Share for friends:

Read The Way I Found Her (1999)

The Way I Found Her (1999)

Online Book

Author
Genre
Rating
3.55 of 5 Votes: 1
Your rating
ISBN
0671035703 (ISBN13: 9780671035709)
Language
English
Publisher
washington square press

The Way I Found Her (1999) - Plot & Excerpts

This one left me in tears. Literally. The last 75 pages just got to me. The plot is fairly simple, Lewis Little, 13, spends the summer in Paris with his mother, who is translating the latest medieval romance novel from Valentina Gavril as she writes it. The summer is hot and Lewis is becoming a teenager with a giant crush on Valentina. He reads, takes walks with Valentina's dog Sergueï. And one day, Valentina vanishes. No one can find her. No ransom demand. Nothing. Lewis decides he will find her. Whatever the cost. Told from the POV of this young man discovering hormones and the world, your heart breaks as you turn the pages one by one and follow him on his quest. This was the first novel I read of Rose Tremain. It's not the last one.

I was drawn to this book when I heard it was about a English boy, Lewis Little, who goes to France with his mother, a translator, and becomes interested in the book Le Grand Meaulnes, which is one of my favorite French novels. However, the parts about Lewis's fascination with Le Grand Meaulnes are quick and disappointing, and the plot deteriorates into Lewis's larger, hormonal fascination with Valentine, a neighbor, who mysteriously disappears about halfway through the book. The plot deteriorates into a dark story about the disappearance and culminates into inappropriate sexuality. Very disappointing, in my opinion. Didn't care for it.

What do You think about The Way I Found Her (1999)?

A precocious 13-year-old boy narrates this story, set in and evocative of Paris. It’s a fabric of exotic and interesting characters and ideas, involving a Russian woman writer of medieval romance novels--written in French--that the boy's mother is translating into English. There is some Existentialism, a suspicion of plagiarism, and a kidnapping. Of course the boy is obsessed with the woman writer(a standard middle-aged woman author fantasy?). Some of it borders on implausible, though it's mostly entertaining. Absorbing in its first half, to my taste it took way too many pages to get to where it was going.
—Martin

Set in Paris, it is a beautiful kind of reverse Lolita tale of a young boy falling in love with an older woman. He spends his summer in an attic of a gorgeous apartment in Paris, learning the language by reading Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment in French, and walking around the city on his own as his mother translates books for their host, Valentina. Dramatic, touching, and full of beautiful sorrow, this is a book to remember. Like the literary equivalent to 'Some Velvet Morning' by Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood.
—Kym

I loved the writing and the theme of early adolescent lust for an older woman, coupled with alienation from one's parents. Of course, I'd like to think that, when I was just about to turn 14, I had Lewis Little's preternaturally adult responses to the grown-up world of sex, work, duplicity, and depravity. Needless to say, I didn't have his courage, but what straight 14-year-old boy doesn't have fantasies of saving an older, voluptuous damsel in distress [while simultaneously discovering his own inner existentialist as well]?
—Lawrence A

Write Review

(Review will shown on site after approval)

Read books by author Rose Tremain

Read books in category Fiction