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A Partisan’s Daughter

Love goes begging

Louis de Bernières
Harvill Secker, 212pp, £16.99,
Digby Durrant
Wednesday, 12th March 2008

Digby Durrant reviews Louis de Bernieres' latest novel

And yet how vividly she remembers those intoxicating moments at the beginning when she sat on that bus to Trieste with people playing chess, while to deafening music, dancers jerk up and down the aisles imitating Mick Jagger and bawling ‘Satisfaction’, and an old man asks her if she will spit on Franco’s grave and make him happy and she promises she will. She had found her vagabond true self. Destiny. O Happy Days!

She’s been free-wheeling downhill all the way since and now she’s slowly climbing back up again in her filthy kitchen with Chris, the timid little salesman, wondering when he’s going to sample her wares so long and so temptingly on display. How he goes about finding out is stupid and clumsy. He should have listened to her more carefully; he knows too late he has thrown away that very rare thing, an irreplaceable person.

It’s a sad tale and although I found my original disbelief difficult to suspend, by the end I was impressed, moved and touched. This didn’t seem to be the same writer I had read before.

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Carbunkle

April 22nd, 2008 3:51pm

Very delicate and intense, dramatic and funny..

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