Customer Reviews

The Way I Found Her

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really can't find enough superlatives to describe Rose Tremain's wonderful coming-of-age novel, The Way I Found Her. It's sweet, sexy, sad, funny, affectionate, tender, heartbreaking, engrossing and...perfect.

The Way I Found Her is the first-person narrative of Lewis Little's rite-of-passage from the world of childhood to the world of the adult. Rose Tremain has done such a masterful job of bringing Lewis to life, one would almost think The Way I Found Her was a memoir rather than a novel. There is a wonderful mix of the child Lewis still is and the adult he is rapidly becoming. And, this mix is not only charming and endearing...it's believable. For me, Lewis Little is far more "real" and unforgettable than many more famous (and more highly-touted) literary characters. I really felt I knew Lewis inside and out; I could feel his fear, his hope, his pain, his joy.

On its surface, The Way I Found Her may seem to be the story of a disappearance, but the disappearance itself actually plays a very small part in the story. Its importance lies in its impact on Lewis and in the way it changes him; this isn't a fun, little caper story, its definitely a portrait of one lovely and precocious boy's coming-of-age through his own "trial by fire." If there is one thread that runs through all of Tremain's novels, it seems to be one of isolation and loneliness. Lewis, like all of Tremain's protagonists is isolated and, in many respects, lonely.

Lewis Little is charming and he is forced, through no fault of his own, to give up much of the innocence of childhood during the summer we spend with him in Paris, but he still has far to go before fully entering the cynical world of the adult. This makes him a rather unreliable narrator and an even less reliable detective. He makes wild assumptions, he is led down false paths, he devises outlandish hypotheses. Sometimes these work out, but more often than not, they don't. Still, Lewis, in grand thirteen-year old fashion, is unfazed.

Those looking for a plot that races at breakneck speed should really look elsewhere. The Way I Found Her is, at its heart, an interior book. It is a chronicle of Lewis Little at age thirteen, (almost fourteen), and, as such, it is fascinating. Quite psychological and literary, The Way I Found Her bases its protagonist on an earlier one...one found in Le Grand Meaulnes, a very French book in which Lewis just happens to be engrossed. And, just as that book honored adolescence, especially male adolescence, so does The Way I Found Her.

The Way I Found Her is first and foremost a superb story, written by an author who possesses superb storytelling skills. But it is also an endearing portrait of a young boy poised on the brink of adulthood who wants to fly and yet knows that in that flying he will relinquish something precious and irretrievable.

The Way I Found Her is a book that tugs at your heart; Lewis Little is a character who burrows into your soul and stays there. This is a thoroughly enjoyable story and one that is also unforgettable.

Like Lewis Little, the hero (?) of this novel, I too spent my thirteenth year wandering around the streets and cafes of Paris as though in a wonderland of adulthood before my time. Happily, however, I wasn't caught up in love with a Russian novelist thirty years older than me, or kidnapped by...

Rose Tremain has written a formidably intelligent romantic thriller, which evokes Paris perfectly, and says something important about the pain of adolescence. My favourite character is Didier the existentialist roofer. I loved his melancholy, and the way Lewis never had the heart to tell him that 'no one is an existentialist these days'.

I also loved the neatness of the plot, in which everything seems to foreshadow later developments. It had me staying up till the small hours, unable to put the book down.

I didn't care that Lewis, or the plot, are not entirely credible as 'real'. This is a novel, for heavens sake! Like the roof of the hospital chapel, where Didier accidentally killed his father, this book is a fantastic construction, to marvel at, not to pull apart.

I can't remember the last time a book imprinted itself on my soul the way this one did. "The Way I Found Her" is a remarkable book - affecting on many different levels. Rose Tremain carries your spirit to a place in the way Hemnigway did - it's almost more real than actually being in Paris. You can smell the baguettes, feel the opressive summer heat, sense the sheer magic of the place. If this novel were nothing more than a travelogue of Paris it would be an amazing success.

It's so much more than that, though - even as you're whisked away to Paris along with Lewis Little and his beautiful, enigmatic mother, you're whisked along by the story as well. Tremain weaves a deceptively complex tale of love, betrayal, loneliness and, finally, regret. As a novel "The Way I Found Her" flows smoothly and effortlessly as the Seine, never allowing your attention to drift from the events at hand.

Most of all, though, this novel succeeds in the vivid portrait of the characters who grace it's pages. Lewis Little is the most interesting voice in many a years' fiction. Tremain does a stunning job of capturing the pure, unadultaerated passion of an adolescant boy, his senses opening up to the world around him as if for the first time. Adolescence is a natural vehicle for character drama because it's a time of change, and Lewis can feel change all around him - the life he knows is slipping away, the person he was along with it. This frightens him and exhilerates him at the same time, leaving him torn between a stubborn attatchment to his comfortable, child's life in Devon and the bold, exciting world of adult pleasures and sorrows he's just beginning to comprehend.

Even as he slips farther away from the stranger his mother has become and the father who seems a million miles away, he falls under the spell of Valentina, the writer who'se latest novel Lewis' mother has come to Paris to translate. Valentina is one of the most vivid, larger than life characters ever to grace the page. He comes to love her as only an adolescant can, old enough to realize the futility of his desire but unable to resist. She's a marvel - a bosomy, dizzying melange of cigarette smoke, infectious laughter, surprising warmth and a mysterious, exotic and sorrowful past which Lewis comes to understand all too well.

Finally, Tremain's Paris is filled with a collection of unforgettable supporting characters - Didier, the philosopher/roofer; Grisha, the bitter, mororse Russian writer; Moinel, the dapper, inquisitive yet guarded neighbor; Sergei, the "brilliant dog" who becomes Lewis' constant companion; and Babba, the immigrant maid who becomes Lewis' confidant. Not least of all, this Paris - in Lewis' fertile mind - is alive with the images of Francois Suerel and "Le Grand Meaulnes" (which serves as a framework for the novel), of Porfiry Petrovich and "Crime and Punishment", which serves as the inspiration for Lewis' improbable quest.

This novel is a triumph - an emotional roller coaster ride through one summer in Paris and the ending of one boy's childhood. After what Lewis experiences in Paris he'll never be the same. After sharing the experience, neither will you.

When Lewis Little travels to Paris for the summer, he enters into a childish fantasy and primitive love for a stylish, Russian author. Valentina does utterly consume him as he becomes more estranged from his mother, Valentina's translator.

The inner world of this gifted and very hungry 13 year old boy is surprisingly not far from the meanderings of an adult. Only his simplistic, complete devotion to this plagairising goddess, who is far less a goddess than an aging overweight woman in the reader's mind, remains child-like. Some reviewers have noted the delayed plot while some have complained of the lack of a story line. I disagree. For it is through the characterizations of those who are attached to this elegant makeshift household, that true tension, verging on panic held me riveted to the book. There is the tangerine bewigged neighbor who could be either friend or foe in the ultimate deadly mystery that unfolds, an African housekeeper unfairly blamed for Valentina's accident who meddles with voodoo and speaks of revenge. There is the existentialist roofer, suspected but never confirmed as Lewis' mother's lover and there is a tender but poorly loved father, back in Devon, who is fond of teaching Lewis things that are depressed or otherwise unwanted knowledge.
All of these people fail to meet the immediate and ravenous hungers that drive Lewis, well past his age, into a tale of seduction, kidnapping and loneliness. The book wobbles into the rapids of post modernism by the Seine, in the City of Love.

A precocious British boy travels to Paris to perfect his French while his father remains home to build a garden hut in an attempt to salvage his marriage to Lewis's mother, who is in Paris with Lewis to translate the work of a Russian romance novelist. He walks a beautiful dog around Paris, discusses philosophy with a roofer and religion with a maid, and becomes completely erotically bewitched with Valentina, the novelist.

This doesn't sound like the set-up for one of the most suspenseful, gripping novels I've read in the last few years, but halfway through this beautiful book, that's what it becomes.

There is much going on below the surface of this book; Lewis's new awareness of his mother's beauty and how it transfixes men, his worries about his father, the way these all entwine in his joyful and boyishly perverse surrender to his new feelings for the unattainable Valentina. He's wrestling with the issues of identity and purpose, his sense of place in the universe. Lewis is so real, so thirteen, so intelligent and brave that you will almost be unable to leave him at the end of the book, knowing that he is sadder, wiser, older, and forever changed by what he's undergone.

Rarely does a book marry character, plot, setting and an overarching intellectual engagement with philosophy to this extent. You have to go back to the classics. And yet it's all so skillfully, invisibly done. The seamlessness of this book is a marvel.

At once a poignant, coming-of-age novel, a page-turning mystery, and an extremely well-crafted story that vividly and realistically portrays the machinations of a 13-year-old boy's mind. Infused with snippets of literary and philosophical commentary, Tremain's writing brings her characters to life with a plot that has many suspenseful twists and turns, plumbing the psychological and emotional depths of life and love. Young Lewis Little captivates the reader as they follow him on an achingly bittersweet journey that bridges childhood innocence and the maturity that he gains at the cost of a traumatic experience which leaves him sadder, but wiser. An absolutely wonderful read!

This is a delightful story of a 13 year old English boy, who travels to Paris with his mother who is to translate a book. Lewis Little is growing up, sometimes faltering between becoming a man and sliding back into childhood with its securities.

The first part of the book details his attachment to the author of romance novels, with whom he and his mother are staying. Just when you think that the novel is about his love for an older woman, and an interesting coming of age story, suddenly the object of his affections disappears.

He decides to take on the responsibility of finding and rescuing her.

I found this book really interesting and was fascinated by the world through Lewis' eyes. He was funny, sweet, heroic, emotional, embarrassing...everything that we all experience during puberty. I have two more of Rose Tremain's books on my shelf and look forward to reading them.

This is the first book I have read by Rose Tremain, but it won't be the last. She is a sensitive, talented writer. The coming-of-age story of Lewis Little is sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and the characters are unforgettable. I read it non-stop, and when I came to the end, I felt discombobulated to find myself back in the real world.

What I thought was going to be a sweet, charming rumination on one 13 year old's most important summer, was instead a brilliant, insightful look at a young adult on the cusp on manhood. That Tremain accurately captures that evasive and often dizzying period of being a boy and a man at the same time is a testament to her incredible writing skills. This is a gripping and poignant book that will stay with you long after the last page.

It is now 4:30 AM and I just finished THE WAY I FOUND HER. I wish it didn't end. A seemingly simple story of a 13-year old boy's "coming of age" during a summer spent in Paris, the book is a passionate exploration of love, friendship, intimacy and what it really means to live life.This is the first novel by Rose Tremain that I have read - I anxiously look forward to visiting her other literary worlds. Her writing expertly captures the mind, imagination and language of a real, albeit precocious, 13-year old. Her attention to detail is wonderful and as you are reading THE WAY I FOUND HER, you feel as if you are living amongst the character in Paris. The characters of Lewis and Valentine are people you want to know and have in your life.There are times towards the end when the novel takes a slightly off-key turn and wavers towards becomming contrived. Tremain handles this well, even if she does come close to becomming incredulous at times. She redeems herself completely with the ending and Epilogue where she is on firmer ground dealing with human emotions.There are few books that once finshed, I look forward to returning to years later. I add THE WAY I FOUND HER to this short list