'A Partisan's Daughter: A Novel' by Louis de Bernières
Desire lingers like a ghost in a new tale from the author of 'Corelli's Mandolin.'
A Partisan's Daughter
A Novel
Louis de Bernières
Knopf: 196 pp., $23.95
"Remember," George Bailey learns at the end of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," "no man is a failure who has friends."
It is as fundamental as breathing or eating -- a desire for camaraderie. Don't we all want a set of boon companions to draw strength from along life's journey? I'm certain that such a desire has been a part of every utopian experiment or exclusive club since Jason and his band of brothers boarded the Argo. It's also a strong chord plucked on the strings of "Corelli's Mandolin," Louis de Bernières' novel of love and fraternity on a Greek island in the midst of World War II. De Bernières' other novels evoke communal visions as well: "Birds Without Wings" shows us the failure of people to overcome cultural differences and recognize one another, while his Colombian trilogy pokes fun at the stereotype of backward South American countries where everyone knows everyone and dictators have cruel, village mentalities.
In his latest, "A Partisan's Daughter," De Bernières gives us Christian, a lonely, middle-aged salesman whose marriage is loveless and empty -- he cruelly refers to his wife as the "Great White Loaf" -- and who briefly finds a connection with Roza, a Serbian woman living in a run-down London building in the 1970s.
When Chris first sees her on the street, she seems to him a beguiling, urban goddess wearing "a fluffy white fur jacket. She had litter whirling about her in the cold wind. . . . I felt a lurch of attraction." But his feeble attempt to solicit her -- he's never approached a prostitute before -- is rebuffed. What Roza really wants is a ride home.
From this awkward beginning their friendship grows, as West meets East; in all his English blandness, Chris is smitten by Roza's Slavic strangeness -- her "Gypsy eyes, her hair . . . black and shiny," her accent and the smell of cigarettes encircling her. But such romantic impressions give way to an even more romantic, and then harrowing, story of her life. She relates her father's wartime experiences as a decorated fighter in Tito's Yugoslavia. But we can't ever be sure what is true and what isn't: Over many weeks, she tells stories of incest (impatient, apparently, at being a virgin, she enticed her own father into her bed), difficult student days in Zagreb, insults endured and given, prostitution and a particularly brutal rape that causes Chris to break into sobs.
