The Most Beautiful Book in the World

June 22, 2009
Eight well-developed, engaging stories by French novelist Schmitt (My Life with Mozart
) delineate the complex emotional lives of women and their nettlesome men. Two of the tales play into the delicious stereotype of married Frenchmen carrying on parallel lives with longstanding amours. In “The Forgery,” a man breaks up with his mistress of 25 years, leaving the now middle-aged secretary living in low-income housing with nothing but his gift of a Picasso that might or might not be real. In “Every Reason to be Happy,” a chronically anxious wife follows a suspicious-behaving manicurist and unearths the staggering double life her husband of 17 years has been leading with this other woman. “Odette Toulemonde” is an adoring working-class fan of a washed-up popular novelist who ends up turning to her to authenticate his feelings. The odd tale here is the title story, set in a Russian gulag among a group of women prisoners who, sharing a pencil, struggle to write to their daughters. Schmitt’s stories capture a quirky, clever, feminist, very French sensibility.

June 15, 2009
Eight stories about a variety of women from French playwright/novelist Schmitt (Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran & Oscar and the Lady in Pink, 2004, etc.).
Several start with intriguing puzzles. Who is the old woman repeatedly breaking into Odile's Paris apartment? (The answer in "The Intruder" sheds an imaginative light on sickness.) What is the secret at the heart of Isabelle's apparently successful marriage, and why should it begin to unravel at her hairdresser's ("Every Reason to be Happy")? The title story's question is in a class of its own. The setting is a Soviet-era women's re-education camp in Siberia. The new arrival, Olga, has a wild tangle of hair: Why is that so important? All the women long to communicate with their faraway daughters, and it's deeply moving that the most ordinary among them hits on the perfect solution, revealed only in an epilogue. Schmitt's tales echo Maupassant's with their lean narratives, surprise endings, mordant humor and psychological acuity. That humor and acuity sparkle in "A Fine Rainy Day." Hl'ne is a perfectionist and a malcontent; Antoine sees only the good. Their marriage is counterintuitive, yet it works. The eponymous "Odette Toulemonde," a humble Belgian shop assistant, is the devoted fan of a potboiler novelist with big problems. Odette shows him the way out, moderating a meeting with the novelist, his publisher and his difficult wife. Even the slighter stories have their charms. A touring actor returns to the Sicilian village where, years before, a beautiful young woman invited him to a fabulous restaurant and then to her bed ("The Barefoot Princess"). A discarded mistress picks the wrong target for her revenge in "The Forgery," which features a Picasso, while an old beach bum's really bad paintings fetch big bucks in "Wanda Winnipeg"; the world's wealthiest woman is repaying, finally, her first lover.
Fairy tales and realistic studies happily coexist in this elegant collection.

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