From Nancy Huston, a Canadian writer who's lived in France for a couple of decades, comes a modest proposal in the form of a novel: Maybe millennial fiction shouldn't look forward. Maybe it should look back to the shames and sadnesses of the 20th century. The Mark of the Angel, Huston's U.S. debut and a bestseller in France, tells the story of Saffie, a young German girl who takes a job as a housekeeper in 1957 Paris. Her employer, a brilliant young flautist named Raphael, falls hard for her, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he finds her "impassive" and "impenetrable." Hard-eyed Saffie seems to sleepwalk through life, and as if in a dream, she and Raphael marry and have a son, Emil. When Raphael sends her off to have his flute repaired one day, he little suspects what he's setting in motion. In András, the instrument maker, Saffie finds a damaged twin. Both are victims of the horrible experiment of Hitler's war: German Saffie has endured not only rape and torture but also the knowledge of her own family's Nazi sympathies. Hungarian Jew András has lost his family and his country. The two embody the horrors that Europeans visited on each other in the middle of the 20th century. And they covertly embark on a five-year affair, during which their love comes to be sorely tested by the Algerian war for independence from France.

Huston's prose is cool, opaque, ironic, and intensely romantic. Her style and her story both owe a great debt to Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, a debt she seems to acknowledge explicitly: "Saffie is crushed, stifled, petrified by the... how to put it... the unbearable tenuousness of the moment... Dizzy with inexistence, she clutches at András's arm--and he, misunderstanding, sets Emil down in a chair on the café terrace--turns to his lover--takes her in his arms and begins to waltz with her... Ah! Thanks to András, the hideous unreality of the world has been held at bay once again, movement has turned back into true movement, instead of immobility in disguise." Kundera's preoccupation with Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return is clearly at work here too: The past, Huston warns us loud and clear, is never past. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
Drenched in irony, and very French in sensibility, Huston's U.S. debut must overcome an unfortunate beginning before it gallops away with the reader's mesmerized attentionAbut once underway, it fascinates with its blend of cynicism and romance, and its dramatization of the roles of accident and fate, and of evil and injustice, in human history. Initially, one must accept a far-fetched plot: that when world-famous flutist Raphael Lepage sees Saffie, the young German woman who answers an ad for a maid to clean his luxurious Paris apartment, he immediately succumbs to overwhelming love and soon afterward marries herAdespite the fact that she is as emotionless as a zombie, does not even remotely return his affections and is anathema to his beloved mother, who has never forgiven the Nazi occupation 20 years before. Even the birth of a son does not thaw Saffie's cold indifference, which persists until she meets Andr s, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who repairs musical instruments; the mutual recognition of irresistible passion releases all her emotions. During their liaisons in his little shop in the Marais, Andr s tells Saffie about the destruction of his family in Budapest, and she reveals her own traumatic memories of WWIIAthe Allied bombings, her father's complicity with the campaign of annihilation, her mother's brutal rape by conquering Russian soldiers. Even as their affair unfolds, however, the horrifying events of the 1940s are being repeated in Algeria and France, as FLN terrorists strike back at French atrocities. In the end, innocence must die, as, Huston reminds us, it always has and always will. While Huston often overwrites and sometimes indulges in arch asides, once she establishes her story's central ironies, the narrative achieves a relentless velocity. A scene in which both Saffie and Andr s recall separate incidents in which poorly buried bodies erupt through the earth, drenching the soil with blood, is a shattering reminder of the endless cycle of human violence. Canadian-born Huston has lived in France for more than three decades, where her books (seven novels plus nonfiction works) are bestsellers. BOMC and QPB selections; paperback rights to Vintage. (Oct.) FYI: The Mark of an Angel won the French Prix des Lectrices d'ELLE and the Prix des Librairies in Canada, and is shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in France. Huston's other awards include the Prix Contrepoint, the Prix Goncourt Lyceen and the Canadian Governor General's Award in French. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Saffie doesn't seem like an angel when she emerges from the train station in Paris in 1957 but so profoundly impassive as to be almost unreal. She takes up duties as a maid to talented flautist Raphael, who promptly falls in love with her and, in a passage that seems even more unreal than Saffie herself, quickly manages to bed, marry, and impregnate her. Not even little Emil can rouse Saffie from her sublime listlessness. Then, when she takes her husband's flute for repair, she encounters Andr s and instantly comes alive. It's clear from the start that Saffie is running from a terrible secret dating to World War II, and Andr s, a Hungarian Jew, has past sorrows of his own. Their passionate affair serves not to heal them but as further escape, and it has gruesome consequences. Perhaps the ending is not quite convincingAtoo abrupt and not sufficiently rooted in what precedesAbut Huston's prose is strong, ironic, and refreshingly original; she effectively revisits events of this century so much discussed that, tragically, we can go as numb as Saffie. This book was both an award winner and a best seller in France, where Canadian Huston has lived for years. A priority purchase for most libraries.ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Paris has always been the city for doomed love affairs, from the Hunchback of Notre Dame to Bogey and Ingrid Bergman. Huston, a Canadian writer who lives in Paris, adds another to the list with this poignant story of two shell-shocked World War II survivors coming together in Paris in the late 1950s. Saffie is an oddly passive German woman who wanders into Paris and into the life of Raphael, a classical musician beginning a triumphant career. Saffie cleans Raphael's house, marries him, has his child, but remains somehow untouchable. The thin veil shielding her from the pain of life is only removed when she meets Andras, an musical instrument maker who lives in the Marais district. In the arms of Andras, a Hungarian Jew and radical activist, Saffie experiences a life-affirming passion that Huston contrasts with the atrocities committed by the French in the Algerian revolution. This attempt to link the personal and political never quite works--authorial intrusions prove more jarring than enlightening--but the story of Saffie and Andras hits a perfect melancholy note and sustains it superbly. Bill Ott

From Kirkus Reviews
Acclaimed Canadian-born Huston, a longtime resident of France (where this novel, her seventh, was originally published), debuts here with a melancholy tale of a proud French flutist and a Marxist Hungarian Jew who, in the late 50s, share a secretive German woman. As France's brutal war against its former colony Algeria erupts, the silent Saffie appears at Raphael's door in Paris in response to an ad for a maid; without saying much, she soon has the job. In fact, her diffidence so excites the passions of her young employer that he seduces her, then asks her to marry hima change of status she agrees to. What doesnt change, even after their son is born, is Saffies attitude: she still feels indifferent about Raphael, though she cares for him in the same obsessive way she keeps house, while Raphael takes inspiration from his little family on his way to becoming the most acclaimed flutist of his generation. Little does he suspect that an errand run by Saffie to the shop of his instrument repairman has resulted in her giving herselfbody and soulto the man there. She lives for the next tryst with her lover, Andr s, and Raphael unwittingly obliges the couple with his frequent tours and lengthy practice sessions. Only to Andr s can Saffie, the child of a Nazi veterinarian, talk about her wartime past: living near Berlin, bombs killing her best friend, she and her mother being raped by Russian troops, her mother committing suicide. But to Andr s, as a Jew in Budapest during the war, such horrors pale next to his own family's suffering. What's more, as a dedicated Marxist in Paris, he moves in dangerous circles, helping the Algerians to bring the savagery at home back to France. Despite their differences, however, the affair prospersuntil Raphael finally discovers what's going on and intervenes, with tragic results. A stylish, sophisticated story, complete with archly ironic narration, marred only slightly by an overly melodramatic end. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"You may never read a novel crafted with more wonder and mystery than Nancy Huston's The Mark of the Angel.  At once compelling and highly original, it probes not merely the characters' hearts and lives but the very nature of storytelling."  -Arthur Golden, author of Memoris of a Geisha

"Huston's language is beautiful, with startling juxtapositions of imagery.... Huston has made a chilling and beautiful work of art."  -Boston Phoenix

"Describing Nancy Huston's wonderfully provocative and enigmatic new novel as a tale of adultery in the dreary and uncertain Paris of 1957-1963 is to suggest that The Scarlet Letter is about infidelity and Moby Dick about whaling.... This is a superbly readable story spun with perfect ease and balance."  -The Providence Journal

"The writing style is almost tactile, like a dressmaker caressing a fine peice of silk or satin the better to show it off.  Huston has a sensitive yet sure-handed grasp of her craft."  -Washington Times

"A brilliant, powerfully written novel."  -Rocky Mountain News

"At once [a] love story, war tale and psychological thriller....An engaging, intelligent novel."  -The Plain Dealer

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM OUR EDITORS

Fallen Angel

"How can so many worlds exist simultaneously on one little planet? Which of them is the most genuine, the most precious, the most urgent for us to understand?" Some people might argue that it is a literary mortal sin to posit a philosophical question in the midst of a fictional narrative, that it jeopardizes the illusion of the tale and jolts the reader out of a continuous dream in which the characters and their individual trials are all-important. But for Nancy Huston, a Canadian-born author who now lives in Paris, this question is the key to the plot of her brilliant U.S. debut. Already a bestseller in France, and winner of the Grand Prix de Lectrices d'ELLE, Huston's novel hits the mark with what is at once a love story, a poignant meditation on guilt and innocence, and a profound collision of past and present, of real and imagined experience.

The tale begins in 1957 in Paris, a city still scarred by the humiliating memory of Nazi occupation. When Monsieur Raphael Lepage posts an ad for a maid, he could not have expected someone like Saffie to appear at his doorstep. Stoic and detached, with a voice resembling that of Marlene Dietrich, Saffie instantly enthralls Raphael with her utter indifference. Raphael is "a flutist on the verge of becoming famous" and as passionate as Saffie is passive; he instantly hires her. And although she is German, a word that is taboo in his apartment on the Rue de Seine, his desire for Saffie consumes him, and she consents to becoming his mistress and then his wife.

Saffie soon becomes pregnant, and after a failed attempt to abort, she gives birth to their son, Emil. While Raphael hopes that motherhood will awaken affection in his loveless but dutiful wife, it only makes her more distant and resigned. We soon learn the depths of this detachment, for Saffie acutely suffers the ghoulish and private memories of her childhood in Germany during World War II -- the bombing that killed her best friend, the rape of her mother by Russian troops, her father's complicity with the Nazis.

The reader is constantly reminded of the domestic microcosm of their trials, for the couple remains largely ignorant of the foreign conflict that has divided Paris: the escalating tension between France and its former colony, Algeria. Raphael, through his mastery of circular breathing, is able to focus on two things at once -- an ability that lays the groundwork for the rest of the story. Just as Saffie is able to function numbly in the present while bearing the pain of her past, to exist and not to exist, the borders of Raphael's reality are suspended by his dual concentration, at the expense of ignoring the outside world. Thus, "Both of them, albeit for different reasons, carry on their existence at a remove from that particular level of reality. Saffie's mind is hermetically sealed around her pain, like an oyster around its pearl. Raphael -- his brain wholly taken up with the effort of thinking simultaneously about his pregnant wife and his evening concert -- is better endowed with concentration than curiosity."

Raphael eventually does orchestrate Saffie's awakening, albeit accidentally, when he sends her on an errand to András, a repairer of musical instruments living in the Marais, Paris's Jewish quarter. Saffie immediately falls in love with András, a Jew who witnessed the destruction of his family and friends by the Nazis in Budapest. He becomes her lover, and as if animating a statue, brings Saffie to life. Raphael, delighted with his wife's increasing happiness (believing it caused by the birth of their son Emil), and content with his increasing fame and now peaceful bourgeois home life, travels to performances for weeks or months at a time -- a circumstance that allows Saffie's romance with András to thrive unnoticed, with tragic consequences.

But all of Huston's characters lead lives beyond the range of other characters' vision. Just as Raphael and Saffie live in denial or blissful ignorance of each other's "other" lives, András is also a Marxist involved in the war between France and Algeria -- a struggle that gains increasing significance, not only to Saffie and András as a brutal reenactment of the atrocities of the 1940s but also as a reminder of this book's refrain: "How can so many worlds exist simultaneously on this one little planet?"

This question is asked by the narrator, an omniscient, ironic voice that pervades the novel. While some might initially question whether the self-conscious narrator (whose self-congratulatory asides and pitying commentary steer the reader through the events like a modern Greek chorus) is too active in the storytelling, this voice is surprisingly consistent with -- and ultimately necessary to -- Huston's intentions in the novel. Paired with the sensitive observations of the concierge in the Lepages' apartment building, Mademoiselle Blanche (an "obese and ugly woman...but [one whose] eyes are filled with treasures of kindness and wisdom where her fellow human beings are concerned"), the narrator both distinguishes and bridges the boundaries of each character's perceptions, reminding the reader that their blindness and failures are just as significant to the purpose of this tale as their concerns and successes.

In light of these countless worlds of struggle, the central question remains, "Which of them is the most genuine, the most precious, the most urgent for us to understand?" The answer to the question, which Huston brilliantly demonstrates, is that "Every person's suffering is the most important, isn't it?" More importantly, The Mark of the Angel seeks to prove that although sometimes hermetically sealed, or bound by the limits of our own self-preserving illusions, no one person's suffering is ever solitary. Our imagined securities are informed by past and present, other worlds and other lives, and press against harsh realities that -- like the surface tension of a bubble that could burst and vanish in an instant -- make each moment tenuous and precious and have the power to restore lost innocence.

—Elise Vogel

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This novel marks the stuning American debut of an internationally acclaimed writer. Combining the narrative drive of Birdsong with the emotional resonance of The Reader, The Mark of the Angel is a haunting and unforgettable tale of three lives woven together by longing, fate, and the weight of history.

The year is 1957, and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal and the Algerian war is about to escalate. Saffie, an emotionally damaged young German woman, arrives on the doorstep of Raphael, a privileged musician who finds her reserve irresistible. He hires her, and over the next few days seduces her and convinces her to marry him. But when Raphael sends Saffie on an errand to the Jewish ghetto, where she meets András, a Hungarian instrument maker, each of their lives will be altered in startling and unexpected ways. As Saffie learns to feel again, her long buried memories coupled with the inexorable flow of historical forces beyond anyone's control, create a tableau of epic tragedy. The Mark of the Angel is a mesmerizing novel of love, betrayal, and the ironies of history.

SYNOPSIS

In the spring of 1957, a young German woman arrives in Paris to take a position as housekeeper to a bachelor flautist. Soon Saffie and Raphael are married and a son, Emil, is born. One day, Saffie and Emil go on an errand to the Marais - the Jewish Quarter - where they encounter an intriguing instrument maker, Andras. Thus begins a passionate affair that will last a decade. Framed within the love triangle is an exploration of the ways in which individual lives and historical events intersect, from the Soviet invasion of Budapest to the Kennedy assassination, and the different ways in which the German woman and the Hungarian Jew remember World War II and the Algerian war for independence.

FROM THE CRITICS

Merle Rubin - The Christian Science Monitor

Without making the mistake of claiming that there is no distinction between guilt and innocence, Huston's novel suggests that both can exist in a single individual and be hard to disentangle. Her novel also pays tribute to the subjective truths of individual experience....[T]he central point of the novel [is] the tragic clash of multiple histories, multiple worlds, that simultaneously inhabit a single planet...

Publishers Weekly

Drenched in irony, and very French in sensibility, Huston's U.S. debut must overcome an unfortunate beginning before it gallops away with the reader's mesmerized attention--but once underway, it fascinates with its blend of cynicism and romance, and its dramatization of the roles of accident and fate, and of evil and injustice, in human history. Initially, one must accept a far-fetched plot: that when world-famous flutist Raphael Lepage sees Saffie, the young German woman who answers an ad for a maid to clean his luxurious Paris apartment, he immediately succumbs to overwhelming love and soon afterward marries her--despite the fact that she is as emotionless as a zombie, does not even remotely return his affections and is anathema to his beloved mother, who has never forgiven the Nazi occupation 20 years before. Even the birth of a son does not thaw Saffie's cold indifference, which persists until she meets Andr s, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who repairs musical instruments; the mutual recognition of irresistible passion releases all her emotions. During their liaisons in his little shop in the Marais, Andr s tells Saffie about the destruction of his family in Budapest, and she reveals her own traumatic memories of WWII--the Allied bombings, her father's complicity with the campaign of annihilation, her mother's brutal rape by conquering Russian soldiers. Even as their affair unfolds, however, the horrifying events of the 1940s are being repeated in Algeria and France, as FLN terrorists strike back at French atrocities. In the end, innocence must die, as, Huston reminds us, it always has and always will. While Huston often overwrites and sometimes indulges in arch asides, once she establishes her story's central ironies, the narrative achieves a relentless velocity. A scene in which both Saffie and Andr s recall separate incidents in which poorly buried bodies erupt through the earth, drenching the soil with blood, is a shattering reminder of the endless cycle of human violence. Canadian-born Huston has lived in France for more than three decades, where her books (seven novels plus nonfiction works) are bestsellers. BOMC and QPB selections; paperback rights to Vintage. (Oct.) FYI: The Mark of an Angel won the French Prix des Lectrices d'ELLE and the Prix des Librairies in Canada, and is shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in France. Huston's other awards include the Prix Contrepoint, the Prix Goncourt Lyceen and the Canadian Governor General's Award in French. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1957, Paris is still recovering from World War II, France is fighting to retain control of Algeria, and de Gaulle is about to return to power. In this political environment Raphael, professional flautist, advertises for a maid. Finding Saffie, the strange German woman who answers the ad, irresistible, he makes her his maid, his wife, and the mother of his son in quick succession. Saffie has been frightened most of her life but has learned to hide her feelings. One day she takes Raphael's flute to be repaired and falls in love with the Hungarian instrument maker. When Raphael discovers the affair, he takes his son to the south of France, with tragic results. The book captures this chaotic point in history and geography; while it is not a happy story, it is compelling. Reader Richard Aspel delivers the text jerkily but with feeling; he portrays a wide variety of foreign accents with skill. Recommended.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Merle Rubin - The Christian Science Monitor

Without making the mistake of claiming that there is no distinction between guilt and innocence, Huston's novel suggests that both can exist in a single individual and be hard to disentangle. Her novel also pays tribute to the subjective truths of individual experience....[T]he central point of the novel [is] the tragic clash of multiple histories, multiple worlds, that simultaneously inhabit a single planet...

Kirkus Reviews

Acclaimed Canadian-born Huston, a longtime resident of France (where this novel, her seventh, was originally published), debuts here with a melancholy tale of a proud French flutist and a Marxist Hungarian Jew who, in the late 50s, share a secretive German woman. As France's brutal war against its former colony Algeria erupts, the silent Saffie appears at Raphael's door in Paris in response to an ad for a maid; without saying much, she soon has the job. In fact, her diffidence so excites the passions of her young employer that he seduces her, then asks her to marry him—a change of status she agrees to. What doesn't change, even after their son is born, is Saffie's attitude: she still feels indifferent about Raphael, though she cares for him in the same obsessive way she keeps house, while Raphael takes inspiration from his little family on his way to becoming the most acclaimed flutist of his generation. Little does he suspect that an errand run by Saffie to the shop of his instrument repairman has resulted in her giving herself—body and soul—to the man there. She lives for the next tryst with her lover, András, and Raphael unwittingly obliges the couple with his frequent tours and lengthy practice sessions. Only to András can Saffie, the child of a Nazi veterinarian, talk about her wartime past: living near Berlin, bombs killing her best friend, she and her mother being raped by Russian troops, her mother committing suicide. But to András, as a Jew in Budapest during the war, such horrors pale next to his own family's suffering. What's more, as a dedicated Marxist in Paris, he moves in dangerous circles, helping the Algerians to bring thesavagery at home back to France. Despite their differences, however, the affair prospers—until Raphael finally discovers what's going on and intervenes, with tragic results. A stylish, sophisticated story, complete with archly ironic narration, marred only slightly by an overly melodramatic end.