Review by New York Times Review
IT'S INSTANTLY APPARENT on opening "The Double Life of Liliane" that its heroine was born sometime around the start of World War II and took to trans-Atlantic travel in the 1950s, even before the reader Googles the author, Lily Tuck, and learns that she was born in 1938, lives in New York and spends much of her time in Paris. After a short preamble, in the novel's very first paragraph, the heroine, Liliane, confesses that her double life began "at New York's Idlewild Airport" when she boarded "a Trans World Airlines L-749 Constellation, the first commercial plane to cross the Atlantic nonstop thanks to its additional fuel tanks." Oh, nostalgie du ciel! When air travel was glamorous and up-up-and-away TWA was still known as Trans World Airlines, before the cynics had christened it Try Walking Again and a merger with American Airlines did in the name altogether. This is autobiography dressed up as fiction, and quite obviously so. Liliane's parents, Rudolf, nicknamed Rudy, and Irène (which she insists should be pronounced "EE-wren" and not the American way, "i-REEN"), were born German and lived through those years when, thanks to their own hubris, Germans were hit by everything history could throw at them - the defeat of World War I, cruel postwar reparations, economic collapse, chronic inflation, the rise of Nazism, World War II. Rudy married for love, his wife to escape Germany. Who wouldn't? Rudy was born in Bonn, studied in Berlin and was raised as an assimilated Jew. In 1933, when the Nazis' anti-Jewish laws began to be felt, he left Germany for Paris, where he established a film company and married Liliane's mother. When Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany, Rudy, along with other German and Austrian men living in France, was arrested and put in a detention camp. Years later he wrote a memoir describing the conditions ("The ?toilets' were the most disgusting things I had ever seen") and how eventually he was permitted to join the French Foreign Legion in Algeria as an alternative to being deported back to Germany. Meanwhile, Irène, the youngest and most beautiful of three sisters who were born in Berlin, had to fend for herself. In May 1940, tired of waiting for the German Army to reach Paris, she "packed up her husband's cream-colored convertible Packard with suitcases filled with clothes and valuables, several cans of gas she had hoarded, Liliane's porcelain chamber pot, and food (bread, cheese, sausage, oranges); and with Liliane, her 7-month-old daughter, and Jeanne, the 19-year-old nanny from Brittany, she drove south." To make herself less conspicuous, she tied a scarf around her blond hair. Irène reached Lisbon ahead of the mass exodus that occurred when the Germans entered the French capital, and the family boarded an American ship, the SS Exeter, bound for New York. She had left behind most of her belongings - "her beautiful Patou suits, her Revillon furs," as well as "Liliane's elegant midnight navy Silver Cross pram," which the child had already outgrown. But she still managed on the Atlantic crossing to sunbathe in "a two-piece bathing suit" and be photographed, smiling, with the captain ("The Double Life of Liliane" is a novel, but it includes photographs). No wonder the marriage foundered when Rudy, having taken his leave from the Foreign Legion at the end of the war, also fetched up in America. After the two separate and Rudy returns to Europe, Irène makes a life for herself in the United States and remarries. Her new husband, Gaby, is conservative, as is his family: "Good Episcopalian Republicans from New England who can trace their ancestors back to the Pilgrim Fathers and who make no bones about being disapproving." Gaby regards Irène as both glamorous and mysterious, even exotic: "A German-French divorcée, with a past and with an 8-year-old child." Gaby doesn't know what to make of the child. He drinks bourbon, too much of it, and one night tries to climb into Liliane's bed. Rudy makes movies at Rome's Cinecittà, and moves into an apartment building next door to Gualtiero Jacopetti, a briefly controversial and now long-forgotten Italian filmmaker whom Tuck describes as "the dashingly handsome director of 'Mondo Cane,'" a film made up of "a series of lurid and macabre scenes" that was nominated for several awards and "spawned several sequels known as ?shockumentaries.'" Jacopetti would be jailed "for having had sex with a 14-year-old Gypsy girl ... whom he was later forced to marry." Tuck is especially good at the creepy staring and groping by middle-aged men that was commonly believed to be perfectly acceptable behavior with beautiful adolescents. Liliane visits her father in the summer, spending hours on the terrace sunbathing in her bikini. Leaning out his apartment window, Jacopetti watches her. "How old are you?" he asks. The author also excels at bringing out the half-life of information that teenagers inevitably develop when their parents divorce. Rudy has a mistress, a detail Liliane keeps secret from her mother. He asks Liliane how she's getting on at school when really he'd like to know if Irène is happy with her new husband. But he doesn't ask, and Liliane doesn't volunteer. As befits a coming-of-age novel set in the mid-20th century, Liliane reads "Story of O" (which she finds jammed in the back of a drawer in her father's desk), Françoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse" and Elsa Morante's "Arturo's Island." (Tuck wrote a biography of Morante, and the Roman novelist and her husband, Alberto Moravia, have a walk-on part in "The Double Life of Liliane.") Eventually, and inevitably, Liliane also reads "Peyton Place." The novel ends with her flying to Bangkok to join her handsome American boyfriend. Before he left, he'd said to her: "You should come with me, Lil. Think of all the adventures we will have." "The Double Life of Liliane" will mean most to readers of a certain age who are able to recognize the cultural fence posts Tuck has hammered into the verge along her journey. The detailed references add bulk to her story. But to younger readers, the insertions about Italian film directors they have never heard of or fashionable Roman restaurants whose names are a mystery - all these details, however carefully harvested, risk feeling as if they've been culled from Wikipedia. Other writers before Tuck, notably Orhan Pamuk in "The Museum of Innocence," have mapped out a similar autobiographical route to imaginative fiction, but with more feeling and to far greater effect, proving that the old lesson to writers, "Show, don't tell," is one still worth taking to heart. FIAMMETTA ROCCO is the books and arts editor of The Economist and a former judge of the Man Booker Prize for fiction.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Tuck won the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay (2004), a brilliantly imagined fictional transport back to eighteenth-century Paraguay during the dictatorship of Francisco Solano López. Her new novel refracts autobiographical situations through a fictional lens to reveal a rich spectrum of details about the life of a female writer, Liliane (not too difficult to read Lily here), who has led a life full of exceptional experiences well worth following regardless of whether in fictional or nonfictional format. Her father was born in Germany, and as a young man at the advent of Nazism, he fled to Paris, where he established a film production company. But the tentacles of established anti-Semitism reached him there, which eventually led him to join the French Foreign Legion. After the war, he became a naturalized French citizen and moved to Rome to resume his movie-production company at the time when the Eternal City was known as Hollywood on the Tiber. Before the war, he'd met and married Liliane's mother, whom he'd had to leave behind when in the Foreign Legion. She was also born in Germany and fled during the war, on her own with her baby, Liliane, to Portugal and sailed to New York, where she eventually, after subsequent hops around Europe and the Western Hemisphere, located permanently and there obtained a divorce. When we join Liliane's story, she is dividing her time between her mother and stepfather in New York and her father and his girlfriend in Rome. As she grows to young womanhood, and despite her parents' broken marriage, her life lessons are vivid and exciting. Her extended family and the friends of her parents well populate these pages; it's specious to argue that they read more like nonfiction than fiction. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tuck's critical acclaim for her National Book Award-winning novel will draw readers to this special, provocative, unusual novel.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Award winner Tuck (The News from Paraguay) blends history, biography, memoir, and fiction in this gleefully chaotic metanarrative, which closely parallels the author's own life. Tracking the emotional and intellectual development of its protagonist, Liliane, who is born in France in the 1930s but raised largely in the U.S., the novel encompasses many of the early 20th century's most monumental-and most horrific-developments. Sections centering on Liliane's parents and family members offer insights into the tribulations faced by European Jews during World War II, as well as the experiences of migrants to the U.S. in the years during and after the war. Along the way, the novel, restless and roving, delivers reports on Liliane's impressive family history (celebrity relatives include Moses Mendelssohn and Mary, Queen of Scots), while mapping the various places her peripatetic clan has called home (Peru, Italy, and Tanzania among others). While stretches of the novel verge on seeming crammed and distracted, Tuck succeeds in balancing the bounty of the information she relays with playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes-particularly those between Liliane and her mother, Irène-that quicken the heart. Of her mother's scent, Liliane thinks at one point, "Joy, the most expensive perfume in the world; an ounce consists of ten thousand jasmine flowers and three hundred roses." In Tuck's prose-messy, lively, dizzy, happy-one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Winner of several O. Henrys, as well as a National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, Tuck here offers a fictional autobiography that presents her rich life in vignettes both personal and historical. Born in Paris in the late 1930s to German film producer Rudy Solmsen and his beautiful, difficult wife, Irene, the author was a bright yet shy child, shuttled between continents after her parents' marriage collapsed (her mother relocated to New York, her father to Italy). The metanarrative moves back and forth in time, entwining pieces of world history (Genghis Khan; Josephine Baker; Mary, Queen of Scots; and the mid-20th-century Mau Mau Uprising, to name but a few) with the intricate facts of Tuck's family tree, thus giving context to her private life as it shaped her professional career. VERDICT Tuck remains one of America's most brilliant novelists and short story writers, and this distinctive work, penned with a masterly eye for details that speak volumes and illustrated throughout with intriguing uncaptioned photos, allows her literary gifts to come full circle. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A ton of factual information complements the fiction in National Book Award winner (The News From Paraguay, 2004) Tuck's sixth novel, a family history in mosaic form. It's 1948. Eight-year-old Liliane, an only child, is flying from New York to Rome to visit her divorced father, Rudy. The history of Rudy's Roman neighborhood is spelled out in detail to distance us from the characters, just as Rudy, a movie producer awkward around kids, is distanced from his daughter. German by origin, French by choice after moving to Paris, Rudy is a nonreligious, assimilated Jew. His half-Jewish ex-wife, Irne, was also German originally; now she's American and newly married to Gaby, an investment banker and WASP. With her father, Liliane speaks French, while in America, fearful of the foreigner label, she speaks only English: this is her double life. Dislocated lives are the essence of this novel, which approximates Tuck's life just as the name Liliane approximates Lily. It jumps around in time and place. The outbreak of war in '39 sees Rudy taken prisoner and Irne fleeing Paris with baby Liliane, to be reunited much later in Peru; but Tuck has no interest in exploiting these dramatic moments. She also zips past Rudy's nemesis, his villainous brother-in-law, and Claude, "the love of Irne's life." What matters is arranging the lives of the leads, and their ancestors, on history's canvas; context, such as Hitler's rise to power, is all-important. What's problematic, though, is Tuck's dragging in real-life events (the notorious Career Girls Murders in 1963 New York; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya) without seeming justification. Liliane's own story, overshadowed at first by that of her sensationally beautiful mother, takes shape quite late, as she turns her instinct for fantasizing into a beginner's novel. Metafiction that pleases and frustrates in equal measure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
