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    Paris Echo: A Novel
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    Paris Echo: A Novel
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    Paris Echo: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Paris Echo: A Novel

    Written by Sebastian Faulks

    Narrated by Elham Ehsas and Deborah McBride

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    American historian Hannah intends to immerse herself in World War II research in Paris, wary of paying too much attention to the city where a youthful misadventure once left her dejected. But a chance encounter with Tariq — a Moroccan teenager whose visions of the City of Lights as a world of opportunity and rebirth starkly contrast with her own — disrupts her plan.

    Hannah agrees to take Tariq in as a lodger, forming an unexpected connection with the young man. Yet as Tariq begins to assimilate into the country he risked his life to enter, he realizes that its dark past and current ills are far more complicated than he'd anticipated. And Hannah, diving deeper into her work on women's lives in Nazi-occupied Paris, uncovers a shocking piece of history that threatens to dismantle her core beliefs. Soon each must question which sacrifices are worth their happiness and what, if anything, the tumultuous past century can teach them about the future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateNov 6, 2018
    ISBN9781974923014
    Author

    Sebastian Faulks

    Sebastian Faulks is the author of ten novels. They include the UK number one bestseller A Week in December; Charlotte Gray, which was made into a film starring Cate Blanchett; and the classic Birdsong, which was recently adapted for television. In 2008, he was invited to write a James Bond novel, Devil May Care, to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming. He lives in London with his wife and their three children.

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    Reviews for Paris Echo

    3.5/5

    76 ratings22 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Set primarily in Paris, an Algerian youth and an American historian share an apartment and share a desire to find answers to questions about the past. Both characters, from completely different cultures, find themselves drawn to the echoes of Paris and the lives of people torn apart by war. I am left asking myself if it is better to hold on to aggregious behavior from the past or to try to move on with an open mind & heart? Themes include love and hate, cross-cultural openness and close-mindedness, and the pros and cons of trying to keep the past relevant to choices in the present. The book was interesting, although it felt a bit likely a barely disguised history lesson.
    • 3/5
      I am a relatively quick reader, so for a book to take me some two months to read means several things..1. I am not all that interested in it2. I am not completely thrown off it so I am still willing to pick it up now and then, if I can remember to, among all the other many books I am reading at the same time. So here this book is, it was brought along in the car as my 'waiting to pick up the kids from school' read, it was brought along in the swimming bag as my 'waiting for the kids to finish their swim class' read. For a book, it was relatively widely travelled, at least in my suburban town. Parts of the book interested me. I liked reading about Tariq and his strange escape from Morocco. I was disappointed when Sandrine disappeared, I wanted to find out more about her. I learnt a lot more about the Parisian metro system and station names than I ever expected to learn from a book.I enjoyed reading the invented archived interviews that Hannah listens to as part of her research. It reminded me of when I did my master's thesis and how I combed through audio interviews in the Singapore archives. The stories of Tariq and Hannah often felt like two separate books that just so happened to coincidentally come together in one, in a way that I still don't get. And that was seemingly brushed off as a, eh, that's what people do, kind of way. For me this was a, ah Paris, and an, ah historical research, but essentially meh read.
    • 5/5
      I have enjoyed every single book by Sebastian Faulks that I have read, and loved On Green Dolphin Street so much, so my reluctance to read Paris Echo makes no sense at all, except that the bare outline of the description made me nervous. Hannah, an American post-doc, comes to Paris ten years after her last stay, to do research into the lives of ordinary Parisian women during the Second World War. Tariq is an Algerian teenager who, through a series of events, ends up as a lodger of sorts in her small apartment. I think I was worried about what would happen in the wrong hands, that Tariq would do something terrible, or Hannah would, and I would be left feeling unhappy about the novel. But Sebastian Faulks is not a first-time author looking to write something edgy or controversial. He knows exactly what he's doing. Here, Hannah is a naturally cautious woman who is used to being alone. She's given access to a series of recordings of women recalling their wartime experiences living in Paris and she is drawn into their lives. Meanwhile, Tariq is figuring out how to survive in a city that doesn't welcome him. His natural resilience means he's willing to explore the city and he especially loves the Metro. He gets a menial job at the fabulously named Panama Fried Poulet spends his free time exploring. The careful way they manage to form a friendship is just wonderful.There's a clever bit of blurred time in this novel, but the main thing is how evocatively Faulks describes a Paris, not of tourists and grand avenues, but of immigrants, not always in France legally, trying to get by and of ordinary Parisian women during the war, and how they managed to survive. There were moments where it was clear that Faulks is much more comfortable with the thoughts of teenagers living eighty years ago than with a teenager today and he sometimes adds actions and thoughts to Tariq that don't feel entirely natural, but this was still and extraordinary novel, that I enjoyed thoroughly.
    • 3/5
      Hannah has moved to Paris to do some research on WWII. Paris has not been very kind to her in the past. She takes in Tariq, totally by accident. Tariq is a refugee determined to make it in Paris. Hannah and Tariq become strange friends but it works for them. Their connection is unique and enjoyable. I love the matter of fact tone of this author. There is no sugar-coating, no over-dramatizing. It just is. However, the story is filled with mundane, everyday activities. This I could do without. It also repeats itself in several places. But, I could not stop reading. I enjoyed the characters and their struggles. Especially Hannah. She discovers something during her research and it totally knocks her for a loop! This is a game changer in this story. I enjoy historical remembrance stories. This book did not have as many as I like, but it made up for it in historical references. I learned a lot in this read about the struggles many women had during the occupation of France. Not sure I have every really given that much thought. I love it when an author gives me a different insight.I received this novel from Henry Holt for a honest review.
    • 3/5
      *I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.*I've read some great historical fiction centered around Paris and France during the Nazi occupation that this book unfortunately just didn't compare well. I enjoyed the story, which is largely set in the 2000s Paris and involves an unlikely friendship between a historical researcher and a young Morroccan man. While I liked the stories they uncovered as the research progresses, I felt like this novel had too many separate strands that never really wove together all that well.
    • 4/5
      Two unlikely visitors to Paris become friends when Tariq, a young man from Morocco, and Hannah, a researcher from the US, become housemates. Both are seeking answers: Tariq hopes to learn about the mother who left him as a young child; and Hannah seeks oral histories of women of the Resistance. Each ends up with more questions, as well as more self-awareness. I particularly enjoyed the somewhat ethereal scenes of Tariq's encounters with the puppeteer Victor Hugo and the mysterious Clemence, and the serendipitous connections between Tariq's and Hannah's quests. As one would expect, the accounts of women's lives during the German Occupation of France were horrific and powerful.
    • 4/5
      Ever since his immense critical and commercial success with Birdsong, a new novel from Sebastian Faulks has always been a major event in the literary world. His A Week in December is one of my favourite novels (although I think that Capital by John Lanchester – and how eagerly I await a new novel from him – covered similar ground even more effectively), but I struggled to engage with some of his more recent books. As a regular participant in BBC Radio 4’s literary quiz programme, The Write Stuff, he has showcased his ability to produce marvellous pastiches of established icons, although I found his contribution to the ‘official’ James Band canon, Devil May Care, rather disappointing, and his officially sanctioned addition to P G Wodehouse’s corpus, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells was simply an embarrassment to all concerned. I was, therefore, a little uncertain as I embarked upon this latest novel, although all the reviews that I had seen had been very favourable.On this occasion, those reviewers spoke with straight tongue. This is a clever and engaging novel, and features several of Faulks’s soundest characteristics. It is set in Paris in 2006 and takes the form of two counterpoised narratives, one related by Hannah, an American academic who has returned to the city after a gap of ten years. In her previous visit she had been a postgraduate student, embarking upon an academic career. While there she had fallen into a passionate, but ultimately damaging, relationship with a Russian playwright who, after a few months, simply moved away, returning to his wife in Russia. This time, Hannah is commissioned to write a chapter for an academic study of life in Paris during the German occupation between 1940 and 1944.The other account is related by Tariq, a disaffected young Moroccan who reaches such a pitch of frustration with his family life that he decides to leave, making his way by ferry to France. Having landed in Marseille, he befriends a young French woman, Sandrine, who is trying to make her way to Paris. Sandrine is clearly unwell, and once they reach Paris, Tariq shows unwonted initiative and manages to find them a room to live in, and to secure a job for himself. Meanwhile, Sandrine’s health deteriorates, to such an extent that Hannah comes across her lying ill in a doorway, and takes her into her own rented apartment. Tariq joins them there shortly afterwards, at which point a recuperated Sandrine suddenly departs, trying to make her way to England.The rest of the novel revolves around Tariq’s attempts to establish himself in Paris, and to develop sufficient maturity to encourage Hannah to allow him to continue to occupy a room in her flat, while Hannah pursues her researches, with mixed success. However, as this is Faulks, the are some of his characteristic quirks of time and place, with both Tariq and Hannah experiencing momentary displacement, as the depth of the city’s history exerts its power upon them. The sense of history at work is heightened by Faulks’s use of stations on the Paris Metro as chapter titles. Perhaps more than any other underground system, reading the line maps of the Paris Metro is like a history lesson in itself, and Tariq is made increasingly aware of the city’s past as he wanders the streets and rides the subway to pass his time.This may not quite be up to the standard of A Week in December, and will probably fall well short of the commercial success enjoyed by Birdsong, but it is a thoughtful and well written novel, and shows Faulks coming close to his former high standards.
    • 2/5
      Okay, I'm not going over the premise as that's done in every review and shouldn't be. I really was disappointed in this read for several reasons. I thought the author was trying to impress the reader with his knowledge of French streets and train stops. The constant intro of new street names was numbing. I mean who cares? I thought many little'instances' were staged for the book and irrelevant to the story, like Tariq taking money back for someone in Algeria. That entire scene's purpose is never explained and seemed inserted to take up space. The entire story seemed contrived and meant to draw parallels between France's actions in WWII and their colonialism in Algeria. I was very disappointed in the ending. Others may enjoy this book, in the end I did not.
    • 4/5
      Tariq Sandrine, a Moroccan teenager, has taken the decision to travel to Paris in part to discover something about his Parisian born mother...."Paris and its beauty, by its pavement cafes and its trees and bridges, by its cathedral floating on the stream and all the other charms to which no sane person could fail to respond"...... Hannah is in Paris as part of her studies; a thesis she is writing on the women of Paris during its occupation by the Germans in 1940-1944. When Tariq and Hannah meet by chance a strange alliance develops between them, a meeting of lost souls in a city with a troubled war history.Tariq finds employment in the guise of a fast food outlet where he is introduced to the joys of smoking hash and loose women. As a 19 year old and a late developer his part in Paris Echo is his coming of age. It is however the experiences of Hannah and her attempt to source surviving evidence either written or recorded that lends to Paris Echo a great sense of loss and hopelessness. She learns of the attitude of Parisian women to the German occupation and tearfully researches such brave resistance fighters as Andree Borrel, a young French woman trained by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Through an act of betrayal Borrel is captured and sent to "Natzweiler" the only concentration camp ever built in France...."but when her turn came, Andree was still conscious and fought back, tearing flesh from the face of her murderer with her fingernails as he pushed her into the flames"....Fraternization, collaboration and betrayal was what defined Paris at this time..."the indifference of others; the racial hatred and propaganda and the deportations to the death camps"......This is a poignant sobering story blending historical fact into a modern setting. Two young people trying to interpret this business of living and their role within that. For Tariq it will mean friendship, manhood and winning the girl of his dreams. For Hannah true love has always been close but will she discover its tender touch before it disappears. Paris Echo is a story full of hope with a simple message that life is for the taking and only by action can we understand the true meaning of what it is to exist. Many thanks to the good people at netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.
    • 4/5
      This novel, although not my favorite of Faulk's books, is well written with an interesting premise and set in the most beautiful of locations, Paris. Hannah is an American historian researching the lives of Parisian women during the German occupation of Paris from 1940 to 1944. These were the most interesting parts of the book, and their stories came alive under the skillful guidance of the author.Hannah's life intersects with Tariq, a teenager from Morocco, who has come to Paris to "find himself" and leave the past. He comes to live as a boarder with Hannah, through a mutual acquaintance. Having dismissed history as boring and not applicable to present-day life, he eventually gains a new understanding when he is able to help her with the translations that drive her research.I am grateful to LibraryThing and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book.
    • 3/5
      I've enjoyed Faulks's fiction in the past. At its best (BIRDSONG; CHARLOTTE GRAY), his fiction succeeds because his characters leap off the page. He's capable of historical fiction that comes alive and is deeply moving.PARIS ECHO unfortunately is not that book. The plot seemed to hold such promise. There has been some good recent history written about the lives of Parisian women during World War II, and I was looking forward to reading Faulks's fictional take on that story. Alas, the narrative feels contrived and the merging of modern Paris with the "ghosts of Paris past" just doesn't work. It's clunky, lifeless, and ultimately unsatisfying.The story could have been redeemed with some of those strong characters Faulks has given us in the past. But Tariq and Hannah are unlikeable and unbelievable. Worse than that, they're flat and boring. Halfway through the book, I had long since stopped caring about what happened to either of them. And in the end, it's all sort of strangely unresolved. I can't really recommend this one. Two stars rounded up due to the imagined oral histories of Parisians in the Occupation, which are interesting.(Thank you to Henry Holt for an advance copy in exchange for an unbiased review.)
    • 3/5
      Blurb from Amazon: "American historian Hannah intends to immerse herself in World War II research in Paris, wary of paying much attention to the city where a youthful misadventure once left her dejected. But a chance encounter with Tariq, a Moroccan teenager whose visions of the City of Lights as a world of opportunity and rebirth starkly contrast with her own, disrupts her plan." The story of two outsiders to France, academic reasearcher Alice and teenage adventurer Tariq, this is an interesting novel with several themes: life choices, education, outsider attitudes, behavior under stress, colonialism, identity. Faulks is an excellent writer, so the prose is easy to follow and a pleasure to read. I started out not liking Tariq, but there is more character development for Tariq than for Alice, and he ended up being my favorite character. This would make a good book club selection (warning: occasional vulgar language for those who are bothered about that sort of thing) as there is plenty to mull over. Thanks to the Early Reviewer program for the opportunity to read and review this book.
    • 4/5
      Paris Echo is the story of Hannah and Tariq, from two different worlds but temporarily sharing the same Paris apartment. There is a strong tie to Occupied France and the resistance, through recordings of personal stories, and the ghosts of these women haunt both Hannah and Tariq, for different reasons. I loved how both time periods, modern day and 1940s, were made to seem simultaneous. But I didn't feel for either of the characters. There was too much jumping around between the two points of view and while I liked Tariq for being so blunt and honest, I didn't like Hannah at all. It was a decent read, but hard to love the characters.
    • 5/5
      Hannah is an American historian who is in Paris to do some research. She’s writing about the lives of women who were present in Paris during the German Occupation. She listens for hours to recordings these women made detailing what living in Paris was like at that time and how these women felt about the German soldiers. As she walks the streets of Paris, memories of her time there ten years before and the love affair she has never gotten over begin to haunt her. She’s also haunted by the ghosts of the Paris witnesses she’s listening to.She takes in a boarder, 19-year-old Tariq, who has run away from his home in Morocco. Tarij isn’t sure why he came to Paris, possibly to find answers to all of the questions he’s had about his long dead mother. Hannah and Tariq couldn’t be more different and yet they form a friendship. Tariq is ashamed that he knows so little history and learns that many North Africans hate France for its treatment of Muslims. One of his newly found “teachers” is a man who thinks he’s Victor Hugo, a homeless man who performs puppet shows in the subway for donations.This is a gorgeously written literary work, a slow-moving, thought-provoking book. There are several stories in this book, not only the stories of Hannah and Tariq but also of the women who witnessed Paris during the German Occupation, relating the atrocities committed, and real-life women such as Andree Borrel, a French heroine of World War II who was executed by the Germans. The ghosts of the past converge with those walking the streets of Paris in the present day and Paris’ history continues to echo into the future. This is a book that will linger long after the last page is read. Most highly recommended.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      Tariq is 19 when he finds his Moroccan home too small, too far away from the real world. Paris is the place he wants to be, not just because of the dreams of the city of lights he has, but also to follow his deceased mother’s traces who was born and raised there. On his way, he meets a young girl and together they arrive in the French capital without any place to stay or any idea of how to earn money. Hannah, an American researcher twice their age, accommodates them; what was meant as an arrangement just for a couple of days becomes a cohabitation for months in which Tariq not only discovers that he is not only ignorant of Europe’s history, but also of the struggles between France and its former colonies in northern Africa. But also Hannah not only makes progress in her work on women in the second World War, but also in her personal love life.I was eager to read Sebastian Fault’s novel because seeing the French history through the eyes of a Moroccan teenager seemed to be quite an interesting perspective. The author certainly has chosen quite a unique approach to history, since it is mainly strangers who do not actually have a family bond or personal connection to what has happened and thus, can look at things a bit more freely. What I liked best was actually Tariq’s education through the metro, especially since he didn’t learn because he was told to, but because he felt a need and wanted to. This informal kind of education lead to a lot more depth than any formal teaching could ever have provided. And it clearly showed that this kind of knowledge has a certain relevance in everyday life and it not just dusty knowledge of no practical use. Even though the whole set-up of the novel was not really authentic – which middle-aged American woman would ever house a refugee in her expensive Parisian flat and how could a Moroccan teenager move around Paris without ever being eyed closely by the police or the people around him – I enjoyed reading it, especially since the narration of the past events was much more inspiring than the plot set in the present.
    • 4/5
      Nineteen-year-old Tariq runs away from his home in Algiers and discovers Paris. His explorations are the fun part of this novel, as he travels on the Metro throughout the city. Then there is Hannah, an American 30-something PhD candidate who is researching lives of French women during WWII. For some reason -- because she is generous? because she needs help with the French language? because she is lonely? -- she allows Tariq to move into her flat. He learns some French history from her while she learns a great deal about the Paris women of the 1940s. That is the sad part. That and Hannah's unhappy relationship with men since a heartbreaking affair when she was a college student in Paris. Perhaps the aftermath of the affair is not well defined; I had a hard time understanding why it took her 10 years to get over it.There are a few other points that didn't quite make sense to me but they won't spoil the reading for anyone.
    • 3/5
      This was the worst book I’ve read in a long, long time. If it hadn’t been an ER book, I never would’ve finished it. But I forged my way through what was really quite a slog. Part coming of age, part WWII history about the role of Paris women in collaboration with the Germans (or not) it held great promise but never really lived up to it. It failed to draw me in on so many levels. An Algerian teenager who doesn’t really know what he wants, leaves his home and travels to France to work for what amounted to a few months. He finds that all is not rosy in France and eventually returns home, somehow buoyed up to finish his degree and go on at college. Why he arrived at this conclusion is about as clear as mud.An American woman, doing research about the Parisian women during the war years, listens to audio recordings supplied by these women in their old age. In the meantime, an old acquaintance, recently divorced, seems to have fallen in love with her. She’s oblivious. Until the last few pages of the book. Then she suddenly realizes she’s in love with him and MUST move in with him.The worst, and I mean the very worst part for me was the fact that the author felt the need to flood every single page with French street names or restaurant names or neighborhood names until I wanted to just throw the book against the wall. I don’t speak French. If I wanted to read a book loaded with French phrases I’d look for an actual French author. This was absolutely mind-numbing and very, very tiresome. Just like the rest of the book. Save yourself.
    • 3/5
      In this ponderous novel, Faulks sets out to tackle several interesting questions all of which concern the relationship between the past and the present. Some of the story lines involve the far past, some the near future, some involve things the characters know, others things that they don’t know. They are all interesting questions, and parts of this novel are intriguing and well-done. (I love the idea of the past overlapping with the present.) Other parts of this novel, however, are rather dry and slow going. Even though the philosophical questions he raises are intriguing, I ended up not caring very much about the story or the characters.
    • 5/5
      Sebastian Faulks is on of the best literary figures of his generation and The Paris Echo proves it.
    • 3/5
      I read Birdsong twenty years ago – I forget why I decided to do so – and I’ve sort of followed Faulks’s career ever since, possibly because his books were available in the subscription library I joined on my move to Abu Dhabi in 1994 and his name was familiar from Birdsong. None of his novels have matched that one, and in fact many have been disappointing in one way or another. But, as British middle-brow literary fiction authors go, he’s at least better than Ian McEwan. Paris Echo is middling Faulks. It presents an interesting slice of history – Paris under the Nazis – and comments on collaboration and its impact on people and families of the time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer much in the way of plot as a substrate for this discussion, and in fact seems more concerned with the intersection of the lives of two immigrants in Paris, a female American academic and a teenage Moroccan who has had himself smuggled into the country, than the actual story the characters are intended to be springboards for. But the Maghrebi teenager’s experiences are all very anodyne, and the US academic is a bit of a blank slate, and the two narratives run along side each other but do not influence each other to any degree which sort of renders it all a bit moot. There’s some good historical stuff in here, but there’s sadly little in the way of plot and the two protagonists are somewhat thin. Faulks has written some good stuff during his career, but this is not one of them.
    • 3/5
      DId not allow me to identify too well with the characters - maybe my cultural prejudice/inhibitions. Life threads seemed to go nowhere - maybe the beauty of the book that life is a little like that? Wrapped thraeads up nicely at the end. Enjoyed but not a page turner for me. Paris background was fun.
    • 3/5
      Tariq is a Moroccan teenager determined to escape his family and see Paris, where he knows his mother once lived. Hannah is an American researcher who has returned to Paris to research the lives and voices of women who lived during the Occupation. They become roommates through a series of unlikely events, and the novel is told in their voices and through their eyes in alternating chapters. Tariq experiences Paris in the present, but known only to the reader, he also experiences the Paris of the past through encounters with people who lived during the time Hannah is researching. Hannah's research takes her down some surprising paths. And she is able to let go of a lost love, and find a new one. Well written, but unsatisfying.