I was very eagerly awaiting this book, which marries Cara Black’s interest in Paris and WWII with a great new female central character. Black has made her name with her Aimée Leduc series featuring a private detective in 1990s Paris. Her new book takes us back to the war where we discover, along with titular character Huguette, Aimée’s grandfather Claude, founder of the Leduc Detective Agency. When the book opens, though, Claude is a policeman, or flic, just trying to hold on to his job.
But this is mostly Huguette’s story, however, and as the book begins in Paris in 1945, it’s not a happy one. She’s pregnant, an orphan and living in a maternity home with the understanding that when her baby is born she will relinquish it to “suitable” parents, as she’s only 17 with no resources. When her boy is delivered during a storm, she’s forced to nurse and care for him for a week or so and, of course, bonds with him.
This complicates things when the baby is removed, and Huguette heads off to search for him. Although her efforts do not go very well, Huguette is a survivor, smart and good with numbers, and stumbles into a black-market position at a movie studio. She starts as a kind of under assistant to an assistant but, because of her smarts, works her way up.
She is governed by two desires, to find justice for her father, a collaborator killed during liberation, and retribution for the Nazi soldier that raped and impregnated her. She’s also afraid of the forces who don’t want those things and ultimately changes her name and lives in Lyon mostly incognito.
Black’s real triumph here is not only the personality of Huguette, a strong woman who still struggles with doubt and trauma, but also her portrayal of postwar France, which becomes a character in its own right. It’s the portrait of a society picking up the pieces amid the frenzied search for collaborators and the uncertainty about the fate of Nazis awaiting trial, all to the soundtrack of the clatter of wooden soles on cobblestone streets (there was no leather for shoes in postwar France) and the sight of patched up bullet holes in cherished cafés. Huguette is also putting herself back together, never forgetting the time when she was homeless and hungry and that Claude saved her from jail and found her a job. She emulates his charity as she becomes successful, employing people who truly need a hand.
Black is not a sentimental writer by any means, however, and her portrayal of the horrors Huguette endures and the lingering trauma is raw and straightforward, making her tribulations all the more poignantly memorable. Black at the same time tells the parallel story of the struggle of the nation of France itself to deal with its own Nazi inflicted cataclysm and somehow rebuild on the ruins. Spaced throughout the book are meetings between Claude and Huguette, acting as milestones in the story and serving as good bookends for an absorbing saga you won’t want to miss. — Robin Agnew