Rich, vivid turns of phrase bring post-war Paris to life

Foreign Bodies v

CYNTHIA OZICK’S sixth novel takes as its protagonist the recently divorced Bea Nightingale, “one of that ludicrously recognisable breed of middle-aged schoolteachers who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe”. Cajoled into searching for a nephew she barely knows, Bea travels to post-war Paris, a place where the fumes of the death camps still hang thick in the air.

The year is 1952 and Bea is caught between the people play-acting at being expatriates (’little more than literary tourists on a long visit’) and those ‘Europeans whom Europe had set upon’, the displaced polyglots immune to the Parisian “taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal”. Her nephew Julian, a “jobless, futureless, clueless” poet writing for “fool magazines”, is very much one of the former, while Lilli, the physically and emotionally scarred Holocaust survivor he has married, is definitely the latter.