The book opens with the early life of Sophie Marks, whose parents died during the First World War, living with her artist grand parents in the English Midlands. She moves to Paris to go to art school, falls in love, and upon returning to her grandparents gives birth to a child she does not want, but eventually grows to love until air raids bomb her home and everyone she knows. Shell-shocked, she is hospitalized for several years. Any hesitation that I felt about the opening tragedy was allayed by the beauty of the language. Though sympathetic to the plight of the characters, the story never descends into melodrama.
The book has just laid its underpainting at this point, as Sophie must yet become an artist, and build a life as such. Across love and success, the story maintains a gorgeous calm. The chapters are brief and evocative of each step she takes, loving, losing, moving here, then there, in search of some indescribable sense of self, and all the other trite material of life that is never so trite for those living it, or for good fictional characters. The happy is satisfying not because it is a trite, happily-ever-after farce, but because the reader has come to believe that Sophie, nearing eighty, might yet be able to learn something, accept what she had refused, and find contentment.
The focus on Sophie makes some characters, like Nico, a little too simple, but since the reader is strongly positioned within Sophie's point of view, I was willing to ignore the occasional shallow quality in that character as an aspect of how Sophie saw them. She had not the knowledge, self or otherwise, to see them completely, and so neither do we.
I read this book within 24 hours, on the subway, while walking, ignoring family or friends after the holidays, because the book carries the magnificence of a Tolstoy life without the volume as a burden, and I wanted the satisfaction of knowing, in the end, the life of Sophie Marks completely.
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