 First edition | |
| Author | Bruce Marshall |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Elias |
| Country | United Kingdom (Scotland) |
| Language | English |
| Published | Constable 1943 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 294 |
Yellow Tapers for Paris is a 1943 novel by Scottish writer Bruce Marshall.
| First edition | |
| Author | Bruce Marshall |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Elias |
| Country | United Kingdom (Scotland) |
| Language | English |
| Published | Constable 1943 |
| 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]
Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house. It was founded in 1941, during the French Resistance of World War II, and is still publishing books today.
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 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. Founded in 1941 in Paris by Jacques Duclos, André Pican and Pierre Villon, along with their wives all members of the French Communist Party (PCF) they felt that to be a vital force against the Nazis, the collaborationists and the informers that all of the Resistance movements, no matter their party or religion had to band together. Its name was inspired by the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition which governed France from 1936 to 1938. This helped them coordinate attacks all across France, to move weapons, food, false identity papers, information and food, protect and move people who were to be arrested or executed and supply multiple safe houses for the Resistance and for Jews. They also formed fighting units in early 1942 to assassinate German leaders and soldiers among the occupation forces, perform acts of sabotage on railroads and other forms of distribution of people and goods being taken from France to Germany and to help organize sabotage in factories forced to produce armaments and goods for the German military.
Paul Morand was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist and Imagist.
Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Cunningham Bruce Marshall, known as 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 Kyiv, the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she died 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.
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Alice Yaeger Kaplan is an American literary critic, translator, historian, and educator. She is the Sterling Professor of French and Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University.
Le Bal is the title of collection of 2 novellas written by Irène Némirovsky. Published in France in 1930, 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.
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 1690 metres, Rue de la Pompe is one of the longest streets in the 16th arrondissement. It runs from Avenue Paul Doumer to Avenue Foch.
Gringoire was a political and literary weekly newspaper in France, founded in 1928 by Horace de Carbuccia, Georges Suarez and Joseph Kessel.
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Pithiviers internment camp during the Holocaust was a transit camp for Jewish deportees in Pithiviers in Occupied France during the Second World War. Children were separated there from their parents; the adults were processed and deported to concentration camps farther away, usually Auschwitz. This was the fate of the novelist Irène Némirovsky.
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