The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Thanks you Libby for offering your house for me to host a gathering of nine of us to talk about this beautiful and poignant and relevant book. It was so good to see you all and to once more sit in a gathering of women and discuss what we loved or disliked or found painful or delightful about a recent reading of a book.  Our views of this book were varied.  Some found it too painful to finish, many found it chilling in light of Trump’s maniacal rise to power, others found it inspiring in the way that it described two sisters' quite different but equally heroic actions to thwart the Nazi’s occupation of France.

Having read “All the Light We Cannot See” over a year ago, we were able to contrast the two books.  “All the Light….” we described as poetic, exquisitely written, a gem; while “The Nightingale” was more personal, describing the lives of people of the French countryside, especially of two women, Vianne and Isabelle.  It was a visceral, heartbreaking book about the impact of WWII on the people who were not at the front, but who were fighting their own battle; the one of survival, of resistance, and of loss.

That brought us to a discussion of whether we would have had the courage to act as the two sisters did and of the differences in their motivations,  of Vianne’s betrayal of Rachael, and of course of how this war came to be.  How a mad man was able to capture the minds and bodies of a nation and if today’s mad man has the potential to capture the minds of America.  It made the book even more chilling to read it in this light.  One of my favorite quotes was “If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

This book was well researched and taught us much about France and the French resistance.  We learned that the Vichy government collaborated with the Nazi regime and became subservient to it.  We learned that about 2% of the French adult population was actively involved in the resistance and up to 10% were affiliated with it.  The children that Vianne saved were representative of the 12,000 to 15,000 jewish children who were hidden and/ or smuggled out of France.  And Isabelle was modeled after an actual woman who smuggled people across the Pyrenees.I “Isabelle's character is based on the late Andrée de Jongh (1916-2007), an amazing woman who repeatedly risked her life helping British and American servicemen escape on foot from Nazi-occupied Belgium and France.”

I will end with a couple of my favorite quotes.  “But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”  And…  “You’re not alone, and you’re not the one in charge,” Mother said gently. “Ask for help when you need it, and give help when you can. I think that is how we serve God—and each other and ourselves—in times as dark as these.”

I love books.  They offer us the chance to experience emotions and events that in our own bodies we would never know.  They teach us about the past.  I was talking to my nephew today who is on his own for the first time in years after breaking up with his girlfriend.  He was wondering how it would be to travel by himself to South America.  I wanted to tell him about Paul Theroux, who always travels alone, because it really opens you to experiences, but he is not a reader.  It is a blessing to be a reader, to see the world through so many different eyes.