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Kate Taylor is a bright, promotable author. The daughter of a diplomat, she was born in 1962 and spent several years in Paris as a child. She is the theatre critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail and came over to London to do a major interview with Harold Pinter for the paper. This is her first novel.
The odd title doesn't make sense until three-quarters of the way through the book, and then it becomes apparent that it is the only title that will do. Taylor's challenging themes are language and memory, ranging from a reflection on what it means to be Jewish to a mother's love for her sons and Zola's role in the Dreyfus affair in 19th-century France. The link that binds these disparate ideas is Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Marie Prevost, a young Canadian interpreter, finds solace for her broken heart in literature. Researching the great novel in the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale, she discovers Proust's mother's unpublished diaries and settles down to the delightful task of translating them. The charming diary entries are interwoven with Marie's own story and that of Sarah Bensimon, her former love's mother whose Jewish parents managed to send her from Paris to Canada and safety in the early 1940s. Just as a film maker seeks the image that will fade one scene into another, so Taylor uses pictures to highlight parallels and slide in and out of her narratives. Marie treasures the memory of her man putting his arms around her as she holds his cat, Sarah Bensimon cannot forget seeing in Venice a square full of cats. Jeanne Proust fusses over Marcel's scarves while Sarah despairs of sending her son out into the Canadian winter in clothes that will keep him sufficiently warm and well. The most striking parallel is Marcel's deliberate breaking of his mother's Venetian vase, a desecration that is echoed in the Kosher kitchen when a despairing Canadian woman smashes of all her favourite china. Kate Taylor stresses that although memories may be repressed for a time they ambush the unsuspecting victim without mercy. This is a highly impressive debut. (Kirkus UK)
