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    Paris, 7 A.M.
    Paris, 7 A.M.
    Paris, 7 A.M.
    Audiobook9 hours

    Paris, 7 A.M.

    Written by Liza Wieland

    Narrated by Madeleine Maby

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “A marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) that reimagines three life-changing weeks poet Elizabeth Bishop spent in Paris amidst the imminent threat of World War II.

    June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband and a quiet life. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Lights, the larger threats of fascism and occupation are looming. There, they meet a community of upper-crust expatriates who not only bring them along on a life-changing adventure, but also into an underground world of rebellion that will quietly alter the course of Elizabeth’s life forever.

    Sweeping and stirring, Paris, 7 A.M. imagines 1937—the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals—didn’t fully chronicle—in vivid detail and brings us from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish “orphans” and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face.

    Both poignant and captivating, Paris, 7 A.M. is an “achingly introspective marvel of lost innocence” (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America’s most celebrated female poets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJun 11, 2019
    ISBN9781508283744
    Author

    Liza Wieland

    Liza Wieland is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet who has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the 2017 winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her novel A Watch of Nightingales won the 2008 Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and her most recent novel, Land of Enchantment, was a longlist finalist for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize. She lives near Oriental, North Carolina, and teaches at East Carolina University.

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    Reviews for Paris, 7 A.M.

    3.5/5

    22 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      In 1937, two years after graduating from Vassar, Elizabeth Bishop went with some college friends to France. During this time, there was a three week stretch in time where she did not write in her life-long journal. Wieland has taken a look back and imagined what might have happened in that time. She and her friends move around and end up in Paris. Bishop tries to write. An artist friend has a tragic accident. She meets other artists and writers, including Natalie Barney. She falls for a woman who is not available to her. An older woman takes her on as a replacement for her deceased daughter- and as an aide in saving Jews from the invading Nazis. Even though I realize this is a well written book, it really didn’t draw me in. It’s written in the third person present tense, which I found a bit off putting. Besides that, I was never pulled into the story, and never took to any of the characters. Wieland’s writing has a dreamy quality, like watching the story through a veil of chiffon. I can only give it three stars.
    • 4/5
      After graduating from Vassar, American poet Elizabeth Bishop went to France with two college friends. In Paris, 7 a.m. author Liza Wieland imagines what might have happened to Bishop as a young woman in Paris in 1937. In the novel, Bishop forms relationships of various kinds with a young German woman who is in Paris because Berlin is no longer safe for her and an older woman who lost her own daughter some years earlier. There's a lot going on in this novel, from Nazis, to lesbians, to an amputated hand, to rescuing babies, to hanging out with everyone from Sylvia Beach to Marianne Moore. Yet it never feels over-packed. Wieland's writing is almost dreamy and stays focused on how Bishop perceives what's happening around her, rather than what is actually happening, which puts some of the events at a sort of remove, even as they're happening, while intensifying others. There is a sense of slowly rising danger in this novel, not for Bishop and her American friends, who return to the US safely, although not without having been changed, but for the Europeans they encounter. Not all the Germans in France are Nazis, some are Germans who have found Germany unsafe for a variety of reasons. And while the heart of the story centers on secretly moving Jewish babies into the safety of a Catholic convent in Paris, the reader remains aware of what tenuous protection that will prove to be. There are a number of novels out there imagining the details of the lives of famous literary and historical personages and a disproportionate number of them take place in Paris. But Paris, 7 a.m. is different enough and written so well as to be well worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Vassar, 1930, the reader is introduced to the characters- you begin to see the discordance, what is in balance and what is unknowable. The book was a confusion for me - you might think that was a typo or the wrong word, but it is a perfect description for me.I am not sure what the author hoped the reader would come away with. Surely a story of trying to save children doomed by their religious background. Surely a story about several women who travel after college on an adventure of sorts. Surely a story of women’s relationships with each other. Unfortunately the retelling was not very interesting. A background for one of the most important poets of the last century but lacking in clear direction.There is much loneliness, solitude, artistic passion and single-mindedness within the pages and yet somehow it wasn’t enough to carry the story. Well written but underdeveloped and disappointing.Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a copy.
    • 5/5
      SerendipityOn Monday, April 15, Notre-Dame was in flames.A horrified world watched, joined in tears.***On Tuesday, April 16, during my husband's surgery,I was in a waiting room reading Liz Wieland's Paris, 7 A.M.And I read, "The crazy quilt of languages around Notre-Dame,"and I read, "The being that will appear will emerge from the guest bedroomwill be hideous, a sort of gargoylecome down off the sheer facade of Notre-Dame,"and I read, "In an hour, it's lighting a candle in Notre-Dame,"and I read, "the great squatting hulk of Notre-Dame,"while the television in the waiting room airedphotographs and videos of the "great squatting hulk",the gleam of the cross rising out of the ashes like a beacon.I have never seen Notre-Dame or Paris or France.I have not had the luck to have been a traveler.No memories rushed forward, just sorrow for what was lost.But the book brought Paris alive for me,albeit a Paris from long before my birth,a Paris just before the war, with intimations of warquivering in the atmosphere.The NovelGeography In 1937, the young poet Elizabeth Bishop and two Vassar friendstraveled to Paris.For three weeks, Elizabeth did not write in her journal.Liz Wieland wondered about that silence and imagined Bishop's life over those missing weeks, the mysteries she held close and never revealed.Elizabeth and her friends, full of youthful optimismin spite of the disorder on the continent.Louise of the blue eyes.Anaphora. Margaret's horrid accident.And the people they meet,Sigrid who married for safety,and the Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrunwho sees in Elizabeth her deceased daughter who sees in Elizabeth a co-conspirator.Paris 7 A.M. reflects Bishop's poetic voice, steals her imageryand the titles of her books of poetry, Easter eggsleft to find in the days before Easter when I was reading.So many hidden in the paragraphs beyond my ken."And then the clocks speak," I read.The clocks, the time, the water, sailing, the drinking, the women, the traveling, and the traveling."Why do you travel?" I read. Questions of Travel.And she answers, "To be free." "To see beauty."It was coming, people sensed, knewthe world would shift again, war inevitable."The world is getting so ugly," I read."The swastika, a headless spider," I read.The Jewish babies lovingly handed overby desperate loving mothersto traveling into stranger's armsto travel into another mother's arms.Elizabeth's mother could not motherElizabeth would never become a motherElizabeth was a midwife in the babies rebirth.ElsewhereBack to the known, Wieland's penflirts across the yearstouching like a butterfly on a flowerupon Bishop's travels.Florida. Brazil. America.Letters from Marianne Moore, Sigrid, Louise.Sailing with 'Cal' Lowell.A summation of a life's losses.And I read, "Does everybody live such divided lives, Elizabeth wonders: one self moving about the world like all the other million selves, and another that's stuck somewhere behind?"I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.