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Summary
Summary
From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair
Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs-#65533;lys#65533;es. A young, unknown writer--Samuel Beckett--recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance . . .
Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man's timeless art.
Author Notes
Jo Baker was born and raised in the village of Arkholme, Lancashire, England. She attended Kirby Lonsdale and Somerville College, Oxford. She later moved to Belfast in 1995 to study for an MA in Irish literature at Queen's University, where she also completed a PhD on the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She is now the author of six novels, including the bestseller, Longbourn.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Baker's intimate portrait of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) focuses on the critical years 1939-1946, during which time Beckett began his relationship with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, whom he later married; participated in the French Resistance, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre; and developed the modern perspective and minimalist style that earned him the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. A brief prologue shows Beckett as a boy in Ireland climbing a tree while his mother tries in vain to keep him within the bounds of safety. Part One, entitled "The End," flashes forward to England's entry into World War II. Drinking, depressed, and home in Ireland after living in France, Beckett longs to return to Paris, although he's haunted by his mother's question: what possible use can he be there? Once back in France, without papers or income, Beckett reconnects with mentor/friend James Joyce, the great Irish author whose genius overshadows Beckett's own frustrated attempts at writing. When German forces move into Paris, and one of Beckett's dearest friends, a communist, is arrested, Beckett joins the Resistance, serving in Paris and the French countryside, first as a translator, then in combat. Examples of wartime decency and brutality, instances of courage and betrayal, periods of time when nothing happens, and shortages that limit life to essentials all stir Beckett's sense of absurdity in modern life. Baker details how wartime experiences provide the key to Beckett's transformation from Joyce disciple to distinctive literary voice. In this worthy successor to Longbourn, she skillfully captures Beckett's world, the rhythms of his bare-bones prose, and the edginess of his point of view. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In her latest novel, Baker, the author of Longbourn (2013), reimagines Irish writer Samuel Beckett's involvement with the French Resistance during WWII. Over his mother's objections, Beckett left the relative safety of his family home in Ireland in 1939 to return to Paris in the days just before France declared war on Germany. When the Nazis reach Paris, Beckett and his love, Suzanne, flee alongside Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, and his wife, Nora. While the Joyces seek a safe haven in Switzerland, Beckett and Suzanne ultimately return to Paris, where a friend of Beckett's draws them into the resistance effort. Though the tasks are small keeping track of German troops in Paris and relaying that information to contacts the danger is great, and the couple is soon forced out of the city once again, setting out on a harrowing journey to the countryside, where Beckett agrees to even more perilous missions. Taking its title from Beckett's most famous play, Waiting for Godot, Baker's historical drama deftly explores the psyche of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE BEGUILING TITLE of Jo Baker's new novel comes from the opening stage direction of Samuel Beckett's 1952 play "Waiting for Godot." "A country road, a tree. Evening." Once notorious, now canonical, "Godot" is famously the play in which nothing happens: two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for a mysterious stranger, Godot, who never appears. They divert themselves with conversation, encounter some bizarre strangers, struggle to fill the passing time, decide to hang themselves, decide not to hang themselves, resolve to move on, move nowhere, and then the curtain falls. What saves the play from being a pretentious Gallic snore-fest is that it owes as much to Charlie Chaplin as Schopenhauer: It's full of physical humor, funny bickering, trousers falling down and pungent verbal inventiveness. Like Beckett's other works, "Godot" is baffling and nonlinear on principle. There is no sense of change and development. The action sometimes seems shapeless, sometimes static, sometimes obsessively spiral. But the world is not like a Beckett play. The unexpected success of "Godot" was a genuine turning point in Beckett's life. It set in motion an unmistakably linear pattern of events that culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature and Beckett's enthronement as one of the craggy writer-prophets of the 20 th century. He didn't appear to enjoy either fame or wealth, and gave away the money he received when he won the Nobel. From James Knowlson's 1996 biography, "Damned to Fame," we also learn that in later life Beckett liked to pass the time reading pulp crime fiction, which is both charming and disconcerting, like hearing that a great patisserie chef binges in secret on Twinkies. "A Country Road, a Tree" is a biographical novel that dramatizes Beckett's life pre-"Godot." This was his career's long penurious antechamber, lit up by encounters with prominent figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. The book does a good Joyce - weary, entitled, disappointed, patronizing - who is both an inspiration to Beckett and a creative obstacle, preventing him from finding his own voice. The novel focuses in particular on the years of World War II, which Beckett spent in France. Infantilized and carped at by his mother in Ireland, he chose to return at the outbreak of the war to Paris, where he became involved with the French Resistance. In later life, Beckett would disparage his activities as "Boy Scout stuff." But he came close to being arrested by the Gestapo and was forced to flee Paris with his lover and future wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Suzanne and Samuel's experiences on the run in occupied France form the core of "A Country Road, a Tree." The novel's controlling idea is that this period was the artistic crucible in which the mature Beckett and "Waiting for Godot" were formed. The world the characters inhabit is a present-tense space of hunger, purposeless waiting, cigarette smoke and ticking clocks. Dotted throughout their journey are the elements that will cohere in "Waiting for Godot" : the blasted landscape, the tedium of life as a near vagrant, the mundane conversations about boots and carrots between a footsore, starving couple. During a key scene, Suzanne and Samuel wait beneath a willow for a contact in the Resistance who never shows up. Jo Baker's previous novel, the best-selling "Longbourn," was another literary homage: Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" viewed from the perspective of the servants. But it's one thing to riff on such a familiar cast and plot, another to dramatize the penniless war years of a challenging modernist. And "A Country Road, a Tree" doesn't offer its reader many footholds. It sticks very faithfully to the facts of Beckett's biography, but often doesn't tell you exactly what they are. For example, the text refers at several points to Beckett's bandaged chest and the "scar" from his injury, but never explains that it was the result of a near-fatal knife attack by a Parisian pimp called Prudent. One reason for this reticence is that the book is locked into a present-tense style that reproduces landscapes vividly but admits little exposition. "The prose creeps. Notebooks fill. A soft evening in Ireland, a redbrick villa, and the elderly and lame and syphilitic. An unseen man upstairs, dishing out pabulum, approval and approbrium, entirely arbitrarily." Here Beckett is working on the manuscript of his novel "Watt," but the reader is never told. Is it too prosaic simply to explain? Why bother playing themes and variations on a melody few readers can be expected to know? Of course, it's a modernist trait: Joyce and Eliot didn't do exposition either. Like travelers who were too grand to carry their own luggage, they expected to be followed by a retinue of explainers carrying copies of "The Odyssey" and books on the myth of the Grail. And yet for all its deliberate obscurities, "A Country Road, a Tree" is much less radical in style and conception than the man Baker has chosen to honor. The purpose of the book is to show how a directionless expatriate writer ripened into the Samuel Beckett of literary history. But it's impossible to imagine Beckett writing a bildungsroman where the difficulties of World War II bear heroic fruit in the artistic triumph of "Waiting for Godot." Beckett's view of human lives is too withering and austere to have any truck with such a conventional kind of uplift. And the novel's writing lacks the vinegar and ingenuity that gives Beckett's characters their strange liveliness. What the sentences achieve most often is a kind of Beckett-lite: "Time ticks. The light fades. The air is full of cigarette smoke and body smells. Nothing happens." "Spool" is a favorite Beckett word, but its overuse in Baker's book seems careless: "The smoke spools up to the ceiling," "a long low spool of talk," "The day stretches and spools," "Smoke spools upward." The atmosphere of ennui eventually leaves the reader wondering if a more engaging tale could have been told with the resourceful and practical Suzanne as its protagonist. The suggestion that "Waiting for Godot" was inspired by Beckett's adventures in wartime France is not a new one. It seems very plausible. Still, knowing this, or that Eleanor Rigby was a name on a tomb in a Liverpool graveyard, or that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, doesn't take us any closer to understanding how a work of art is made or enjoyed. And to insist too much on the relevance of biography to "Godot" does both the play and the war an injustice. If Vladimir and Estragon are fleeing the Gestapo or waiting for a contact in the Resistance, it gives them a purposefulness that makes a mockery of the play. "Godot" takes place in the absence of any meaningful stories. In its world, life holds nothing beyond the present moment - a moment redeemed, if at all, by humor and companionship, not art. And though World War II might have had its quietist, Beckettian moments, it was mainly six years of indefatigable tyrannies, energetically abetted by ordinary people. Notably, "A Country Road, a Tree" has only an uncredited bit part for Robert Alesch, the philandering Roman Catholic priest who betrayed Beckett's comrades in the Resistance. But a character this dynamic or malign would upset the design of a novel that wants to ape Beckett by turning history into powerlessness, longueurs and absences. MARCEL THEROUX'S most recent novel is "Strange Bodies." In later life, Beckett dismissed his activities in the French Resistance as ?Boy Scout stuff.'
Guardian Review
The author of Longbourn illuminates Beckett's work by dramatising the privation and adventures of his wartime experiences, from his work with the resistance to his long walk south Amid all the Jane Austen reboots and ripoffs, Jo Baker's 2013 debut Longbourn, which developed the events of Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective, seemed restrained yet revelatory. Fresh, fascinating and beautifully achieved, it was that rare beast: a critical success with wide commercial appeal. What would one expect from the follow-up? Probably not a re-creation of Samuel Beckett 's war years, from his desperation to leave the Ireland that stifled him, through his time in occupied Paris working for the resistance and escape to the south after being betrayed to the Nazis, to his postwar job helping set up a French hospital. And always, through danger, penury and privation, the compulsion to continue with writing that doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, that he is driven to produce, as a writer friend puts it, like snails make slime. The book echoes Longbourn, though, in the way it takes a behind-the-scenes look at literature, animating the experiences that fed into Beckett's later work. Baker's close attention to physical experience, the deafening demands of the body during hard labour or hunger, is familiar from Longbourn, too, and pertinent to Beckett's aesthetic as it was to her story of Georgian England's less fortunate class. "The body's barest needs make for a heavy load," we are told, as, during the darkest days of the war, Beckett and his lover Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil struggle on foot towards what they hope will be the safe haven of Roussillon. As they throw themselves on the mercy of strangers, "human bodies share the almost nothing that they have, and go on living". It is a daring project, to enter the mind of a man known for his withdrawal and silences, but Baker succeeds triumphantly in prose that is both intimate and austere, with an unobtrusive Beckettian cadence. At the heart of the novel is Beckett's relationship with Suzanne, a lifelong companion and later his wife, yet of whom he wrote in a 1939 letter to a friend: "There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid." His need for solitude and distance grinds against her combination of support and dismay -- peeking into his notebooks, black with crossings-out, it occurs to her that "all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time". By war's end, there is indeed a gulf between them, as well as exhausted familiarity. There is an unbearably poignant moment as they run, single file, from the Germans: "His arm is stretched back to her; she's tumbling forward to hold on to him. It's uncomfortable, constraining, it might be better to let go. They don't let go." In Deirdre Bair's Beckett biography she called Waiting for Godot, written a decade later, "a metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon". Baker takes her title from the spartan description that sets the scene at the beginning of the first act, and Beckett and Suzanne's weary squabbling, over where they are to meet the contact who will get them over the border into the free zone, prefigures the double act of Vladimir and Estragon. "Monsieur will surely come tomorrow," says Beckett. "It's tomorrow now," she replies. Baker has Beckett look around the landscape, and project on to it the paintings of Van Gogh and Rouault. We, in turn, are accustomed to seeing the horrors of the 20th century -- such as the exodus from Paris, glimpsed here from a train as "a rubbish dump, a mound of junk and clutter" that separates into fleeing humanity -- through Beckett's eyes. A wartime obsession with tattered boots and sore feet, with turnips gleaned from field edges, sucking stones held in the mouth against thirst all appear in later novels as well as plays, while broader themes of stasis and stoicism are delicately foregrounded by Baker. The old man by whose side Beckett hides under floorboards, sharing a bottle to pee in, could be a character from his own pages: "He is a gracious pisser, and a courteous sleeper; he does not fart as much as might be supposed." Beckett begins the novel in shame and apathy, hanging on the coattails of Joyce in a relationship that is a queasy mixture of adoration, gratitude and resentment (Baker gives us a nicely turned portrait of the ageing Joyce, fumbling along with his stick and glasses, "oblivious and uncanny and sharp as you like"). His work with the resistance -- where, as is pointed out, his "silent habit" is a virtue -- demonstrates the power of words to change the world, as he collates the information that will "conjure aeroplanes out of a clear sky ... bring all hell raining down". He keeps his reports slipped into the manuscript of Murphy, "which is by far the safest place to keep something that he doesn't want people to read". Hindsight and the shaping of fiction perhaps give the novel an unduly uplifting arc, as it moves towards Beckett's famous epiphany when he realised that, in the case of his own writing, less would be more. Baker presents his time in Roussillon, when he wrote Watt, as years of mind-clearing labour rather than breakdown, as has been reported elsewhere. But though Beckett kept characteristically quiet about it after the war, the raw material is nothing short of sensational: hiding up a tree to escape the Nazis, seeing a companion throw himself from a window to escape capture, digging a roadside grave for dead German soldiers, disguising a case of explosives with potted geraniums... Baker describes it all in wry, unruffled tones, taking Beckett towards the attitude later formulated as The Unnamable 's "I can't go on, I'll go on" -- as she puts it here, life is "an act of resistance". Do you need to be interested in Beckett to engage with this novel? Well, as with the Longbourn servants, if you're not, you should be, because again this is an extraordinary story that shines a light both on individuals caught up in the sweep of history and the way life is transmuted into art. Baker is a strange, determined writer, and I am fascinated to see what she does next. - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
The experiences of a struggling Irish writer in France during World War IIjoining the Resistance, fleeing the Gestapo, risking everything again after escaping to the free zonewill help shape his groundbreaking literary future, suggests this novel based on the life of Samuel Beckett. Having turned Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice on its head in Longbourn (2013), Baker moves on to more recent but bleaker literary pastures with a biofiction tracing the life of Beckett, the brooding "spindly giant," from 1939 to 1946. Before the war begins, the young author has escaped his difficult relationship with his mother by settling in Paris, where he finds work as a secretary to James Joyce, a partner named Suzanne, and a creative community. However, once war is declared and Paris falls, life becomes increasingly harsh and is further darkened by Joyce's death. Beckett joins the Resistance, his role to find patterns in scraps of information. But the cell is betrayed, and Beckett and Suzanne are forced to flee, enduring a terrifying journey to Roussillon, which includes an interminable wait by a tree in a nameless place, a woman who can't stop talking, and the constant agony of ill-fitting boots. These passing but pointed references to Beckett's great works to comeWaiting for Godot, Not I, etc.and philosophical speculations ("And so one finds one goes on living") are intrusive. Baker's impressionistic character portrait works hard at evoking a questing, solitary intelligence during a period of physical and mental anguish and wholesale destruction, but Beckett is a world-class literary enigma, and any such attempt was perhaps always going to fall short of full-blooded conviction. Baker's virtuoso imagining of war's terrors and privations is not quite matched by her depiction of a unique, consistently elusive artistic identity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.