Review: Vivien Horler

One Night in Paris, by Nina George. Translated by Sharon Howe (Michael Joseph)

I’m not sure I’ve read The Little Paris Bookshop, Nina George’s bestseller which was translated from the French into 36 languages. The title sounds a bit twee to me.

The cover of this new novel gave me the same feeling – lights from the windows of a darkened apartment building, pretty wrought-iron balconies, a bicycle propped up next to a street light. And a man and woman on different floors, each with their glasses of wine. Sort of sweet.

Well, One Night in Paris is not like that at all. In fact, unless I’ve missed the point entirely, I’m not sure why it has the title it does, as the main action, over about eight weeks of the French summer between July and August, is set on the Brittany coast in northern France.

George, who divides her time between Berlin and Brittany, clearly loves the area. This is, in part, a love story to Brittany, and I defy anyone who reads this novel not to want to go there and explore the back roads, the secret coves, the great granite boulders, the restaurants, the endless shimmering sea.

But the story does  have a pivotal start in Paris. Claire is a behavioural biologist and a professor at the Sorbonne who has just spent the late afternoon in bed with a casual lover in a Montmartre hotel. She is married, as is he, and she has no intention of seeing him again.

Leaving the hotel she hears someone singing Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas with great power. She pauses outside the room, to see a young woman, a cleaner, emerge.

A pretty girl, with piercings and tattoos, but her eyes! “An old, dark gaze out of young eyes.”

The girl spots Claire’s wedding ring and knows instantly what has been going on. Claire finds herself wanting, inexplicably, to explain. They stare at each other in silence, and then the girl says: “Good evening,” and Clair tears herself away.

Her marriage to Gilles, a freelance composer of film music, is not what it was, but they are jogging along. She arrives home to find Gilles has cooked a special dinner: their 21-yearold son Nicolas is bringing his new girlfriend home for the first time.

There are flowers and champagne.

And of course, when Nicolas arrives, girl in tow, it’s the girl from the hotel. Julie is wearing a chaste frock, no piercings, the tattoo covered.

A slight widening of Julie’s eyes shows Claire she has been recognised.

Nicolas anxiously wants his parents to like Julie. No problem there – Gilles is clearly taken. Claire, though, cannot relax. It seems unjust, she muses, that a person who could bring her life crashing down has been invited through her own front door.

Enthusiastically, Gilles says he has a wonderful idea – why doesn’t Julie join them for the eight weeks in Brittany? And so she does.

The family retreat every year to the old Breton fishing cottage across a meadow from the beach, a cottage Claire inherited from her paternal grandmother.

We learn that Claire, her sister and brother – each with a different father – grew up with a dysfunctional mother, and it was Claire, despite being the youngest, who held the family together.

Claire is steely, Claire is cool and unemotional. She is also the breadwinner in her married family.

But despite her icy exterior,  she has wants, she has desires, and Gilles no longer seems interested in her. Meanwhile there is something about Julie, some yearning, and this is clearly reciprocated.

Tangled.

As Claire seeks freedom in long wild sea swims, it turns out Julie has never learnt to swim, has never seen the sea. Julie wants to sing and to dance, but feels she must restrain herself. “She felt a restless longing for someone or something on whom to unleash the fire inside…”

The sea makes her feel free, but she is also frightened of it. Claire teaches her to swim, and the description of the lessons is beautiful.

There are beach walks, ice cream, wine on the beach in the evenings, salt-crusted glowing skin. There is love and some reconciliation. This is a lovely book, and also a satisfying one.

PS: This novel is not to be confused with a 2004 porn film starring a very young Paris Hilton.

• One Night in Paris was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for September,