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The Year Is '42: A Novel by Nella Bielski

Vintage International, 2006 $12.95

When remembering times of war, there is often a tendency to fixate on the big losses—the vast numbers of dead soldiers, the devastated cities…that, or the tendency to cling to the literary memoirs of actual lives, such as those of Anne Frank or Eli Wiesel. Nella Bielski has done neither in her newly translated The Year is ’42, instead constructing a work of fiction; a novel deeply entrenched not in the overwhelming horrors or fools-glory of war, but fitted with the moments and small triumphs that comprise the everyday lives of two separate and compellingly realistic characters, ordinary in every way save for the fact that their countries are at war.

Bielski’s novel is not a love story in any conventional sense of the word, although throughout the novel’s full 207 pages characters do in fact fall in and out of romance. It is a story full of affection—affection for the characters’ families, affection for the first pristine and then war-ravaged countryside in Germany and Russia, and first and foremost affection for Paris, the City of Light, still breathtaking and romantic while under the harsh glare of Nazi occupation. The beauty and mournful enigma that is Paris during wartime is remarkably well drawn in the novel, perhaps due to the fact that Bielski is a Frenchwoman herself, or perhaps simply because of her masterful command of descriptive language.

It is also a story that revels in eloquently conceived restraint, careful, melancholic prose and precise details. A German army officer, loyal in the first war but in anger with the Nazi regime and a stunning, kind Russian pediatrician are the focus of the novel. Bielski writes their stories separately, juxtaposing the different kind of resentment each person feels for their government during the war. Their lives finally collide near the conclusion, an event that, in the end, is irrelevant. Bielski has shown in this powerful, subtle novel that it’s not the extraordinary that defines us; but instead the minute, day-to-day occurrences and random circumstances that comprise what becomes our life.