Marianne C. Bohr’s thoroughly appealing “When Paris Whispers,” which transports its likeable young protagonist, Catrine, to Paris in the early 1980s, was most engaging to me as a straight paean to the City of Light, where I logged time as a teen with my military family.
Not that the story line isn’t engrossing enough or even downright compelling at times, as when, shortly after Catrine’s arrival, she is literally assaulted by Freddie, the woman she’s staying with, for having drawn more romantic interest than Freddie from Freddie’s handsome cousin, Vincent, at a beach outing.
“You boring, neurotic bitch!” Freddie screams at Catrine, even shearing off some of her hair, in her fury over the beach outing, where Freddie also embarrassed Catrine by announcing to everybody present, after delivering a “hot-sex” anecdote, that of course Catrine wouldn’t understand, with how she’s still a virgin.
And as if that weren’t mortification enough for Catrine, the verbal assault continues when the group returns from a swim which she hadn’t joined in and they discover that Catrine has moved their stuff because of a threatening rain squall and in the process obscured the location where a member of the group has buried his car keys in the sand so as to safeguard them.
“For fuck’s sake!” one of them screams at her as she fights “lightheaded panic” and her tears build.
A total humiliation, in short, the outing, for Catrine – this atop an earlier ordeal when she was mugged almost as soon as she stepped off the plane.
Still, not enough, the two upsetting experiences, to take the bloom off the rose for her with Paris, which she has fantasized about and yearned to visit all her life, much to the disapproval of her mother back home, who, after losing her husband and being given to counting every penny, wishes only for Catrine to continue working alongside her at the warehouse where they’re both employed.
But Catrine has stashed away some money given to her by her father, with whom she enjoyed a warmer relationship, and once Freddie extends an invitation to join her in Paris – this at a time when the two women enjoyed a more convivial relationship – off she goes to the city of her dreams.
Compelling enough, as I say, the novel as straight narrative, and made the more so by a mystery about her mother which isn’t resolved until the book’s final 20 pages or so, though the book was still most absorbing to me as a straight rendition of the appeal of Paris, especially after Catrine strikes up an acquaintance with a widowed professor of French literature who expands her knowledge of the city with physical excursions as well as extended conversations about native-born authors as well as ones who simply set up residence there.
Sartre, Maupassant, Gide, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the literary references abound in a book which, along with its veneration for Paris, is a veritable feast for anyone with an appreciation for all things literary.