Word: garret
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Here, and in other stories, the remoteness and haze are carried to an extreme. The characters become flat, or stylized to the point of implausibility. In "Lightning North of Paris," Helprin is unable to bring to life the garret affair between two Americans in Paris, a composer and a ballet dancer; wrapped up in his descriptions of the composer's wild moments when he writes "music which if played for pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky," Helprin is happily oblivious of the fact...
Until the winter sky begins to darken, Sissela Bok, the wife of the President of Harvard University, the mother of three children, the daughter of Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Mrydal, is alone in a small garret on the top floor of her Cambridge house. She has more than a room of her own up there; she has a whole land to herself where she can dream and reminisce, a land no foreigner can invade...
Sissela does not want any material treasures to remind her of her childhood in Sweden, so the garret contains nothing Swedish except her own language hidden in the bookshelf. Others bring in any Swedish souvenirs the house may harbor. Her parents often bring her son gifts from their travels; orange blue painted wooden horses from Sweden line the mantel in his room. "Like the ones I had when I was little," she says. In the library downstairs there is a white marble bust of Sissela, sculpted when she was 11. Her parents wanted to give work...
Although Sissela doesn't want to bring any part of Sweden to America, she is not at home here. Sometimes she comes down from her garret and dresses up in pastel skirts with matching jackets and white patent leather shoes and confronts these Americans who made demands on her as the wife of the President, or as a serious academic...
...when the children leave for school she starts up the winding wooden stairway toward her garret and no one follows...