Day of the Bees
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sanchez has done notable work (Rabbit Boss and Mile High), but this novel about a world-famous painter and his love blighted by war is not quite thought through. For a start, much of it is told in epistolary form, which is always tricky to manage, since a novelist's gifts of narration, here employed at full stretch, are profoundly different from what anyone would be likely to write in a letter. Then, too, the machinery of having an art history professor unearth the letters and tell the story through them is overly familiar, so that although there are moments of genuine power in Sanchez's tale, it feels for much of its course labored and manufactured. Francisco Zermano, a dynamic Spanish-born painter (rather obviously modeled on Picasso, even down to his colossal American car), has a French lover, Louise. When the Nazis invade France, the pair are separated, Louise burying herself in Vichy France and eventually becoming deeply involved in the Resistance, Zermano in uneasy exile from her in occupied Paris. Most of the story is told in a series of Louise's (unposted) letters to him, describing their early days together, a horrific encounter with a German officer who raped her after shattering Zermano's knees, and then her pregnancy, her wartime sufferings and heroism, the loss of her baby and her eternal, death-transcending love for the painter. Finally, the narrator who found her letters takes them to the great man's solitary exile in Mallorca and has his daughter read them to him. After one more revelation, the story ends on a wistful note. Sanchez evokes the immemorial Proven al landscape exquisitely, and some of the mutual passion of Louise and Zermano comes across powerfully, but the Resistance scenes and the mysterious beekeeper who gives the book part of its title are melodramatic in concept and execution.
