My Berlin Child

by Anne Wiazemsky, Alison Anderson (Translator)

Overview

Based on the life of Claire Mauriac, mother of acclaimed writer Anne Wiazemsky, My Berlin Child tells the inspiring story of an extraordinary young woman who abandons her privileged world and finds courage and love while working for the French Red Cross during the Second World War. 

When Claire realizes that rather than quell her spirit and desire for indpendence, her wartime experiences have left her thirsting for more, she travels to the heart of the fallen enemy: war-torm Berlin. The German citizens in their desperation evoke her compassion and she is moved by the desolation of the once-thriving metropolis. Yet, despite the devastation of war, there is life and love to be found there, as the ruined city becomes a magical and emotionally charged backgrop for a passionate romance.

In elegant prose, Wiazemsky succeeds in portraying how love and hope can surface amidst the ravages of war and the ruins of an entire civilization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609450038
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/22/2011
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	17 Years

About the Author

Anne Wiazemsky is an acclaimed French actress, author, and filmmaker born in West Berlin. She has written several award-winning novels: Filles bien élevées (La Société des Gens de Lettres Grand Prix for the Novel, 1988), Canines (Goncourt Prize, 1993), Hymnes à l’amour (1996, prix RTL-Lire), and Une poignée de gens (The French Academy’s Grand Prix, 1998). Wiazemsky was married to the director Jean-Luc Godard and appeared in his films La Chinoise and Weekend. She lives in France.

Editorial Reviews

A forest's worth of wooden prose dooms this airless account of wartime romance. It is 1944 and 27-year-old Claire Mauriac, the daughter of a famous French writer, is an ambulance driver in the city of Béziers. With her fiancé, Patrice, held in a German POW camp, Claire dedicates herself to her sometimes arduous ambulance work, writes many letters to her parents, and suffers migraines that take on a strangely prominent role in the story. But when Claire travels to Berlin after the war is over, she meets Russian-born French soldier Ivan "Wia" Wiazemsky and her life is forever changed. Perhaps something was lost in the translation, but this tedious narrative, with its clunky prose ("I want an optimistic wife who doesn't have migraines") and slack story, reads like a vanity family history project and should be of little interest to anyone whose last name isn't Wiazemsky. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

The picture of life in France and Germany at the end of WWII is fascinating and vivid...”
—Kirkus Reviews

”[A] vivid encapsulation of war, where the worst of inhumanity exists side by side with the best of humanity, [My Berlin Child] makes the story of Claire, who held on tightly to her humanity amidst all the horror, an exaltation of possibility for us all.”
—Read All Day blog

“Perhaps the most moving book of the season. A story of dignity told with a tasteful drop of distance...The ingenuity and the candor that radiates fromn Wiazemsky's prose is rare.”—L'Humanité

“My Berlin Child touches reades with the depth of its characters, with its portrayal of a troubled time, and with the purity of its style.”
—Lire

“Anne Wiazemsky tells a story so extraordinary that it is wholly believable.”
—La Croix

“What could have easily been presented in conventionally dry, chronological reportage, Wiazemsky brings to life by approaching her family history in an effectively nuanced, layered way.”—Rain Taxi

From the Publisher

The first novel to be published in English by French actress and novelist Wiazemsky is a brief, barely fictionalized memoir about her mother Claire, the daughter of Nobel Prize–winning author François Mauriac.

In her mid-20s during World War II, Claire first begins to assert her independence from her tight, traditional Catholic family when she becomes an ambulance driver for the French Red Cross. Despite chronic stomach problems and migraines, she takes serious risks working secretly for the French Resistance. Although officially engaged to Patrice, who is imprisoned in Germany, she flirts with serious romance, first in southern France and then in Alsace as the war winds down. Finally back in Paris, where her family remained during the occupation, she reunites with Patrice, who has gained his freedom, but by the Armistice she realizes she does not love him—although she adores his family. With the engagement broken off, and Germany defeated, she returns to Red Cross duty in Berlin, where she finds the social/political/human drama of postwar devastation compelling. There she meets and falls in love with Ivan Wiazemsky, a Russian-speaking French officer whose aristocratic family fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. The obstacles to their marriage may not seem great to Americans: She is Roman Catholic and he is Russian Orthodox; her family is ensconced in the Parisian literary elite class while he is a "cosmopolitan" (a word that no longer carries a clear meaning); her parents have wealth or at least financial security while his are impoverished immigrants despite their fancy titles. Nevertheless Ivan and Claire become engaged. Soon after, Ivan must fight unfounded charges of trafficking with Germans and belonging to a fascist-leaning organization in the 1930s. His name cleared, the lovers marry, Claire becomes pregnant and the author is born.

The picture of life in France and Germany at the end of WWII is fascinating and vivid, but despite excerpts from letters and diaries, the characters of Wiazemsky's parents remain slightly elusive.

Kirkus Reviews