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WORK TITLE: The Balcony
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.janedelury.com/
CITY: Baltimore
STATE: MD
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married, 1998 (divorced); children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A.; University of Grenoble (France), master’s degree; Johns Hopkins University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Baltimore, MD, associate professor. Previously, taught English in France.
AWARDS:PEN/O. Henry Prize; F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Award; Pushcart Special Mention. Grants and fellowships from organizations, including Virginia Center for the Creative Artsand Maryland State Arts Council.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to publications, including the Yale Review, Southern Review, Narrative, Five Points, and Glimmer Train.
SIDELIGHTS
Jane Delury is a writer and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and master’s degrees from the University of Grenoble, in France, and Johns Hopkins University. Delury lived in France for four years and taught English there. Back in the U.S., she became a college professor and has taught at the University of Baltimore. Delury has written short stories that have appeared in publications, including the Yale Review, Southern Review, Narrative, Five Points, and Glimmer Train. Her work has received the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Award, and a Pushcart Special Mention.
In 2018, Delury released her first book, The Balcony. The volume contains ten linked stories, each involving a manor in a fictional French village called Benneville, located close to Paris. The first of the stories finds an American young woman named Brigitte moving to the manor to become an au pair for the family who lives there. The married Brigitte’s charge is Elodie, who Brigitte later learns is suffering from leukemia. Elodie’s mother is Olga, an overbearing woman who survived a concentration camp. The family is preparing to relocate to the U.S. Meanwhile, Brigitte finds herself attracted to a local man named Hugo. The next story shifts back in time to the WWII era, when Olga is in the concentration camp. The manor is sitting empty. A woman living nearby struggles to feed Charlotte, her daughter, and decides to break into the manor to find food. Charlotte returns in another story. Now an adult, she cares for her ailing husband. Another character, Henri Havre, who fought with the Resistance during WWII, becomes a cold and abusive father and grandfather.
In an interview with Marion Winik, contributor to the Baltimore Fishbowl website, Delury explained how she came to write the book and discussed her writing and research process. She stated: “I love historical anecdotes, and I gather them everywhere on visits to France, so there are many of those fragments that inform the story of the estate. The description of what happened to the manor during the war is based on something I read years ago about a house that was plundered. I did do research when I wrote the original stories, and I did more research when I wrote the novel.” Delury continued: “I found villages near Paris like the one I created near the forest (Benneville) and I read about their history. I wanted my characters to drive the events of the novel, but I did want to remain in the realm of the plausible. And I had a French copy editor fact check for me once I had a draft.”
Critics offered favorable assessments of The Balcony. “The prose is tight and each [of the] stories are told well; this is a satisfying examination,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Referring to Delury, Karen Ann Cullotta, contributor to BookPage, commented: “With immense storytelling gifts and spare but luminous prose, she is one of the few writers whose debut will have readers begging for a second novel.” Cullotta described the volume as “a smart, elegantly written story.” Writing in Booklist, Margaret Quamme called the book a “satisfying puzzle of a debut novel.” “While the author affectingly composes her characters’ individual psychologies in slow dabs of detail, the manor’s physicality supplies permanence,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic. The same critic described the narrative as “strikingly deft and nuanced” and called Delury “a writer to watch.” A reviewer on the WTOP website suggested: “The Balcony is an American’s love letter to France—a bit prickly … and a compelling saga spanning France’s past century, a period in which the manor, ravaged by wars and time, survives as a silent witness.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2018, Margaret Quamme, review of The Balcony, p. 24.
BookPage, April, 2018. Karen Ann Cullotta, review of The Balcony, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of The Balcony.
Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2018, review of The Balcony, p. 34.
ONLINE
Baltimore Fishbowl, https://baltimorefishbowl.com/ (March 22, 2018), Marion Wink, author interview.
Jane Delury website, http://www.janedelury.com/ (May 24, 2018).
Oprah.com, http://www.oprah.com/ (May 24, 2018), article by author.
WTOP, https://wtop.com/ (March 26, 2018), review of The Balcony.
Bio
9780316554671_jane-delury_spring-2018
Jane Delury grew up in Sacramento, California, and attended UC Santa Cruz. She spent her junior year abroad in Grenoble, France, and she returned to the University of Grenoble after UCSC to complete a master’s degree and to teach English. Following several years in France, she moved to Baltimore to study fiction in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Five Points, Narrative, and other publications. She has received a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Award, a VCCA fellowship, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. She holds a BA in English and French literature from UCSC, a maîtrise from the University of Grenoble, and an MA from the Writing Seminars. She is an associate professor of creative writing and English at the University of Baltimore.
QUOTED: "I love historical anecdotes, and I gather them everywhere on visits to France, so there are many of those fragments that inform the story of the estate. The description of what happened to the manor during the war is based on something I read years ago about a house that was plundered. I did do research when I wrote the original stories, and I did more research when I wrote the novel."
"I found villages near Paris like the one I created near the forest (Benneville) and I read about their history. I wanted my characters to drive the events of the novel, but I did want to remain in the realm of the plausible. And I had a French copy editor fact check for me once I had a draft."
Q&A with local author Jane Delury about her new novel ‘The Balcony’
By Marion Winik - March 22, 20180
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“In June of 1992, I left Boston for France with everything in front of me.” So begins the first story in The Balcony, debut fiction from Jane Delury, a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore.
The narrator of this story is Brigitte, an American college girl working as an au pair for a French family at a manor house in the countryside. But any initial impression that this is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel is dashed when one hits the second story, set in 1890 on the same estate, with an upstairs-downstairs theme, all French characters, and a suicide. By the third story, in 1980, you figure it out. It’s centered on the place, and all the people who lived there, and all the things that happened to them over about 130 years. And Brigitte is about the only American you’ll find.
Take the fictional poet Rado Koto, from Madagascar. He appears in “Au Pair” as the subject of a book that the father of the family, a literature professor, is working on. We hear that he won a big poetry prize, slept with Andy Warhol, became a heroin addict, died a suicide at 42. In “Nothing of Consequence,” set in 1975, Koto is alive and well, having a romantic liaison with one of his adult students at a poetry conference on a coconut plantation in Madagascar. This woman, we gradually figure out by putting two and two together with information from another story, grew up in poverty in a cottage on the estate, pre-WWII. Aha!
Some of the most acclaimed books of 2017 were in the linked story format: Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible, Joan Silber’s Improvement, Neal Mukherjee’s State of Freedom. Though this form offers the novelistic pleasure of lingering in a unified world for the whole length of the book, it also gives the author freedom to range around in time, place and perspective. It is uniquely suited to depicting the operation of fate and coincidence, and to showing troubled relationships and complicated characters from a variety of angles.
The Balcony has been blessed with a starred review in Kirkus calling Jane “a writer to watch.” As her colleague and friend, I’ve had a birds-eye view for the past 10 years. Honestly, with her talent, she could have been that 25-year old who gets the million dollar deal for her first book. Instead, fate made her wait quite a while. We caught up with her to talk about it all.
BFB: You seem to know so much about France and about French people. Can you tell us how that came about?
I fell in love with France as a girl, growing up in Sacramento. My father had cousins in Alsace, whom we visited, and he wrote to them regularly in French and encouraged me to learn the language as well. I started lessons young, then I minored in French literature at UC Santa Cruz. I spent my junior year abroad, in Grenoble. I ended up marrying a Frenchman I met that year, and we lived in Grenoble for four years. The stories in the book began with a forest behind his grandparents’ house near Chateauroux, France, a place we visited often. When we left France for Baltimore so I could start graduate work in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I kept coming up with stories about that forest. There are other places in the book that I adore too, like Brittany, where we often rented houses during the summer and where his grand-aunt lived.
BFB: The history you provide for the estate and its previous owners seems so real. is it made up completely, or is it modeled on something? How did you do it?
The history of the estate and the lives of its owners are mostly made up. One or two of the stories have elements of local legends about the forest of Chateauroux. For instance, I wrote a story based on an anecdote about a boy who went out hunting with his brother and drowned in a pond. I love historical anecdotes, and I gather them everywhere on visits to France, so there are many of those fragments that inform the story of the estate. The description of what happened to the manor during the war is based on something I read years ago about a house that was plundered. I did do research when I wrote the original stories, and I did more research when I wrote the novel. I found villages near Paris like the one I created near the forest (Benneville) and I read about their history. I wanted my characters to drive the events of the novel, but I did want to remain in the realm of the plausible. And I had a French copy editor fact check for me once I had a draft.
BFB: How did you decide on the order?
Initially, when I was putting a manuscript together, I wanted to balance the voice shifts between the original stories. I wanted to set the more historical stories up against the more contemporary ones, but also have consistency from the start to the end of the book. And I wanted the greater story of the estate to build from each chapter. My partner, Don Lee, who’s also a fiction writer, was my first reader and he helped me figure out the initial order. The opening chapter, “Au Pair” was key—it set the tone of the novel for me and it laid out the history of the estate.
I was lucky to find a wonderful editor at Little, Brown, Jean Garnett. From the start, Jean understood perfectly what I was trying to do, and she and I worked together on the proper flow of the chapters. I recognize that I’m asking the reader to do some work here, piecing together a larger narrative while also living in the moment of each story. Jean and I were aware of that challenge for the reader, and we worked the book out like a puzzle. There’s also a bit of a cheat sheet on my website, a timeline that goes decade by decade from the 1880s to the 2000s, showing who was living on the property.
BFB: The way you slip in the French phrases here and there, translating just enough to make it legible for everyone — it reminds me of what Junot Díaz does in his work with Spanish. Talk a little about that.
When I was first writing the original stories, I moved without thought between English and French. I was living with a Frenchman (we are now divorced) and my daughters speak the language. The narration and the approach to French come from that state of mind. At the same time, there’s a wonder to a second language that never quite goes away. I love those expressions that only exist French, for which there’s no perfect equivalent in English. Although my French characters don’t speak French on the page, they are speaking French in my head. I tried to transmit that in the narration, though syntax and idiom. But it wasn’t a conscious act—it felt natural. Jean suggested that I include more French words in the book, so I did translate some words “back” to French, words that would strike a certain narrative rhythm. Again, I tried to do what felt natural to me. That, to me, is the most important thing. I’m glad you mention Junot Díaz, because he is a master at slipping in Spanish perfectly. I’d love to think that I got close!
Jane will be reading from The Balcony at events all over Baltimore in March and April, including Hopkins, UB, the Pratt, the Ivy Bookshop.
The Thing You Forget When a Marriage Doesn't Last
The author of The Balcony looks back with nostalgia—and a burning question.
By Jane Delury
Photo: MHJ/Getty Images
Recently, when I dropped off my daughters at their father's house, he mentioned that he was cleaning out his basement for a remodeling project. Maybe there was something I would want? He listed objects from our 20 years of life together: the humidifier we once used, boxes of our daughters' clothes, a dollhouse, an office chair. I was standing on the threshold of the suburban Baltimore split-level that used to be ours. I had a view of the living room, where a painting of an oak tree had once hung over the fireplace. Framed Charlie Hebdo covers hung there now. The elephantine couches we bought months before we separated flanked a glass coffee table that he bought later. The original table now stands in my living room, a mile away. If marriage is a division of labor, divorce is a division of things. When I moved out, my ex-husband kept the toaster, and I took the blender. We split the wedding porcelain in half. In the four years since, we've filled in the blanks on our walls, completed our sets, replaced what was missing. No, thanks, I said about the humidifier, no to the dollhouse—no, no, no. He paused. "And there's the green trunk," he said.
I was 20 years old when I met my ex-husband, on my junior year abroad in Grenoble, France. An American friend was dating a French student at the university, and they decided to set us up. The four of us went to a dance party at the Bastille, the fortress that overlooks Grenoble. It turned out that this French boy I'd been set up with didn't dance, and he couldn't stand techno music, but we sat together, talking, when I took a break from bouncing around with the others. He was thin as a whippet, handsome, with long hair and brown eyes, precise in his movements, unlike me, who hurried and stumbled and broke things. After the party, we all went to my friend's apartment. I made chocolate chip cookies with baking soda bought at a pharmacy and a chocolate bar pounded into chips. He ate half the plate. Over the following weeks, we courted each other on hikes up the Bastille, stretching them longer and longer to the next summit. I snuck him into the apartment I rented, past my landlady's peephole—there were no boys allowed—and we stayed up all night talking. His English was tentative, so we spoke only French.
Two months later, we were living together in his one-room studio with a corner kitchen and a bed he'd built on stilts, a desk and chair tucked underneath. We had to learn right away to bridge our differences, and of these there were many. He'd been raised in a low-income banlieue by unmarried, atheist, activist parents. I'd been raised in the Sacramento suburbs by Irish Catholics—my mother is a former nun. He studied computer science and didn't like reading. I studied literature and spent half my time in imaginary worlds. He loved meat. I was a vegetarian. He had a barbed sense of humor, and I could be sensitive. I hummed with anxiety; he flowed with calm.
Looking back, I find it amazing how quickly we learned to coexist. We'd cook a pan of mushrooms and another pan of pork lardons to mix into our separate plates of ravioles with cream. While he coded on his computer, I read a novel. When we visited the Grande Chartreuse monastery, I went to the museum while he walked the trails outside. He softened his humor, and I took his jokes less seriously. Of course, we drove each other crazy at times, him with his pickiness, and me with my messiness. But it worked. And we had fun together. Weekends, we hiked the peaks that ringed Grenoble, like the Dent de Crolles, a molar-shaped mountain. We lay in the grass, eating hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise. We learned to cross-country ski, went on weekend trips to visit his family and to Provence. He would drive and I would read, my feet on the dash of his tiny Supercinq car.
All relationships are an attempt to understand another person, and when that other person speaks another language and comes from another culture, the challenge increases. Our differences were inevitable and obvious and, in many ways, defined us. The friction kept things alive and interesting, or at least that's how I thought of it. We were long distance for almost two years while I finished my degree in California. We saw each other every few months, spent fortunes on phone calls, exchanged long letters in French. Then I went back to Grenoble. I enrolled in a master's program at the university and taught English while he worked on his PhD. We moved to an 18th-century building with long, cloudy windows and a dark staircase that smelled like a church. His handiness and practicality transformed our apartment. We drove to his grandparents' house in the country and came back with a truckload of furniture that he sanded and refinished: a beautiful old oak bed; a sideboard made new with white porcelain knobs; a table and chairs, lopsided with age, that he righted again. At the Sunday market, we bought bolts of colorful cotton that he sewed into curtains, a lampshade, a canopy for our bed.
In 1998, we got married. At our small wedding in Sacramento, the ceremony alternated between English and French. After, I danced le rock 'n' roll with my mother-in-law. My brother-in-law developed a passion for Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and my father-in-law became a near expert on the diversion of rivers in California. That fall, I applied to graduate programs in creative writing. When I was accepted at Johns Hopkins, we packed up our apartment on the rue Gabriel Péri and headed to Baltimore. We assumed that we would go back to France someday. We would hopscotch the two countries. We would have children. We would find a house that he could remodel. We would spend the rest of our lives together. Some of these things came true.
Even if I felt that I could talk about why my marriage ended, I wouldn't know what to say. Maybe we were too young when we met. Maybe that friction we cultivated became a liability. Maybe I spent too much time reading and he spent too much time coding. Maybe we grew into our differences. Although the decision felt unavoidable at the time, and I see no other possible outcome from here, I've spent these past four years managing grief. Memories stab me out of nowhere. The Sunday mornings in our house in Baltimore with him making crepes for the children while I waited for the coffee to brew. Standing in a warehouse, choosing the right gray for the tile he'd lay in the kitchen. Those summer vacations in France, where we stayed with his family and rented houses in Brittany and the Alps. That summit we climbed with our elder daughter on his back, pointing out marmots in the rocks. The swarm of bats that came down on his father and me as we biked Belle Isle at sunset. His grandfather feeding our younger daughter a strawberry in his garden.
Now, I stood on the threshold of my ex-husband's house and faced the question of the green trunk. We'd shipped it from Grenoble when we moved to Baltimore, filled with photographs, old passports, our letters from our two years apart, other belongings that I didn't remember. We'd never opened it since. Neither of us had mentioned it when I moved out. The last time the trunk had been open was in our apartment in Grenoble. Something filled me suddenly, something stronger than grief, more like panic. "I can just take it," I said. "I have room in my attic." I thought he would help me load the trunk into my car. I'd get someone to help me carry it into my house, up the stairs, to the attic. It could remain closed. But he shook his head. There were things in the trunk, he said, that he would want too. Of course there were. Our futures are separate; our past is the same. "Okay," I said, the panic easing. How do people do this? I guess that some morning when our daughters are at school, we'll meet at his house. We'll carry the trunk out of the basement. We'll kneel on either side, open the lid, see what's in there and try to divide our past.
The Myth of the Nice GirlJane Delury is the author of the new novel The Balcony, published by Little, Brown and Company.
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/jane-delury-the-thing-you-forget-when-a-marriage-doesnt-last/all#ixzz5Fo0XfuCe
QUOTED: "The prose is tight and each stories are told well; this is a satisfying examination."
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Print Marked Items
The Balcony
Publishers Weekly.
265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Balcony
Jane Delury. Little, Brown, $26 (256p) ISBN 9780-316-55466-4
Delury's melancholy debut takes place between 1890 and 2009 and revolves around a manor house and
servant's cottage in Benneville, a fictional French village. An American au pair takes care of young Elodie
as Olga, the girl's smothering mother and a concentration camp survivor, packs up the family to move to the
United States; only later does the au pair learn of the child's leukemia. During WWII, after Olga had been
sent to the camp, a woman looted the manor house to feed her daughter, Charlotte, more than bread and
butter. Years later, Charlotte's husband suffers from cancer treatments and can keep down nothing but toast
and tea. Another elderly woman's husband has a debilitating stroke that transforms him into an
unrecognizable version of himself. Careful readers will note the connective tissue between Olga and
Charlotte, but occasionally the author struggles in creating a link. The prose is tight and each stories are told
well; this is a satisfying examination of the various and irrevocable ways lives intersect. Agent: Samantha
Shea, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Balcony." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 34. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38052280.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888865
QUOTED: "With immense storytelling gifts and spare but luminous prose, she is one of the few writers whose debut will have readers begging for a second novel."
"a smart, elegantly written story."
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THE BALCONY
Karen Ann Cullotta
BookPage.
(Apr. 2018): p21+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE BALCONY
By Jane Delury
Little, Brown $26, 256 pages ISBN 9780316554671 Audio, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
With the exceedingly rare exception of literary genius, a first novel from even the most gifted short story
writer is a risky effort, and not always successful. This is why Jane Delury is deserving of recognition: With
immense storytelling gifts and spare but luminous prose, she is one of the few writers whose debut will
have readers begging for a second novel.
The Balcony unfolds in 10 nonchronological chapters--each of which could be a perfect short story--that
introduce a cast of characters spanning several generations from 1890 to 2009. From great loves and
fleeting lust to hunger and genocide, each character's story is connected to a once lavish estate (including a
servants' cottage, a manor and, of course, a balcony) in the French countryside. Families appear, then
reappear in later chapters: "A Place in the Country" introduces the Havres, whose descendants and lasting
heartbreak thread throughout several other sections. The actions of a World War II resistance hero affect the
lives of his grandsons, whose own children continue to bear the weight of choices made before them.
The Balcony beckons readers to abandon preconceptions about generational legacies, motherhood and the
ideal, pastoral French village. Benneville, the fictional setting of Delury's novel, was nearly destroyed by
bombs during World War II and, a generation later, is a hardscrabble, industrial exurb of Paris in the midst
of gentrification. As Delury describes, it's far from charming: "This was not exactly the country--Benneville
had grown since Jacques was a boy, moving closer to Paris on a wave of concrete."
The final chapter of The Balcony is written in a dramatically different freeform style, and some readers will
wish for a more satisfying ending without Delury's sudden embrace of a quirky, unconventional structure.
However, this is a small concern, and readers are more likely to lament that the novel has come to a close,
leaving them longing for more.
Delury is sure to win the hearts of all those who appreciate a smart, elegantly written story.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Cullotta, Karen Ann. "THE BALCONY." BookPage, Apr. 2018, p. 21+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532528585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=31d21b4d.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532528585
QUOTED: "satisfying puzzle of a debut novel."
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The Balcony
Margaret Quamme
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Balcony. By Jane Delury. Mar. 2018. 256p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316554671).
Delury's satisfying puzzle of a debut novel hops back and forth in time through the lives, over the past
century, of the residents of a manor and its adjoining cottage near what has become by modern day a seedy
suburb of Paris. Each chapter of the novel could be a full-fledged short story on its own; together, they
reveal a pattern that only completes itself with the final one. Several of the secrets of the past, including a
mysterious death in a pond and the suicide of a courtesan, are hinted at in the first chapter, in which a young
American nannies the daughter of a professor and his wife. Minor characters in one story become major
players in another, and the reader often learns with a pleased shock what has happened in the life of a
character who seemed to have been forgotten. Without overdoing it, Delury imparts a fairy-tale feel to the
forest surrounding the central buildings and the dark pond at their outskirts.--Margaret Quamme
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Quamme, Margaret. "The Balcony." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=95c5c90c.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771798
QUOTED: "While the author affectingly composes her characters' individual psychologies in slow dabs of detail, the manor's physicality supplies permanence."
"strikingly deft and nuanced"
"a writer to watch."
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Delury, Jane: THE BALCONY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Delury, Jane THE BALCONY Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 27 ISBN: 978-0-316-55467-1
In an assured debut, a delicate fretwork of lives, relationships, and secrets is built up over the course of a
century--and linked by a manor in an ugly French village.
Opening in 1992 with Brigitte, an American hired to work as an au pair in Benneville, a community outside
Paris, this unusual novel in stories introduces a place--the LAaAaAeA@ger country estate--which will act
as t connective tissue to 10 overlapping narratives. This "bourgeois manoir with a faAaAaAeAoade of
buttery limestone that stretched three stories in slate turrets and gables" has weathered architectural looting,
wars, suicide, and sacrifice and has been home to entrepreneurs and deserters as well as the people who
worked for them. Brigitte finds herself attracted to current owner Hugo, a damaged academic, but this is just
one single--if significant--moment in a woman's search for a life trajectory that fits. An intriguing mix of
relationships--flawed men, unsettled women, struggling parents and partners--follows, arranged in
nonchronological order, with characters recurring, often moving from a glancing reference to center stage.
In "A Place in the Country" we meet the Havre family, whose generations, and scars, crop up in several
chapters. Paterfamilias Henri, the village schoolmaster and a hero of the World War II Resistance, is as cold
and bullying to his grandsons, Alexis and Emmanuel, as he was to his schizophrenic son, Guy. Alexis,
whose adult choices are shaped by a childhood encounter with his uncle Guy, reappears in "Half Life," and
Emmanuel's daughter, AdAaAaAeA?le, appears in both "Tintin in t Antilles," an insightful snapshot of
aging, and the weaker "Ants." While the author affectingly composes her characters' individual
psychologies in slow dabs of detail, the manor's physicality supplies permanence, its balcony a witness to
two of the darkest episodes, and the surrounding forest a penumbra of mystery and continuity.
Strikingly deft and nuanced; a writer to watch.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Delury, Jane: THE BALCONY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522643009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cb3e716.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522643009
QUOTED: "The Balcony” is an American’s love letter to France — a bit prickly ... and a compelling saga spanning France’s past century, a period in which the manor, ravaged by wars and time, survives as a silent witness.
Review: ‘The Balcony’ is riveting debut fiction
By The Associated Press
March 26, 2018 9:39 am
This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows "The Balcony," by Jane Delury. (Little, Brown and Company via AP)
“The Balcony” (Little, Brown and Co.), by Jane Delury
A limestone manor, surrounded by fields and forests not far from Paris, is the main setting for “The Balcony,” a subtly crafted and richly rewarding debut book of fiction by Jane Delury.
With a servants’ cottage tucked nearby, the once-grand estate emerges as a central presence in the narrative, looming large in the passions and destinies of a changing cast of characters that own it or visit it over a century.
Delury’s book unfolds in 10 separate stories, each with its own title. While they work as compact, remarkable tales in themselves, they connect through characters and events — and the manor and its environs — to create a riveting free-form novel.
This narrative structure — stand-alone stories woven around a central figure — is reminiscent of “Olive Kitteridge,” Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of stories built around the title character. It is no stretch to mention Delury and Strout in the same sentence: Delury’s debut book, with wise observations, intriguing twists and indelibly drawn characters, is filled with reading pleasures.
A possible flaw is Delury’s change of stylistic gears in the final story, “Between.” It echoes themes of the book’s first, “Au Pair,” with a young married woman finding a lover on the side, but it is told in a stilted framework that may be confusing and jarring to the reader.
The other stories, related in spare but evocative prose, offer fresh looks at human appetites — sex, love, money, art, culture — while exploring the ups and downs of childhood, family, friendship and aging, mostly in France but with American and other foreign touches flecking the narrative.
One story, “Ants,” is a gentle and superb beach drama framing a young teen girl’s coming-of-age experience. Another, “The Pond,” is a gripping, very different coming-of-age story about two young brothers, a secret and courage.
“The Balcony” is an American’s love letter to France — a bit prickly, for sure, and a compelling saga spanning France’s past century, a period in which the manor, ravaged by wars and time, survives as a silent witness.