Untrue Confessions

Review of The Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières:


"Two unreliable narrators perform a discordant but appealing duet in A Partisan's Daughter, a new short novel by Louis de Bernières, author of Birds Without Wings. One of them, Roza, a native of the former Yugoslavia, has long been missing; the other, Chris, a mopey old Englishman, reciting his story 30 years after the fact, comes under the heading of 'not dead yet.' He's had one great adventure in his life, and he tells the reader about it in the mopiest of tones. Life has more than passed him by. You might say that life has lapped him many times in the boring marathon of existence. But yes, just once, for a limited time, he fell under the thrall of a modern Scheherazade who (to quote the Beatles) 'filled his head with notions, seemingly."'The storyteller was Roza, and as he listened to her, his excruciatingly dull life was redeemed by the enchantment of narrative -- and the thought of future sex."