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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
Day of the Bees
by Thomas Sanchez
August 2001
Synopsis
"In this story of an astonishing love, Thomas Sanchez portrays the violence, hope, and grandeur of lives transformed by war and exile. At the heart of the novel are Zermano, a world-famous Spanish painter, and his beautiful French muse, Louise Collard - whose lives are torn apart by the German invasion of France in World War II. Leaving Louise in Vichy-controlled Provence, Zermano returns to occupied Paris. But while he eventually goes on to celebrity and fortune, Louise disappears into obscurity.
Fifty years later, after Louise's death, an American scholar arrives in the south of France seeking the truth about the lovers' tempestuous romance and sudden separation. Why did the painter abandon the young beauty? What was the cause of her lifelong reclusiveness? What dark mysteries were being concealed by the ill-fated couple? By chance, the professor finds a cache of correspondence - Zermano's letters to Louise in her remote mountain village, and her intentionally unmailed letters to him in Paris. In their vivid, wrenching contents he uncovers secrets that Louise kept even from Zermano about her wartime experience: the dangers of her participation in the Resistance, and her complicity with one of its leaders, the Fly; her struggles to elude a sadistic officer who hunts her for political and personal reasons; her lyrical intimacy with a mystical beekeeper. Louise is forced to make a fateful decision between the love for her man, and the ultimate sacrifice for her country.
In a powerful climax, the scholar is compelled to journey to Mallorca, where Zermano is rumored to be living in self-imposed exile. Determined to reveal Louise's fate to the painter, our narrator does not suspect that he, too, will be forced to confront the enigma of his own desire." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "This story of a passionate love that transcends convention portrays the violence, hope, and grandeur of lives transformed by war and exile." (Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction)
- "Sanchez's fourth book is a mixture of epistolary, third-person, and first-person narrative and is thematically reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's Possession, though it never quite reaches that high artistic level. On the day after Louise Collard's effects have been auctioned at her home in a small French town, an art critic arrives, seeking insight into the life and work of Collard's husband, the painter Francisco Zermano. There he stumbles onto a cache of letters that truly illuminates their relationship: a passion based to an extent on bondage and minor involvement with the Resistance during World War II. Some of the book's images are striking, including the eponymous 'day,' in which a beekeeper puts an end to a brutal gang-rape by attracting a swarm of bees, and the final scene, when the scholar finally meets the reclusive Zermano. Though the letters between Collard and Zermano are not always compelling, the novel's ambition and writing style often are" (Library Journal)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Thomas Sanchez
- 'Angels Burning'
- 'Mile Zero'
- 'Rabbit Boss'
- 'Zoot Suit Murders'