circumstances starts slowly and claustrophobically as Barbara and Roger get to know each other amid their confinement. The middle of the book, encompassing a little more than half overall, moves at breakneck speed as the author portrays vividly the rapid changes of life under occupation, the terror, lack of food, and the way locals chafe beneath everyday insults and restrictions. The present-day narrative of inconveniences and petty betrayals makes Margaux’s adolescence even more terrifying in retrospect. What emerges is a portrait of resilience and the power of love as Margaux’s story shows Barbara and Roger how to care for each other and those around them in an unpredictable world.
