Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness Tapa dura - 2007

Extracto

The captain has been at sea for twenty days, going north instead of west, in wild winds, flying light in sleet and snow and a terrific sea, to avoid the Algerian pirates. Two leagues out from the lighthouse called the Tour de Courdoaun, he has been obliged to change course. More than the terrible equinoctial gales, more than the French men-o’-war, more than starvation, he fears the Algerian pirates. He has heard of what they do to their captives: tongues cut off, other parts removed. He knows they prey particularly on American ships, as the American government, unlike the French and the British, has no treaty with them.

This is his first command, this sloop, the Diana, a wretched 150- tonner, one mast, wooden latches to the doors, not a bit of brass about it, and the only cargo, the twenty-five cases his French passengers have brought with them. It rolls horribly even in light seas. He can barely stand upright.

It is mid-afternoon, but the seas are so high and the swirl of fog so thick, it is impossible to see the bowsprit. The dead-lights have been put up.

The captain is used to high seas and fog. He and his first mate come from Newfoundland, that watery and fog-weary place, but he has always feared the sea, has never learned to swim, and has had only a short apprenticeship under Captain Loxley on the Pigow.

He has had to order the mainsail furled in this strong wind. Boyd, one of the sailors, has been up the mast to grapple with it. His crew consists only of the first mate, a cabin boy, and three common sailors, since his fourth caught his loose clothing in the rigging and took a terrible fall on leaving Bordeaux, and was lost at sea. The captain doesn’t like to think about that, though he dreams of it. He sees the man falling through the twilit air, arms flailing, hands reaching for the rigging. In his dreams the man is somehow keeping himself afloat in the sea. He shouts after the ship that has been his home, fixing his gaze on the lantern at the stern, a speck of light which comes and goes with the waves.

Reseñas en medios

Publishers Weekly

Kohler's writing is often deft....The novel succeeds...in conveying the particulars of Lucy's life, especially her adaptation to the rigors of American country life.

Booklist

Sarah Johnson

Kohler bases her enchanting seventh novel on the life on Henriette-Lucy Dillon, an aristocratic descendant of Irish Jacobites who becomes one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies. Daughter of a general off defending French interests in the West Indies, the beautiful, witty Lucy is raised by her ill-tempered grandmother. Her arranged marriage with Frédéric Séraphin, the future marquis de la Tour du Pin, becomes one of her greatest joys. She shows her mettle during the Reign of Terror—a scene where she and Frédéric survey the sad ruin of the royal apartments at Versailles is movingly portrayed—by ensuring her family’s last-minute escape aboard a creaky ship bound for Boston. A practical woman determined to make the best of everything, Lucy settles into a new career as a dairy farmer on the outskirts of Albany, New York. Kohler’s elegant, clearly written prose conjures a heroine whose enthusiasm for life and learning is infectious, and whose disarming manner is immensely appealing. One of the best of the recent crop of French Revolution novels, and certainly the most uplifting.

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Andrea Chapin

Sheila Kohler hitches her sensory-rich prose to a really good story.

TimeOut New York

Written in elegant, spare sentences that recall the language of the period...Bluebird forms that rare, exquisite hybrid: a historical novel where the history lesson works to illuminate the life of the hero instead of the other way around. Much of the book's charm comes from Kohler's sensitivity to the danger of allowing the political tectonics to overwhelm the marquise's triumphant narrative. Throughout, it unwaveringly remains Lucy Dillon’s story.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Carol Deptolla

"Kohler, a South African writer living in New York, puts flesh on the bones of this engrossing story - known from the memoir the Marquise de la Tour du Pin wrote at age 50 - and brings it to life. Her vivid writing lets the reader see the pageantry and folly of the royal court, hear the tumult of the revolution, feel the dark prison of the closet in which Lucy's grandmother sometimes locks the child...'Bluebird' is a gripping fictionalized account of a young 18th-century woman who was resourceful and daring not just for that age but for all ages."

New York Sun

Carol Iannone

[Bluebird] focuses our attention on issues of freedom and self-government that are apropos today, and it hints at reasons for the deep-rooted differences between America and Europe that we still face.

Shelf Awareness

Amanda Thoms

This is a touching and inspirational novel based on the true story of a French noblewoman who saved her family from the terror following the French Revolution. Flowing fluently from Versailles to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the heroine never loses her charm or her love of life.

Philadelphia Weekly

Willa Rohrer

The book, set during the French Revolution and its aftermath, is an ambitious portrait of the real-life noblewoman Henriette Lucy Dillon.

Historical Novel Review

Margaret Barr

Upon occasion a reviewer is familiar with the source material for a fictional biographical novel, and therefore dreads the transformation from actual to imagined history. Readers of Madame La Tour du Pin’s magnificent memoir need not be concerned, for Kohler exquisitely and creatively depicts Lucy Dillon’s life and times, tracing her history from the Court of Versailles to a humble farm in America.

A descendant of the Catholic Irish Wild Geese who sought refuge in France, Lucy is raised by her cruel grandmother. During her early years she lives on the periphery of the French court—maturity thrusts her into that scandalous world. A matrimonial pawn, she has the good fortune to marry an admirer of her soldier father. Frédéric is a nobleman, one capable of appreciating and adoring his bride. But for this hopeful couple there can be no happily ever after—married life begins as the sparks of revolution begin to flare. The riots, the executions, the loss of friends are revealed through Lucy’s perceptive and pragmatic mind. When her husband goes into hiding, she disguises herself as a citoyenne in a rural area, bearing a daughter while a suspicious mob rages on her doorstep, carefully planning an escape.

With their son and infant daughter, Lucy and Frédéric sail to America on a dodgy vessel to embark upon an uncertain and unfamiliar life. Lucy rises to the occasion, stocking and managing the Hudson Valley farm that her husband eventually purchases, proudly marking her butter molds with the family crest. She thrives on exile, but it reduces her loving Frédéric to a nostalgic, displaced aristocrat. In the aftermath of domestic tragedy they embark on yet another journey, each harboring different feelings about it.

Anyone seeking quality historical fiction will welcome the publication of this poignant, powerful novel.

"A triumph. Kohler brings the whole fascinating and terrible period of the French Revolution and its aftermath to life — more graceful, more searching, more truly dramatic than most current fiction."
—Lyndall Gordon, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

"Sheila Kohler is a writer's writer. Her cult admires her for her crisp style, her large conception of the novel, her virtuosity. Bluebird is a page-turner saga... Fiction is seldom written about practical, competent people; this novel is an ode to the half-Irish Lucy Dillon, the woman who had it all."
— Edmund White, author of Fanny: A Fiction