 First edition | |
| Author | Bruce Marshall |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Elias |
| Language | English |
| Published | Constable 1943 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom (Scotland) |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 294 |
Yellow Tapers for Paris is a 1943 novel by Scottish writer Bruce Marshall.
Taper is another, less common, name for candle. Yellow candles are used in Catholic funeral services.
The crushing 1940 defeat of France (an event the author lived through) is the subject of this novel. Marshall implies that France lost its soul and was itself more responsible for its defeat than Germany.
We meet Bigou, the protagonist, in 1934. He is an honest, hard-working, but irreligious and immoral accountant, employed by a successful industrial firm in Paris. He is mildly troubled that his firm expends considerable effort conniving to avoid paying its legitimate taxes. Conversations with accountants and employees of other companies lead Bigou to realize that most of the business enterprises of the time in France are behaving similarly,
The novel gives us a picture of Bigou's life. The reader is introduced to his family, sulky, plucky daughter Odette and sickly wife Marie, friends, his coworkers and other people he meets in his business life. The author endeavors to show that money and pleasure were the main goals sought with any sincerity. Even religion, when it did exist, wasn't much more than an outward display. Bigou does come to believe that the local priest is one of the few people he knows who exhibits integrity.
The "petit bourgeois" in the novel are shabby and bewildered as they assist helplessly at their nation's funeral, but they stand in brilliant contrast to the insatiable greed and craftiness of the wealthy.
Marshall clearly believes that France lost its virtue, especially among its elites. He even implies that the leaders of the Church were more interested in status and materialism than spirituality. The novel indicates that the common people, deprived of the just rewards of their labor, and without worthy spiritual direction, became trapped in immorality, and were spiritually and physically impoverished. [1] [2]
Some readers have noticed similarities between Marshall's 1943 novel Yellow Tapers for Paris and Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française which was written at about the same time, but not discovered until 1998. [3]
There is no suggestion of plagiarism—Némirovsky had been murdered before Marshall's novel was published and no one saw Némirovsky's work before its 1998 discovery.
The stories cover the leadup to the Nazi Invasion and its immediate aftermath, but the events of the respective stories are much different. Marshall's ends before the occupation, while Némirovsky's has significant portions devoted to it. Both works have major characters who work in the financial field—Marshall's protagonist is a financial accountant while Némirovsky's work has major characters who work for a bank.
Both books were written during and/or immediately after the actual period itself, but show considerable reflection—they aren't just "diary" entries. Even more remarkable considering the activities of the authors at the time—Némirovsky struggling to evade the Nazis and protect her two daughters and Marshall working for the British Army.
There are also remarkable parallels in the two writers' lives.
They were close in age, Marshall was born in 1899 and Némirovsky in 1903.
Both were converts to Catholicism.
Both authors were parents of similar aged daughters—the birthdate of Marshall's daughter, Sheila, is not available, but her husband was born in 1927. One would assume that she was close to the same age as Némirovsky's oldest daughter, Denise, who was born in 1929.
Both writers were expatriates living in Paris at the same time (sometime in the early 1920s until the Nazi invasion). Both were successful writers, and lived in a place, Paris, during a time when writers were greatly celebrated. However, there is no evidence that Némirovsky and Marshall ever met.
Marshall worked for a financial accounting firm while Némirovsky's family was in banking.
Both were well-established and prolific novelists at the time of the invasion—Némirovsky's first novel was published in 1927, and she had published about 14 novels by 1940. Marshall's first was in 1924 and he had published about 15 novels by 1940.
Both fled the Nazi invasion and wrote novels partly based on those experiences. [4]
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the resistance organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.
Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Cunningham Bruce Marshall was a prolific Scottish writer who wrote fiction and non-fiction books on a wide range of topics and genres. His first book, A Thief in the Night came out in 1918, possibly self-published. His last, An Account of Capers was published posthumously in 1988, a span of 70 years.
Irène Némirovsky was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France and wrote in French, but was denied French nationality. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.
Suite française may refer to:
Suite française is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite française in 2004.
David Golder is writer Irène Némirovsky's first novel. It was re-issued in 2004 following the popularity of the Suite Française notebooks discovered in 1998. David Golder was first published in France in 1929 and won instant acclaim for the 26-year-old author.
Le Bal is the title of collection of 2 novellas written by Irène Némirovsky. Published in France in 1929, it has been recently re-issued, due to the increasing interest in and popularity of the author's work, following the discovery and publication of Suite Française.
Jonathan Mark Weiss is an American scholar of French literature and social science whose extensive publications include literary and theatre criticism, essays on Franco-American relations, a short story, and most recently the biography of Irène Némirovsky.
Hélène Berr was a French woman of Jewish ancestry and faith, who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France. In France she is considered to be a "French Anne Frank". She died from typhus during an epidemic of the disease in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that also killed Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
The Rue de la Pompe is a street in Paris, France, which was named after the pump which served water to the castle of Muette. With a length of 1,690 metres, the Rue de la Pompe is one of the longest streets in the 16th arrondissement. It runs from the Avenue Paul Doumer to the Avenue Foch.
Gringoire was a political and literary weekly newspaper in France, founded in 1928 by Horace de Carbuccia, Georges Suarez and Joseph Kessel.
Le Vin de solitude, published in English as The Wine of Solitude, is a novel by Ukrainian Jewish author Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942), who was murdered in the Holocaust. It is considered to be partly autobiographical and tells the story of the protagonist, Hélène Karol, who shares much of Némirovsky's early history. Le Vin de solitude was originally published in France in 1935. Following the success of Némirovsky's posthumously published work Suite Française in 2004, it was translated and published in English in 2011.
Pithiviers internment camp was a concentration camp in Vichy France, located 37 kilometres northeast of Orléans, closely associated with Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp in deporting foreign-born and some French-born Jews between 1941 and 1943 during WWII.
Suite Française is a 2015 war romantic drama film directed by Saul Dibb and co-written with Matt Charman. It is based on the second part of Irène Némirovsky's 2004 novel of the same name. The film stars Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sam Riley, Ruth Wilson, Lambert Wilson and Margot Robbie. It concerns a romance between a French villager and a German soldier during the early years of the German occupation of France during World War II. Suite Française was filmed on location in France and Belgium. It was released theatrically in the UK on 13 March 2015 and premiered in the US through Lifetime cable network on 22 May 2017. The film was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition.
Vladimir Solomonovich Pozner was a French writer and translator of Russian-Jewish descent. His family fled the pogroms to take up residence in France. Pozner expanded on his inherited cultural socialism to associate both in writing and politics with anti-fascist and communist groups in the inter-war period. His writing was important because he made friends with internationally renowned exponents of hardline communism, while rejecting Soviet oppression.
Myriam Anissimov is a French writer.
The Passenger is a 1938 novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz published by Henry Holt under the imprint Metropolitan Books. Initially unsuccessful, its 2021 re-release gained critical acclaim for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany.
Les Chiens et les Loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) is a novel by Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942), published at the end of 1939 as a serial in the weekly magazine Gringoire, then by Albin Michel in 1940. Overshadowed by the Phoney War, it was the last work by Irène Némirovsky to be published in volume under her own name during her lifetime, before she was banned from the profession and deported to Auschwitz, where she died after one month.