12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Miracles of Love and Roses, April 16, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: In the Company of Angels: A Novel (Paperback)
"In the Company of Angels" is a lush and beautiful novel. It is hypnotic and evocative, gorgeous and harrowing. It is certainly one of the very best books I've read in a long, long time.
Marie Claire is a small French Jewish girl who lives with her grandmother in a Belgian village near the border of France. In fact, Tournai was once a part of France, itself, and its ties to Christianity are strong. As Kelby so lyrically writes, "Conquered by the French, it was thought more beautiful than Paris. Conquered by the English, it was the favored city of King Henry the Eighth. It was also a city of God, or so it was said." Certainly the people of Tournai see God. They see Him in their prayers and they see Him in the everyday stuff of life: The baker sees God in a cherry tart, the barber sees the Virgin's face on the floor of his shop and the butcher finds a small cross in the belly of a lamb. Yet, the people of Tournai are not happy; they feel that somehow, for some unknown reason, God has deserted their beautiful and loving village.
Marie Claire's grandmother was known for her beautiful garden and cultivating flowers was her hobby. In fact, she names a rare black iris in Marie Claire's honor, because the little girl's hair is so very black. Marie Claire, like generations of the Durrieu family before her, lives a life that is as deeply rooted in the soil as are the beautiful flowers she is learning to tend. When World War II encroached upon their village, however, Marie Claire finds that her world is shattered.
Two Belgian nuns, a Mother Superior and a young postulant, find Marie Claire hiding in the root cellar and they take her to their convent. There, in a town scented with the chocolates for which it is famous, the miracles of love that surrounded Marie Claire and saved her from capture by the Nazis, continue. Miracles that are always accompanied by the overpowering scent of roses.
The two nuns, who are the only surviving Sisters of His Divine and Most Sacred Blood, are Sister Xavier and Sister Anne. These sisters have secrets of their own. Sister Xavier's parents are involved in genetic studies for the Third Reich. In addition, one of Sister Xavier's closest friends has suffered greatly at the hands of a commander in Hitler's army. And Sister Xavier does not plan to let these crimes go unpunished.
Sister Anne is a woman dealing with ghosts. Far from being involved with Hitler, Sister Anne's parents were the victims of love. Her mother was, perhaps, a hysteric, and her father was a man too weak to protect his own daughter from the woman he loved. And then there is the street artist. Sister Anne must deal with his ghost as well.
This is a book in which ghosts inhabit space side by side with the living. "The dead walk," Kelby writes, "the living rot away inch by inch...logic no longer applies." Logic certainly doesn't apply in this beautiful, but grim, story, so reminiscent of a fairy tale, and we are glad it doesn't. Lost in the mystery of faith and the horror or war, both saint and sinner continue to love. Tournai was, after all, a city of four hundred bells. God might be hiding, but how could he not be hiding among them?
This is an extraordinarily poetic book; I don't think it would have worked had it been written any other way. Kelby's prose is spare but metaphorical, and it is perfect for her subject matter. She really makes us feel the fear, the love, the loss, the betrayal, the forgiveness. We can see the death and the destruction, we can smell the chocolates and the roses.
Who would have guessed that in such a slim novel one could find the strands of so many lives and so many emotions woven into so many different patterns? Much of what this book details is unspeakable: unspeakable sorrow, unspeakable hope, unspeakable horror, unspeakable love. Kelby tells her hypnotic story as though she were relating a dream; each word she chooses seems to be the perfect one for this small but powerful, yet somehow, ethereal novel.
This is an exquisite book but one that is sometimes almost too painful too read...and, at other times, too beautiful. Once you pick up this harrowing, yet luminous book you will not be able to put it down. You will have to know how, and why, and who, brought God back to Tournai. But you will not find out until this book's very last pages. Kelby writes of the most sublime spirituality without a trace of the sentimentality usually found in such a book. And, the ending will definitely surprise you. It will surprise you and it will not let you go. "In the Company of Angels" is a book that will haunt both your waking and dreaming hours long after you've finished the very last page; you will be glad that it does.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
N.M. Kelby puts readers In The Company of Angels, February 2, 2001
"In times of war, the line between 'what is' and 'what is no longer' becomes confused," says the omniscient and poetic narrator of the future award winning first novel of N. M. Kelby. The smell and texture of fine chocolate, the oddity of black irises, the stench of smoke, the roar of war planes convey a heady realism, but something much stronger pulls us into this world of the bell-laden city of Tournai, Belgium during the horrible years toward the end of the war. "In times of war, logic no longer applies." What does apply and miraculously survive are various human loves (nuns for God and for each other; a man and a woman who should be bitter enemies; a community for its few survivors) and the mysterious ways of God (light shining from the palms of a beautiful traumatized child, perhaps an angel; doves fluttering from napkins; an elderly German nun, dead, meeting her parents in their field; a beautiful red headed woman who, angelic herself for all her rich corporality and love of chocolate, claims to have "saved an angel of God," a Jewish child ("How can she be an angel of God?". . ."That is the question you must ask yourself," she answers). And that is but one question the reader must ask too. The slim, gripping novel begs us: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
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