Just Because: 'The Paris Wife'

OK, I'll admit up front that I haven't read this book, or, actually, even heard of it. But it's taken over the No. 1 spot on my list, thanks to the Kindle ad on the back of a magazine that shows the first few lines of the prologue. They are really very good, so, intrigued, I looked up some reviews, which were also really very good (except Janet Maslin's in the New York Times). The Paris Wife is the story of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. It's by Paula McLain.

PROLOGUE

Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris. Part of it was the war. The world had ended once already and could again at any moment. The war had come and changed us by happening when everyone said it couldn't. No one knew how many had died, but when you heard the numbers—nine million or fourteen million—you thought, Impossible. Paris was full of ghosts and the walking wounded. Many came back to Rouen or Oak Park, Illinois, shot through and carrying little pieces of what they'd seen behind their kneecaps, full of an emptiness they could never dislodge. They'd carried bodies on stretchers, stepping over other bodies to do it; they'd been on stretchers themselves, on slow-moving trains full of flies
and the floating voice of someone saying he wanted to be remembered to his girl back home.
   There was no back home anymore, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris, too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead anymore.