A partisan's daughter /

"I AM not the sort of man who goes to prostitutes. Well, I suppose that every man would say that." In "A Partisan's Daughter," his urgent, spare new novel of romantic obsession, Louis de Bernières, proficient at intricate historical narratives ("Corelli's Mandolin," "Birds Without Wings") shows himself an artist of the simpler story as well. Not that simple means easy. If prostitution, as so often is said, is the oldest profession, then writing about fallen women must be the oldest literary subject. To make that subject hit its mark requires a new spin. For de Bernières, it's the smoldering repression suffered by a melancholy London salesman named Chris (born "Christian," he lapsed), whose decades-long marital grudge match is interrupted when a Serb called Roza appears on a street corner during his drive home, dressed in a fluffy white fur jacket, high boots and lilac lipstick. Is Roza a streetwalker? Chris doesn't know. But he can't bear not finding out. "I've wasted my life being sensible when I should have been cavorting and gallivanting," he broods. "I haven't had enough bliss." He slows his "shabby brown car" and rolls down the window. "Have you got the time?" he asks her uncertainly, not sure of "the formula." She may. But might he have the inclination? Again, he's not sure.' For one thing, Roza isn't his type: She's a "well-built girl, with wide hips and large breasts. She wasn't the sort I would normally have taken a fancy to." But Roza's measurements don't signify; what matters to Chris is that she's nothing like his wife, whom he reviles as "one of those insipid Englishwomen with skimmed milk in her veins," who has become "ashen-faced and inert" in middle age, sitting in front of the television knitting sweaters, reminding him of "a great loaf of white bread, plumped down on the sofa in its cellophane wrapping." At Roza's place, there's' no sofa, just unstuffed armchairs in a dank basement, across from a gas fire. A wife, he tells Roza, "eventually becomes a sister or an enemy." "I knew for sure he was right about that," she thinks to herself. "It was what every married man used to tell me." She takes pity on Chris, with his receding hairline and big teeth, "whiling away an ordinary life in resignation." He's "a bit like me," she thinks, sympathetically. Blinded by his fantasy of her exoticism, clueless as a schoolboy, Chris fails to notice their commonality, fails to consider that he might represent a fantasy to her. Like Chris, Rosa is lonely. She has no family, no papers, and lives under an assumed name in a decrepit house peopled by other transients. Her shifts at Bergonzi's Pussycat Hostess Paradise have earned her a mountain of money - all she has in the world - which she keeps in a trunk under her bed. "Please stop telling me that," Chris begs. "You shouldn't be so stupid as to tell anyone whatsoever." But Roza's rule is that she will tell Chris whatever she wants. (Any reader who has seen Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" will feel a pang, remembering the moment when Giulietta Masina, as the prostitute Cabiria, stands on a cliff, tears streaking her face, screaming at the man she thought would marry her, who has instead stolen her life's savings: "Ammazzami!" - Kill me!) Chris nervously submits, wondering where the liaison will lead. Roza wonders, too. "I'd hooked him almost straight away," she thinks. "I was giving myself a problem, wondering what to do with him now that I had him dangling on the line." Often, the dramatic tension in stories of the "married man meets forbidden woman" type comes from an external factor - the wife's suspicions, the man's fears for his eternal soul. The master of the genre in the 20th century was Graham Greene, who made adultery a personal leitmotif in his writing, repeatedly scourging himself for his sins against his adopted Roman Catholicism, but unable or unwilling to reform. Greene's biographer Norman Sherry spoke with a friend of the author's who had escorted him to dive bars in Vienna during the shooting of "The Third Man" and asked how he could consort with prostitutes and still consider himself a Catholic. "I have my ways," was the evasive answer. Throughout his life, Greene stayed married to his wife while remaining devoted to his mistresses. His circle understood his passion for the elegant Lady Catherine Walston, but were "mystified," Sherry wrote, by his wide array of lovers whose appeal was less apparent. Greene explained his motivations, to an extent, in "The End of the Affair" when his narrator, Bendrix, confessed that he had "always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical." In an earlier novel, "The Heart of the Matter," Greene wrote more coolly, "Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive." Yet Chris's wife has no suspicions "she had stopped noticing me at all many years before," he complains - and he has no religion to betray. His only war is against his own desire. The novel's tension arises from another quarter: the question of whether Chris, mired in restraint and self-recrimination, will muster the verve to make Roza a dishonest woman. Their story is told in he says/she says chapters, in unadorned, confessional language that has a certain coarse pathos but less beauty than de Bernières's usual writing. While Chris (and we) wait for a resolution, Roza beguiles him with stories. "Now I am confused as to which ones were supposed to be historically factual," Chris says, remembering. There were family legends about a great-uncle who "won a fight with a bear" and an aunt who crossed the Alps with brigands, as well as violent tales from the distant past featuring an emperor who blinded hundreds of prisoners, a peasant king crowned with a circlet of white-hot iron and countless "bloodthirsty" Turks. But the stories that preoccupy Chris concern Roza's father, who was a Chetnik, then a Communist partisan, then a secret policeman in Tito's Yugoslavia. Her father was "somewhat awe-inspiring," Roza tells Chris; he was like a "mountain" or a "monolith." He was also, she claims, her first lover, but she withholds the explicit details. "My stories were the method I used to keep him coming back," she explains. "Once I'd started, I couldn't stop. I couldn't have borne it if he'd lost interest." To keep him keen, she metes out lubricious episodes of her sexual experience: from her childhood (when a pet kitten tried to suckle at her nipple and a confused red-breasted linnet tried to mate with her hand) to her youth (when she had an affair with a Slovene girl she met at a Young Communist Pioneer camp) to her efficient seduction of her father on the eve of her departure to the university in Zagreb, which she orchestrated because "I just didn't want to be a virgin anymore." Bluntly, she tells Chris, "It was my idea," adding, "he never got over it, I don't think. It was very mean of me. Poor Daddy." Horrified, fascinated, Chris can't bring himself to condemn her. "Roza seduced my spirit and unleashed on me the stories of her life," he recalls. He saves his condemnation for himself. Decades later, looking back on this epoch of his life, stewing in regret for all he did and all he left undone with Roza, Chris thinks, "Old men don't become virtuous just because age pins them up against a wall and snarls contempt into their ears." Time, he continues, "never stops you yearning." After Roza, he mourns, "I never had the heart to try again." But a question lingers: did he have the heart to try even once? Is this young woman a streetwalker? De Bernières's narrator doesn't know. But he can't stand not finding out. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

*Starred Review* Although Scheherazade may be the most famous damsel ever to delay her fate by spinning out nightly yarns of fantasy and intrigue, Roza, de Berniéres' captivating temptress, is equally gifted in the art of storytelling as she enchants Chris with tales of lust, love, and loss. Unhappily married (he calls his wife the Great White Loaf) and disarmingly naive, Chris mistakes Roza for a prostitute, and she is just delighted enough with the misconception, in a quirky sort of way, to encourage the charade. Instead of sex, however, Roza and Chris meet regularly just to talk. A Yugoslavian emigrant, Roza regales Chris with episodes from her past that are both preposterous and poignant, the truth seductively masked by her alluring combination of frailty and bravado. And like a soap-opera junkie living vicariously through characters in an alternate universe, Chris depends upon Roza's bizarre history to allow him to temporarily escape his own tedious and tiresome existence. A provocative and artful analyst of the human psyche, de Berniéres vividly celebrates the tantalizing strength of stories to transform individual lives through their eternal and universal appeal.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2008 Booklist

De BerniEres (Corelli's Mandolin) delivers an oddball love story of two spiritually displaced would-be lovers. During a dreary late 1970s London winter, stolid and discontented Chris is drawn to seedy and mysterious Roza, a Yugoslav EmigrEe he initially believes is a prostitute. She isn't (though she claims to have been), and soon the two embark on an awkward friendship (Chris would like to imagine it as a romance) in which Roza spins her life's stories for her nondescript, erstwhile suitor. Roza, whose father supported Tito, moved to London for opportunity but instead found a school of hard knocks, and she's all too happy to dole out the lessons she learned to the slavering Chris. The questions of whether Roza will fall for Chris and whether Chris will leave his wife (he calls her "the Great White Loaf") carry the reader along, as the reliability of Chris and Roza, who trade off narration duties, is called into question--sometimes to less than ideal effect. The conclusion is crushing, and Chris's scorching regret burns brightly to the last line. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Unhappily married and over the hill in 1970s London, Chris finally approaches a hooker. Only she's not a hooker at all but the daring daughter of a Tito partisan who spins an incredible story (but is it true?) as she and Chris launch an affair. With a reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The popular British author who seems to alternate ambitious blockbusters (Birds Without Wings, 2005, etc.) with wispy makeweight fictions (e.g., the wafer-thin Red Dog) tests his devoted readership's patience again. This time we're treated to a dual narrative shared by Chris, a middle-age English widower ostensibly mourning the death of his sexually unresponsive wife ("a Great White Loaf"), and the exotic girl, Roza, whom he impulsively picks up, mistaking her for a prostitute. Chris is Alan Bates, timidly hoping Anthony Quinn's ebullient Zorba the Greek will teach him to shed propriety and learn to dance (so to speak). Roza, who perhaps actually is the Bulgarian Serb that she intermittently claims to be, is a gifted liar, and the sexually stunning life force of Chris's wildest dreams. They continue to meet, usually in the dilapidated apartment building Roza shares with several countercultural types (e.g., their very own BDU: Bob Dylan Upstairs). Roza regales the lovestruck Chris with fiery tales of her (mostly erotic) experiences, including an incestuous romp with her father, a devout follower of strongman Marshall Tito. Many of this painstakingly attenuated book's brief chapters are vehicles for canned information about the sufferings of Eastern European minority populations during times of political interest, and hence of inevitable interest. But everything eventually comes back to Roza's grandiose self-dramatizations, and it becomes impossible to take it, or her, seriously when we're frequently subjected to brain-dead, space-filling chapter titles ("Can You Fall in Love if You've Been Castrated?") and the kind of sonorous sentimentality that belongs in a zero-budget film noir (e.g., "Even inside every damn fucked-up woman there's some sweet little girl"). A malodorous turkey. Corelli's Mandolin it ain't. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.