Paris, 7 A.M.

April 1, 2019
Inspired by a missing period in poet Elizabeth Bishop's journals, Wieland (Land of Enchantment, 2015, etc.) imagines her adventures in France on the brink of World War II. Although the bulk of the action takes place in 1936 and '37, we first meet Elizabeth as an undergraduate at Vassar in 1930. She relishes conversations with her roommate, Margaret, as involved with painting as Elizabeth is with poetry, and envies Margaret's relationship with her mother; Elizabeth's has been in a mental institution since she was 5. Elizabeth already drinks more than is wise, but that doesn't keep her from connecting with Marianne Moore, who becomes her mentor, and from attracting the attention of Robert, a sweet young man she could maybe love, if she were interested in men. By the time she sails for France in 1936 with her well-connected friend Louise, the two women are lovers, or at least, Wieland has implied that in the oblique style that characterizes the entire novel. It's equally unclear why the three German women they meet in Douarnenez have left Berlin, nor do things become clearer in Paris. There, Elizabeth meets Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, and German deputy ambassador Ernst vom Rath, whose assassination (the pretext for Kristallnacht) is alluded to but remains as murky as everything else in a finely written but frustrating narrative. Wieland creates an unsettled, dread-soaked atmosphere appropriate to the period, with ugly scenes of Jew baiting and inexplicable German rage, but it's no substitute for character development. The facts that Elizabeth yearns for her lost mother and that Marianne Moore has urged her to engage with the world don't seem adequate to explain why the poet agrees to help French aristocrat Clara smuggle two Jewish infants to safety in a Paris convent. A hasty wrap-up that whisks from 1938 to 1979 in 25 fragmentary pages reinforces the impression of an author not quite sure what she intends. An intriguing but imperfect attempt to translate the subtlety and poise of Bishop's poetry into prose.

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Starred review from April 22, 2019
Striking imagery and sharp, distinctive language shimmer in Wieland’s haunting fifth novel (following Land of Enchantment), which imagines American poet Elizabeth Bishop as a young woman. It opens in 1930 as the Vassar student struggles with her attraction to women, alcohol’s seductive comfort, and her literary gifts. In 1934, she graduates from college and learns that her mother, who fantasized about killing Elizabeth and was permanently committed to a psychiatric institution when Bishop was five, has died. Grappling with loss, loneliness, and longing for the mothering she never received, in 1936, Bishop travels with her friend Louise Crane to Paris despite news of Hitler’s rising threat. They rent the apartment of American expat Clara de Chambrun, whose only daughter died at 19. Bishop is ambivalent about Clara’s need for a daughter figure, but when the older woman enlists her help in rescuing two Jewish infants being smuggled out of Germany, she can’t refuse. Wieland makes scrupulous use of known fact in crafting her fictional narrative, but neither rehashes familiar biography nor attempts literal interpretations of Bishop’s poems or life. Instead, her dreamlike juxtapositions of the searing and the sensual probe the artistic process, the power of the mother-daughter bond, and the creative coming-of-age of one of America’s greatest poets. Agent: Kerry D’Agostino, Curtis Brown, Ltd.

May 1, 2019
Wieland's (Land of Enchantment, 2015) biographical novel, its title from one of Elizabeth Bishop's poems, focuses on the poet's 1930 admission to Vassar College and experiences in pre-WWII Europe. The real Bishop was a careful chronicler of her life, yet wrote little about 1937, inspiring Wieland to imagine it with a wider lens, particularly Bishop's involvement with a resistance movement and part in conveying two Jewish orphans to a Paris convent. Wieland's prose is simultaneously poetic and sparse, much like Bishop's poems. The chapters are short and often skip through time like a stone across water to Bishop's death in 1979. Wieland focuses on Bishop's life-long friendship with poet and mentor Marianne Moore, her sudden losses and lasting grief, addictions and demons, and her love for women. In college, Bishop contemplated what it meant to keep her eyes open and attain a deeper vision that could reorder pieces of the past and present into coherence, like a cubist painting or modernist collage, a feat she achieved in writing. Wieland's rendition of Bishop's life aptly and beautifully mirrors that process.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2019

With this exquisite novel, Wieland (A Watch of Nightingales) offers a beautifully realized tribute to distinguished American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), tracing her coming of age as a writer and a young woman living in a man's world right before World War II. The bulk of the story is set in Paris in 1937 and 1938, immediately after Bishop graduated from Vassar. She has traveled there with her college roommates, looking for adventure yet finding a city grim with the sense that a second war is inevitable. As she imagines what happened to Bishop during the one year when her journal falls mostly silent, Wieland hews fairly closely to the known facts about Bishop during this period while taking advantage of a gap in her journals to imagine the events here, and we see Bishop in the process of developing her distinctive poetic voice and her celebrated keen eye for detail, character, setting, and emotion. We also see her joining the effort to save Jewish children before it's too late. As with Bishop's own work, the novel is quiet, observational, and reflective, exhibiting its own kind of poetry as it brings its subject's deeply humane, inquisitive, and intelligent sensibility compellingly to life. VERDICT A triumph; recommended for fans of poetry, women's studies, and contemporary literary fiction.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

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