In 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde.
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['Quite like old times.' the room says. 'Yes? No?']
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(Penguin Modern Classics, 3 August 2000, first published 1939, paperback, 159 pages, Around The Year In 52 Books 2019, a book with a strong sense of place or where the author brings the location / setting to life, bought from @AmazonUK)
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I was blown away by this book. So much happens in such a short space. The book uses fantastic imagery and sharp prose to perfectly capture the character's increasing loneliness and isolation. As this is a short book I was expecting it to be a breezy, easy read. I got quite the opposite. The book is devastatingly sad at times but there are moment of comic genius that I can't be sure were intentional or not. There are some light moments as well. This short book is very bleak for the most part which makes it seems like a much longer piece of writing, hundreds of pages more than it actually is. This isn't the kind of book I would normally read. There is no real plot and the other characters are barely more than outline. Yet there is something I really loved about it.
