Paris, 7 A.M.

by Liza Wieland Narrated by Madeleine Maby

Overview

“A marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) that reimagines three life-changing weeks poet Elizabeth Bishop spent in Paris amidst the imminent threat of World War II.

June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband and a quiet life. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Lights, the larger threats of fascism and occupation are looming. There, they meet a community of upper-crust expatriates who not only bring them along on a life-changing adventure, but also into an underground world of rebellion that will quietly alter the course of Elizabeth's life forever.

Sweeping and stirring, Paris, 7 A.M. imagines 1937-the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals-didn't fully chronicle-in vivid detail and brings us from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face.

Both poignant and captivating, Paris, 7 A.M. is an “achingly introspective marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America's most celebrated female poets.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

In this audiobook, the author imagines a year in the young life of poet Elizabeth Bishop, with Madeleine Maby offering an able performance. The narrative unfolds in loosely chronological episodes that recount Bishop’s 1937 visit to Paris with friends from Vassar. Some details are examined minutely and others breezed over or left ambiguous. The effect is sometimes beautiful and sometimes frustrating. Maby echoes the inconsistent pace of the work—various sections seem rushed, and others are more measured in their delivery. Her voice is strong and energetic, but sections of the dialogue sounds distractingly clichéd, with voices oddly rendered at times. What is most fascinating about the audiobook is the content itself—the story of a complicated young woman in Europe at a complicated time, as Hitler rises to power. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/22/2019

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. (June)

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR PARIS, 7 A.M.:

“Fittingly for the artist at the story’s center, Wieland’s novel, about Bishop’s time in the City of Lights, is an achingly introspective marvel of lost innocence.”— O Magazine

“With this exquisite novel, Wieland offers a beautifully realized tribute to distinguished American poet Elizabeth Bishop... The novel exhibit[s] its own kind of poetry as it brings its subject's deeply humane, inquisitive, and intelligent sensibility compellingly to life. A triumph.”—Library Journal (Starred review)

“Striking imagery and sharp, distinctive language shimmer in Wieland’s haunting fifth novel, which imagines American poet Elizabeth Bishop as a young woman.... [Wieland’s] 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.”—Publishers Weekly, (Starred review)

"The life of extraordinary poet Elizabeth Bishop is a more than challenging subject for fiction, but Liza Wieland, in this rendering, captures a sensibility that is believable as Bishop’s, complete with its sometimes acerbic lucidity, its wit, and crystalline precision of mind. Paris, 7 a.m. stands with works like Colm Toibin’s The Master in its startlingly credible rendition of the inner life of a great artist of our time." —Madison Smartt Bell, author of Master of the Crossroads and Devil’s Dream

“Wieland’s prose is simultaneously poetic and sparse, much like Bishop’s poems.... 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.” —Booklist

"Paris, 7 A.M weaves historical facts, biographical speculation, and the plaintive, teasingly playful elements of poems written by one of America’s most beloved 20th-century poets, Elizabeth Bishop—and it is nothing short of wizardry. I am romanced by this story, half true, half re-imagined, about the queer women bohemians of pre-World War II, who dared to resist, create and salvage in the midst of virulent fascism. I love these heroes, as much as I love the true poetry of this daring novel." —Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore

“Inspired by a missing period in poet Elizabeth Bishop's journals, Wieland imagines her adventures in France on the brink of World War II.... Finely written... Wieland creates an unsettled, dread-soaked atmosphere appropriate to the period.”—Kirkus

"Meticulously researched and crisply imagined, biography, history, and poetry come together in this elegant, literary-but-not-too-literary spellbinder. Nothing is left out—Bishop’s love life, her alcoholism, her extraordinarily intense flashbacks from childhood, even her asthma—all are brought to life as Europe descends into war. A masterwork." —Michael White, author of Travels in Vermeer

PRAISE FOR LIZA WIELAND:

"Wieland is a vital voice in contemporary American fiction. Her prose is crisp, her voices are true, and her acuity is remarkable."—Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin

"Liza Wieland writes of discord with such harmony and wisdom that even the bad things that befall her characters feel limned with wonder and grace. For all its wonderfully realized tensions and conflicts, Quickening is an oddly hopeful and redemptive book.”—Michael Parker, author of Don’t Make Me Stop Now

"Liza Wieland understands down to the bone how loneliness and love compel her characters to make their impossible choices. Not only does she have a searing intelligence and wisdom, her prose is by turns graceful and astonishing."—Jane Hamilton

Liza Wieland's brilliant work commingles death, sexuality, and the desperate search of children for ways of assuring themselves of love. These are some of the best pages of fiction I have read in a very long time."—Frederick Busch

"Liza Wieland's stories are wry, touching, crafty portraits of life in the far West where everybody seems to be yearning for roots, for cement, and settling for a what-the-hell compromise. But there is a nobility and boldness to her characters that lends them a heroism missing from much modern fiction, and makes these stories totally absorbing adventures of the heart."—Ron Hansen

Kirkus Reviews

2019-03-18
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171179779
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Paris, 7 A.M.
If you can remember a dream and write it down quickly, without translating, you’ve got the poem. You’ve got the landscapes and populations: alder and aspen and poplar and birch. A lake, a wood, the sea. Pheasants and reindeer. A moose. A lark, a gull, rainbow trout, mackerel. A horned owl. The silly somnambulist brook babbling all night. An old woman and a child. An old man covered with glittering fish scales.

An all-night bus ride over precipitous hills, a heeling sailboat, its mast a slash against the sky, trains tunneling blindly through sycamore and willow, a fire raging in the village, terrible thirst.

See? The dreams are poems. And the way to bring on the dreaming is to eat cheese before bed. The worst cheese you can get your hands on, limburger or blue. Cheese with a long, irregular history.

This was a crazy notion to bring to college, but you have to bring something, don’t you? You have to bring a certain kind of habit, or a story, or, because this is Vassar in 1930, a family name. Some girls bring the story of a mysterious past, a deep wound, a lost love, a dead brother. Other girls bring Rockefeller, Kennedy, Roosevelt. They bring smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and promiscuity (there’s a kind of habit), which some girls wear like—write it!—a habit. This is a wonderful notion, the nun and the prostitute together at last, as they probably secretly wish they could have been all along. Elizabeth laughs about it privately, nervously, alone in her head.

Her roommate, Margaret Miller, has brought a gorgeous alto and a talent for painting. She’s brought New York, which she calls The City, as if there were only that one, ever and always. And cigarettes, a bottle of gin stashed at the back of her wardrobe, a silver flask engraved with her mother’s initials. Margaret has brought a new idea of horizon, not a vista but an angle, not a river but a tunnel, a park and not a field. She will paint angles and tunnels and parks until (write it!) disaster makes this impossible, and then she will curate exhibitions of paintings and write piercing, gemlike essays about the beauty of madwomen in nineteenth-century art.

The cheese, meanwhile, occupies a low bookshelf. Most nights, Elizabeth carves a small slice and eats it with bread brought from the dining hall.

And sure enough, the dreams arrive—though that seems the wrong word for dreams, but really it isn’t. They arrive like passengers out of the air or off the sea, having crossed a vast expanse of some other element. Elizabeth’s father, eighteen years dead. In her dreams, he’s driving a large green car. Her mother, at a high window of the state hospital in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, signaling for something Elizabeth can’t understand, her expression fierce and threatening. A teacher she loves disappearing into a maze of school corridors.

A Dutch bricklayer setting fire to the Reichstag. A two-year-old boy dressed in a brown shirt, a swastika wound round his arm like a bandage. His sister’s mouth opened wide to scream something no one will ever hear because she is gassed and then burnt to ashes. All these people trailing poems behind them like too-large overcoats. And Elizabeth is the seamstress: make the coat fit better, close the seams, move the snaps, stitch up the ragged hem.

Elizabeth, Margaret says toward the end of October. I’m not sure these are poems. They’re more like strange little stories. But I am sure that cheese stinks.

I know, Elizabeth says, but it has a noble purpose.

Which is what, for heaven’s sake? If you want to have peculiar dreams, try this. Margaret holds out the silver flask.

Just . . . without a glass?

Just.

Elizabeth takes a long swallow, coughs.

Oh, she says when she can speak. It’s like drinking perfume.

How would you know that? Margaret says.

I quaff the stuff for breakfast, of course!

Margaret lies down on her bed, and Elizabeth sits below her, on the floor, her back against the bed frame.

So, Margaret begins. About men.

Were we talking about men?

If we weren’t, we should be.

I wish I knew some men the way you do, Elizabeth says.

And what way is that?

To feel comfortable around them. Natural.

Maybe I can help. Give you a lesson or two.

Start now.

Margaret sits up, shifts the pillow behind her back. Elizabeth turns to watch, thinking this will be part of the lesson, how to move one’s body, the choreography. Margaret looks like a queen riding on a barge. What poem is that? A pearl garland winds her head: / She leaneth on a velvet bed. Margaret as the Lady of Shalott. When Elizabeth turns back, she sees herself and Margaret in the mirror across the room, leg and leg and arm and arm and so on, halves of heads. Halves of thoughts, too. It seems to do strange things, this drink. It’s exhilarating.

First, Margaret says, boys—men—they want two things that are contradictory. They want bad and good. They want prostitute and wife.

Prostitute and nun, Elizabeth says.

Margaret smiles, which makes her entire face seem to glow. Such dark beauty, Elizabeth thinks, like my mother. In some photographs, she looks like someone’s powdered her face with ashes.

That’s the spirit! Margaret says. And not only do you have to know how to be both, you have to know when.

Must take some mind reading.

Which is really just imagination. Which you have loads of, obviously.

Margaret leans forward to rest the flask on Elizabeth’s shoulder. This helps, she says.

Helps us or them?

Both, Margaret says. She watches Elizabeth unscrew the cap on the flask. Not so much this time.

Elizabeth takes a tiny sip, a drop. Suddenly, she feels terribly thirsty. A memory crackles out of nowhere, a fire.

Much better, she says. Almost tastes good.

So it’s a math problem, Margaret says. Which do they want, and when. Probability. Gambling.

What if you guess wrong?

Then you move on.

Moving on. That must be the real secret to it.

Down the hall, a door opens and music pours out. How have they not heard it before now, the phonograph in Hallie’s room? She is trying to learn the Mozart sonata that way, by listening. Miss Pierce tells them it will help, to listen, but it’s still no substitute for fingers on the keys, hours alone in the practice room, making the notes crash and break on your own.

Margaret is talking about a boy named Jerome, someone she knows from Greenwich, her childhood. Elizabeth gazes up at her, drinks in the calm assurance of Margaret’s voice, the confiding tone, the privacy. College can be so awfully public, even places that are supposed to be private: library carrels, bathroom stalls.

Jerome was in her cousin’s class. Now at college in The City. Columbia. He is bound to have friends. Elizabeth listens to the sounds of the words, the hard-soft-hard c’s like a mediocre report card: college, city, Columbia, country. The music of it soothes.

She turns to look out the window, rubs her cheek against the nubby pattern of the quilt on Margaret’s bed, takes some vague and unexpected comfort in the fabric. A light from the dorm room above theirs illuminates the branches of an oak tree outside, two raised arms, a child asking her mother to be picked up, pressed to a shoulder. She hears a child’s voice say the words. Hold me. I’m thirsty. Margaret is talking about men. The tree is asking to be gathered up, held aloft. An impossible request: the roots run too deep, too wide, scrabbling under this dormitory, beyond, halfway across campus.

Elizabeth reaches for the flask, takes a longer swallow, then another.

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