The House in Paris
€0,00
First published in 1935, Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris is a quietly unsettling novel of love, secrecy and the emotional inheritances that bind one generation to the next. When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ house in Paris, she meets Leopold, a boy waiting to meet the mother he has never known. The household is governed by strange silences and unspoken histories. The novel unfolds across a single day, moving between the present and the past to reveal the complicated relationship between Leopold’s parents, Karen and Max, and the events that have shaped their son’s life. In Bowen’s hands, the domestic interior becomes a place of exquisite psychological tension, where a gesture or an apparently innocent conversation may conceal a lifetime of feeling.
Among Bowen’s most accomplished works, The House in Paris exemplifies her remarkable gift for rendering the invisible architecture of human relationships: desire, guilt, memory and the fragile arrangements by which people protect themselves from the truth. Its divided structure, shifting temporal perspective and crystalline prose place it firmly within the tradition of literary modernism, while its intimate social world recalls the intricate moral dramas of Henry James. Paris is less a romantic destination than a closed and watchful space, its rooms holding the traces of choices made long before the novel begins. The result is a novel of extraordinary restraint and emotional depth, in which the past is never truly past, and the smallest revelation can alter the meaning of an entire life.
From the book
“I have always thought that the past was not dead, but that it was all around us, and within us.”
— Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
On The House in Paris
“Bowen's novels are among the most distinguished achievements of twentieth-century fiction.”
— Hermione Lee, literary critic and biographer