The Double Life of Liliane

Starred review from July 27, 2015
National Book Award winner Tuck (The News from Paraguay) blends history, biography, memoir, and fiction in this gleefully chaotic metanarrative, which closely parallels the author’s own life. Tracking the emotional and intellectual development of its protagonist, Liliane, who is born in France in the 1930s but raised largely in the U.S., the novel encompasses many of the early 20th century’s most monumental—and most horrific—developments. Sections centering on Liliane’s parents and family members offer insights into the tribulations faced by European Jews during World War II, as well as the experiences of migrants to the U.S. in the years during and after the war. Along the way, the novel, restless and roving, delivers reports on Liliane’s impressive family history (celebrity relatives include Moses Mendelssohn and Mary, Queen of Scots), while mapping the various places her peripatetic clan has called home (Peru, Italy, and Tanzania among others). While stretches of the novel verge on seeming crammed and distracted, Tuck succeeds in balancing the bounty of the information she relays with playful, buoyant prose and poignant scenes—particularly those between Liliane and her mother, Irène—that quicken the heart. Of her mother’s scent, Liliane thinks at one point, “Joy, the most expensive perfume in the world; an ounce consists of ten thousand jasmine flowers and three hundred roses.” In Tuck’s prose—messy, lively, dizzy, happy—one gets a contagious sense of fun that she has transmuting life into words. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

August 1, 2015

Winner of several O. Henrys, as well as a National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, Tuck here offers a fictional autobiography that presents her rich life in vignettes both personal and historical. Born in Paris in the late 1930s to German film producer Rudy Solmsen and his beautiful, difficult wife, Irene, the author was a bright yet shy child, shuttled between continents after her parents' marriage collapsed (her mother relocated to New York, her father to Italy). The metanarrative moves back and forth in time, entwining pieces of world history (Genghis Khan; Josephine Baker; Mary, Queen of Scots; and the mid-20th-century Mau Mau Uprising, to name but a few) with the intricate facts of Tuck's family tree, thus giving context to her private life as it shaped her professional career. VERDICT Tuck remains one of America's most brilliant novelists and short story writers, and this distinctive work, penned with a masterly eye for details that speak volumes and illustrated throughout with intriguing uncaptioned photos, allows her literary gifts to come full circle. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
A ton of factual information complements the fiction in National Book Award winner (The News From Paraguay, 2004) Tuck's sixth novel, a family history in mosaic form. It's 1948. Eight-year-old Liliane, an only child, is flying from New York to Rome to visit her divorced father, Rudy. The history of Rudy's Roman neighborhood is spelled out in detail to distance us from the characters, just as Rudy, a movie producer awkward around kids, is distanced from his daughter. German by origin, French by choice after moving to Paris, Rudy is a nonreligious, assimilated Jew. His half-Jewish ex-wife, Irene, was also German originally; now she's American and newly married to Gaby, an investment banker and WASP. With her father, Liliane speaks French, while in America, fearful of the foreigner label, she speaks only English: this is her double life. Dislocated lives are the essence of this novel, which approximates Tuck's life just as the name Liliane approximates Lily. It jumps around in time and place. The outbreak of war in '39 sees Rudy taken prisoner and Irene fleeing Paris with baby Liliane, to be reunited much later in Peru; but Tuck has no interest in exploiting these dramatic moments. She also zips past Rudy's nemesis, his villainous brother-in-law, and Claude, "the love of Irene's life." What matters is arranging the lives of the leads, and their ancestors, on history's canvas; context, such as Hitler's rise to power, is all-important. What's problematic, though, is Tuck's dragging in real-life events (the notorious Career Girls Murders in 1963 New York; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya) without seeming justification. Liliane's own story, overshadowed at first by that of her sensationally beautiful mother, takes shape quite late, as she turns her instinct for fantasizing into a beginner's novel. Metafiction that pleases and frustrates in equal measure.

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Starred review from July 1, 2015
Tuck won the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay (2004), a brilliantly imagined fictional transport back to eighteenth-century Paraguay during the dictatorship of Francisco Solano Lopez. Her new novel refracts autobiographical situations through a fictional lens to reveal a rich spectrum of details about the life of a female writer, Liliane (not too difficult to read Lily here), who has led a life full of exceptional experiences well worth following regardless of whether in fictional or nonfictional format. Her father was born in Germany, and as a young man at the advent of Nazism, he fled to Paris, where he established a film production company. But the tentacles of established anti-Semitism reached him there, which eventually led him to join the French Foreign Legion. After the war, he became a naturalized French citizen and moved to Rome to resume his movie-production company at the time when the Eternal City was known as Hollywood on the Tiber. Before the war, he'd met and married Liliane's mother, whom he'd had to leave behind when in the Foreign Legion. She was also born in Germany and fled during the war, on her own with her baby, Liliane, to Portugal and sailed to New York, where she eventually, after subsequent hops around Europe and the Western Hemisphere, located permanently and there obtained a divorce. When we join Liliane's story, she is dividing her time between her mother and stepfather in New York and her father and his girlfriend in Rome. As she grows to young womanhood, and despite her parents' broken marriage, her life lessons are vivid and exciting. Her extended family and the friends of her parents well populate these pages; it's specious to argue that they read more like nonfiction than fiction. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tuck's critical acclaim for her National Book Awardwinning novel will draw readers to this special, provocative, unusual novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2015

The daughter of a German movie producer father residing in Italy and a stunning, artistic mother who prefers New York, Liliane finds solid ground by reconstructing the stories of family members ranging dramatically from Moses Mendelssohn to Mary, Queen of Scots. The richly mosaicked narrative that results allows National Book Award Tuck to explore issues of self, family, and our place in the world.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.