The Mistress

By Philippe Tapon

Book Overview

"A fine wicked book . . . full of life's guiltier pleasures . . . altogether enjoyable."-The New York Times Book ReviewSet in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, The Mistress is an enthralling... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525944613
• ISBN13: 9780525944614
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.2" x 0.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Petite epic...exquisite!

A tiny tour de force; should be made into a film noir, for that is what it reminds one of - it's white and black, steel, gunmetal grey and tarnished gold, of course. I don't want to spill the beans, but I found the story tantalizing. I was shocked when it was over - by the ending as well as the fact that I was so quickly epelled from this horrible little world I'd come to relish.Read it for history, read it for fun. I know this sounds needy and American (amazing that the author is, in fact, American), but here goes: Mr. Tappon, may we have a sequel? I want to know what happens to the Mistress.

Deeply engaging, cleverly crafted novel.

Simone is the lover of Dr. Emile Bastien who practices medicine on the rue de Maubeuge. A family man, Dr. Bastien treats Parisians and their German occupiers alike. Simone knows things about Emile's son and daughter (and about the wife who has hidden herself away on a French country estate) that would prove very dangerous if known by the Germans. Simone doesn't know everything though, and when she feels wronged, retaliates by hatching a plan of her own involving a guilt-ridden SS officer, a suspicious death, and a chilling interrogation. Set in a war time atmosphere of fear and paranoia, The Mistress is a deeply engaging, cleverly crafted novel by master storyteller Philippe Tapon.

WUNDERBAR

How odd the last reviewer's comments are! The characters in this short novel are well-rounded, totally believable, totally French . . . The story is gripping, original, diabolical, and moves swiftly forward. It's so realistic in a gritty hallucinatory way--that the only soft spot in the story for me was Simone's dream sequence (pages 140-45), which I thought was distracting. "Hokey Nazi flic," reader from Rhode Island? Couldn't disagree more! The novel reads like an art film in your head. I don't think it would translate as well on the silver screen.

Required reading for new millenium

In less than 200 pages, Tapon articulates a blueprint for surviving social insanity. The cast is a bowl of archetypes and personalities, all in themselves commonplace, dissolved in ideological poison and bled together into inhuman shapes. As they mingle, pollute, acquire each other's diseases and sink together, a new type of hero - a hero that does not seem to fit any existing notion of hero, but that alone remains uncontaminated - emerges. This hero is The Mistress.When the norms of a society are insane, only a particular type of deviant can maintain sanity. That appears to be the message as the elegant and noble Simone, of unchallenged composure and uncompromising resolve, becomes a live-in mistress and secretary of a married French doctor. As people around her crumple like flies into various permutations of the collective madness, she alone keeps her humanity and her head. She is of course vilified and despised, as are all women in this position; but in the end it is she that carries the high moral ground, as well as the greatest prize.Other personages. A Nazi officer who, having spent much of his adult life killing and torturing people, is now looking for love and understanding before his inevitable demise. An eminent surgeon who commits some of the most creative crimes in modern literature, including placing inside the gut of the aforementioned Nazi officer a piece of French cheese. A corrupt priest who sees catechism as a game of outfoxing the child, playing with his mind from various angles, then passing the trickery as conversion and going on to save other souls. A garish old landlady who takes her metaphorical revenge on youth and sophistication by whipping her debutante daughter on the face with a switch. A boy whose perceptiveness forbids him from going along with Catholic faith or with his father's social pretensions; who blooms too early and is crushed. French resistance soldiers, crowds, police executing suspected collaborators without trial, then proclaiming themselves founders of a new democratic republic.And, the only noble - and, in the end, best-preserved - individual among all of these: The Mistress, the outcast, who rejected the social mindset from the beginning and did not stand to lose much when it went bad.This novel is indispensable as a textbook on how one can stand up to a bully - not merely an individual bully who gets his way through physical and psychological brutality, but the great, self-justified bully that is the society whose normative, ideological and economic structures are based in the same. Moral coercion, emotional bribery, religious hypocrisy, mob rule, big lies, ideologies intended to rob people of their self-confidence and independence - all these are referenced in this novel and given an antidote. As America progressively abandons ideals by which it once inspired the world - as the Western civilization turns into a corporate-religious complex that seeks nothing les

Morbid tale filled with back-stabbing characters

If you ever like to read books where you all the characters are evil or at least unlikable, then you'll love this book. I enjoyed the darkness of the setting and the back-stabbing characters that filled the book.I've also read Philippe Tapon's first novel, "A Parisian From Kansas." Although it was not reviewed by the NY Times, I enjoyed his first novel more than "The Mistress." (I appreciate the unconventional style of his first novel; this one is more traditional.)I felt the first 2/3 of "The Mistress" was the best, and then the last 1/3 is not as strong. Nevertheless, this entertaining (and somehat depressing) novel is great for those who want to step away from the Hollywood happy stories that are so common and boring. You may enjoy watching this nest of vipers, spiral down into deeper and deeper treachery.I give it a solid 4 stars, one less than Tapon's first novel.