Word: chris
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Memories - with their power to seduce, to reinvent, to torment - are what fuel A Partisan's Daughter, Louis de Bernières's quiet yet moving new novel set in London in 1979, during the strikebound Winter of Discontent. As recounted by Chris years later, it's an aching tale of love and loss in which the protagonists embody the profound but fragile relationships strangers can build and the pain of intimacy corrupted. "A previous draft was about sexual obsession, and it left a rather bad taste in the mouth," says De Bernières, who grew up in Surrey...
...known for the romantic World War II epic Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which has sold more than 3 million copies in the U.K. alone, De Bernières in A Partisan's Daughter departs from what he describes as his usual "complicated, Latinate" writing style. He allows Roza and Chris to alternate in telling their stories, using their own raw and candid language. As a result, the novel reads like a memoir, which is fitting since De Bernières says Roza is the literary incarnation of a Serbian housemate he lived with in the late '70s. "When I left...
...seven previous books, De Bernières uses history to define his central characters. In 1979, the U.K. was mired in economic gloom, and he maps the bleakness of that time directly onto Chris's personality. A hopeless dullard who watches youth movements sweep the world but pass him by, Chris represents the mediocrity of a time and place in which trash lined the streets and protesting cemetery workers refused to bury the dead. "His psychological state is very like everybody's in 1979 when the country seemed to be going nowhere," says De Bernières. "It didn...
...Roza gives Chris the adventure he craves, her stories sparking what he calls a "buzzing in my groin." She speaks of her tough upbringing in Belgrade with her one-eyed father, a decorated communist hero who cut off the fingers of several Croats. She becomes the counterpoint to everything middle-class and politically correct, comparing Albanians to apes and taunting Chris with accounts of her sexual exploits. He breathes in every detail as fodder for his fantasies. "I only wanted to sleep with her, really, but when you're fascinated by a woman you'll settle for her stories...
...solace the characters seek in one another slowly blurs into something deeper, obscuring the lines between lust and love. De Bernières uses their emotional confusion to comment on the power of storytelling, and its effects on the storyteller. Roza begins to worry that Chris will lose interest in her, so her stories grow ever more fanciful: in one, she gains passage on a ship by seducing the captain with her cooking. It's a tension that reflects De Bernières' friendship with the real Roza, who vanished from his life three decades ago: "Even today...