The Velvet Hours

Starred review from September 26, 2016
In this exploration of sensuality, beauty, and the lives of heirlooms, two women narrate a rich tale set in Paris during the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2010, a time capsule of sorts was uncovered in Paris’s ninth arrondissement: an apartment untouched since WWII and filled with treasures of a bygone age. Richman (The Garden of Letters), in her fifth novel, fills in the details of this intriguing mystery by imagining the life and loves of the apartment’s real-life inhabitant, courtesan Marthe de Florian. On the eve of WWII, Marthe recites her adventures in the half-world of belle epoque Paris, where she began as an impoverished seamstress and ended up a demimondaine, to her granddaughter Solange, a budding writer. Solange has her own story to tell; the world she thought she knew is unraveling, and Solange’s mother recently revealed her Jewish heritage before dying. Hoping to understand her past, Solange takes a precious book from her mother’s collection to a rare book dealer. There she meets Alec, the son of the book dealer, and slowly begins to fall in love. Meanwhile, Hitler’s troops draw closer to Paris, her father is conscripted, and Marthe’s health begins to fail. Richman fills her novel with vibrant details (including some of the more juicy bits from Marthe’s real life), much as Marthe decorated her apartment: always with care, craft, and a sharp eye.

July 1, 2016
In 2010, an apartment in Paris was unlocked for the first time in seven decades, revealing a time capsule from the Belle Epoque. The apartment had been owned by one Marthe de Florian, and among its contents was a previously unknown portrait of her by the painter Giovanni Boldini. In Richman's telling, Marthe's granddaughter, Solange, is first introduced to her grandmother on the eve of WWII and decides to write a novel based on her life. Chapters detailing Marthe's reinvention of herself from seamstress to chorus girl to glamorous and artistically inclined demimondaine with a passion for Asian porcelains alternate with those narrated by Solange, who, thanks to some old volumes that belonged to her mother, discovers her Jewish heritage and falls in love with Alex, a Jewish dealer in rare books. Though the story sags under the weight of period and historical detail, lush descriptions of beautiful things help create a sensual reading experience. Readers who are intrigued by Marthe's apartment may also be interested in Michelle Gables' A Paris Apartment (2014).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)