Love and Loss in Nazi-Occupied and Modern-Day Paris

What the Light Touches by Xavier Bosch (Translated By: Samantha Mateo)

Goodreads Giveaway Win

Pages: 435 Genre: historical fiction

Rating: 3.5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights

It's 2008, and Barbara arrives home to the apartment she used to share with her Mamie Margaux to see a random man asleep on he couch. Barbara came to Paris to restart her life, and once Margaux moved into a retirement home, she rented out the spare room. Apparently, her normal resident has sublet his apartment to his brother, Roger: a curious and forward photographer. Neither is particularly fond of each other, but when an unexpected snowstorm traps them both indoors, their bonding begins to reveal secrets about Barbara's family. Because before she was Mamie Margaux, she was Margaux the teenager. This version of Margaux was living in Nazi-occupied Paris where she is learning to play the Oboe, falling in love for the first time, and trying to stay safe in a dangerous time.

I really enjoyed this book. I won it in a Goodreads giveaway, and I'm really glad I did; I don't think I would've read it otherwise. It's certainly not perfect, though, and I'd say its biggest flaws lie in the translation. As other readers have pointed out, it seems as though the translator tried to stay as literal as possible, which means not everything reads smoothly in English. But while I found some of the writing to be clunky and awkward, I always knew what it was going for, and I didn't find it too distracting. But I can understand why that would turn away some readers.

Overall, I think this book shined in the broader story and fell flat in the details. About half the book takes place in the "present" 2008 and about half takes place in the 1940s. I loved the piece that took place in the past. I found it incredibly powerful and moving to witness such a horrific time period through the lens of "ordinary" life. And I really enjoyed the way the book portrayed things like love and loss and grief and connection.

Unfortunately, while I liked the full big-picture story, I found the page-to-page happenings to be lacking. The book is quite long, and there were many passages that tended to drag. We got a lot of unnecessary details about Barbara's job that were just never really relevant. I also didn't love the way women's bodies were talked about, but I can't tell if my issues lie in the original author's intention or the translator's blunders.

The book description on Goodreads focuses a lot on a photo of Margaux that was taken and used by a photographer as Nazi propaganda unbeknownst to her, and while the throughline does exist, I don't think it's as strong as the official blurb claims it to be. At least not until the latter half of the book. A poor description is not necessary a fair critique of a full-length novel, though, but it did make the beginning seem slower than it was since a lot of it was not immediately connected to that photograph. I'd say the story is more about Barbara and Margaux in their respective lifetimes, learning both independently and together what it means to love and lose. And then they sometimes talk about the photo.

Barbara, Margaux, and Roger were real highlights of this book. Every character — these three in particular, but even the side characters — really held their own. The narration shifted between characters frequently, and there was never a person where I was disappointed to be briefly residing in their head.

While this book certainly wasn't perfect, I found it be a very engaging story that I think fans of historical fiction (particularly about WWII) would enjoy.