You don’t read a book because it topped the NYTimes “Best Seller” list for umpteen weeks. Nor because Good Reads labelled it “Best Historical Novel of the Year”, though that’s a recommend hard to ignore. You read a book because it touches where you are, what you need, who you might like to have known — or been. I’ve just wept my way through The Nightingale and learned a lot. I hope you will, too.

How many books will prepare me to write the story of Clotilde Sobieska and her convoluted connection with a small town in northwest Iowa?

Howard Tabor’s aunt Mary Grace had married Kurt Bernhard, a French refugee from WWII. Uncle Kurt left a good deal of himself behind, as most refugees do. In his case it was the memory of his first wife Clotilde Sobieska, daughter of Peter and Mary, themselves Polish refugees and vintners living in Alsace-Lorraine. Confused yet?

When Paris Went Dark was helpful in understanding the Bernhard’s generation, in France and during the war I don’t (didn’t) enjoy reading about. And now The Nightingale may be enough to rough out the story of Clotilde’s short life in the French underground. In the Agincourt narrative, it seems to have sprung from a painting by Gabriel Spat, titled originally “Portraite une famille” but repurposed into “The Project.” What I can say after reading Nightingale is that my attention span is long, while my capacity for writing, telling this or any other story, is shorter than “Cliff’s Notes” by contrast.

ADDENDUM

The complex story of how Spat’s impressionist family portrait came to be in the community collection could in an introduction to “the way things work.” Which was followed by a TWTW 1.2 expansion.

When Paris Went Dark was a first stab at understanding the Nazi occupation of Paris, which was becoming central to the plot.