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Summary
Summary
Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young Scottish widow and a French engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.
In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Ã%mile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris, France--a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear. Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is forced to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges. Ã%mile is expected to take on the bourgeois stability of his family's business and choose a suitable wife. As the Eiffel Tower rises, a marvel of steel and air and light, the subject of extreme controversy and a symbol of the future, Cait and Ã%mile must decide what their love is worth.
Seamlessly weaving historical detail and vivid invention, Beatrice Colin evokes the revolutionary time in which Cait and Ã%mile live--one of corsets and secret trysts, duels and Bohemian independence, strict tradition and Impressionist experimentation. To Capture What We Cannot Keep , stylish, provocative, and shimmering, raises probing questions about a woman's place in that world, the overarching reach of class distinctions, and the sacrifices love requires of us all.
Author Notes
Beatrice Colin is a novelist based in Glasgow. The Glimmer Palace (2008), a novel set in Berlin in the early 20th century, was translated into eight languages, was a Richard and Judy pick, and was short-listed for several major awards. Colin also writes radio plays and adaptations for BBC Radio 4.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
A French engineer working on the construction of the Eiffel Tower meets a Glaswegian widow, and their romance is as risky as the tower project itself.mile Nouguier is second-in-command to Gustave Eiffel, designing the tower that will mark the centennial of the French Revolution at the Worlds Fair of 1889. In 1886, construction of La Tour is just commencing. As her only surviving son, mile has incurred his aging mothers disapproval for choosing engineering over active management of the family glass factory. During a tour of the construction site by balloon, mile meets Caitriona Wallace, 31, a widow who has accompanied, as chaperone, two Scottish young adults, Alice and Jamie, the cosseted niece and nephew of a wealthy, childless Glasgow civil engineer. Caits husband was killed in a bridge collapse, but the match would have been doomed by an incompatibility between the couple which Colin handles so discreetly that readers can only guess at its nature until the very end. Now, Caits only options are positions such as this one or remarriage, but so far only one rich but repulsive suitor has presented himself. The attraction between mile and Cait is instant but it takes several chapters of hesitation as each gradually sheds his or her own nationalitys version of Victorian reticence. miles mother is dying and has been urging him to marry soon and produce grandchildren before it's too late, but he knows she will never accept Cait, a foreigner. Meanwhile, his ex-mistress Gabrielle has embroiled herself with Alice and Jamie, abetting the Scottish innocents forays into the Parisian demimonde. Cait, oblivious to the full extent of her charges indiscretions, dreads confessing what she does suspect to her employer, since it will necessitate a return to Glasgow and her own bleak future. Colin has a sure hand with the atmospheres of both cities and with the mores and dress of the period, and she manages to continually raise the stakes for her characters without ever resorting to melodrama. A novel of soaring ambitions, public and private. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
They meet while aloft in a hot air balloon over Paris in 1887. Caitriona Wallace is an impoverished Glaswegian widow acting as chaperone to the wealthy Arrol siblings as they travel Europe on their Grand Tour. One of Gustave Eiffel's engineers, Émile Nouguier, needs to marry among his class to please his mother and bolster the family finances. Although Alice Arrol is a naive teenager, she's a potential match for Émile, but he finds himself more intrigued by Cait. However, in returning his affections, Cait would be choosing passion over honor. Their beautifully restrained love story, told in a refreshingly unhurried manner and grounded in the era's social constraints, gains complexity as Alice and her brother, Jamie, rebel against their expected roles. Nouguier is a historical figure, and readers get a close-up perspective on the Eiffel Tower's step-by-step construction. Drawn with care and suffused with stylish ambience, Colin's (The Glimmer Palace, 2008) Paris is a city of painters, eccentric aristocrats, desperate prostitutes, secret lovers, and the magnificent artistic vision taking shape high above them. Devotees of the Belle Époque should relish every word.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Love swoops into the wicker gondola of a hot-air balloon over late-19th-century Paris, where the Eiffel Tower is about to take shape. Suspended there, vertiginous, a young Scottish widow named Caitriona Wallace locks eyes with a fictionalized version of Émile Nouguier, one of the two engineer-architects who had the idea of erecting a 300-meter iron tower on the Champ de Mars as the focal point of the 1889 Universal Exposition. (Although Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin oversaw the tower's construction, it was their boss, Gustave Eiffel, who purchased the patent and gained the fame.) In the novel, when the future lovers first see each other, Cait's heart accelerates with "a rapid knocking against a solid wall of whalebone and wool." Here's a corset destined for unlacing! Air and iron - desire and whalebone stays - govern the story, whose most intriguing moments don't occur between the standard-issue characters: the constrained lovers; the spoiled rich kids Cait is chaperoning on their world tour; Émile's jealous, wicked demimondaine mistress; the amoral aristocrat who seduces and discards virgins; and so on. The real drama plays out around the much-maligned tower-inprogress - its contemporaries thought it a "monstrosity" - on the smelly, messy, muddy construction site. As it slowly rises amid "the rubble and the wagon tracks," its two and a half million rivets must be perfectly aligned to hold together this fabulous structure whose "strength is in its voids." It is "a building without a skin."
Library Journal Review
To be in Paris to witness the construction of the Eiffel Tower is a magnificent occasion: to have a hand, however small, in its building, even better. Jamie Arrol, the nephew of a successful Scottish engineer, talks himself into an apprenticeship. His sister, Alice, and their chaperone, Caitriona Wallace, travel with him, for it is just possible that -Alice might find an acceptable husband in the City of Light. And what of Cait, a widow only too happy to escape penury and the gloom of Scotland for a while? It is she who finds something fleetingly beautiful, a love that in the end must be left behind. Hauntingly melancholic in places, Colin's (The Glimmer Palace) story moves like wisps of fog through Parisian streets, capturing moments of both gaiety and tragedy. VERDICT This exquisitely written, shadowy historical novel will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including fans of the Belle Époque. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16.]-Pamela O'Sullivan, Coll. at Brockport Lib., SUNY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
