The Ultimate Summer Escape: Historical Fiction
New novels by turns salty, sweeping and sweet will transport you to 1930s Italy, 19th-century England and San Francisco a hundred years ago.
Credit.Ryan Gillett
May 27, 2021, 9:55 a.m. ET
If you think of historical fiction as a way of translating the past, does your perspective change when that fiction has been translated from another language? As some of the season’s best new historical novels suggest, this added dimension can make a book even richer, even more provocative. And none demonstrates that better than Frank Wynne’s translation of Alice Zeniter’s
THE ART OF LOSING (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 434 pp., $28), which won France’s Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Its central character is a young Frenchwoman attempting to reconnect with the Algeria that shaped and then silenced her paternal grandfather.
The two women met at the child’s bedside at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.
“She stopped my daughter’s bleeding with her head covering,” Liane said at the hospital. “It’s a supernatural miracle. My daughter would have been lost.”
Liane’s sister, who was also present, called Galia a “righteous woman” and “the
rabbanit of Holon.”
Galia recounted that she saw Liane “screaming and going into a panic attack. What I did was to ask my husband to get out of the car, I took the child and we ran quickly toward a building.”
At that point, the explosion occurred, throwing them to the ground, “but my maternal instinct made me hold the child and she didn’t fly out of my arms.”