{"id":7833,"date":"2019-03-19T07:28:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T11:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7833"},"modified":"2019-03-19T07:37:36","modified_gmt":"2019-03-19T11:37:36","slug":"the-long-road-from-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7833","title":{"rendered":"****The Long Road from Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Kirby Williams \u2013 A book with Paris in the title two weeks\nin a row? It\u2019s enough to make you stock up on croissants. While the title of\nthis one echoes Dov Alfon\u2019s contemporary crime thriller, A Long Night in Paris<\/a><\/em>,\nthe similarity ends there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is Kirby Williams\u2019s second thriller featuring New Orleans jazz prodigy Urby Brown, an expat living in Paris as the dark clouds of Naziism spread over Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Williams, an expat himself, effectively conveys his love of the city where he has lived and worked for many decades in real life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book begins with Brown\u2019s early years in New Orleans as a\nwhite-skinned octoroon, son of a woman named Josephine Dubois and a white\nFrenchman who skedaddled back to France after impregnating her. In 1895,\nJosephine left her newborn in a Moses basket on the doorstep of Saint Vincent\u2019s\nColored Waifs\u2019 Home. She later pleaded with Father Gohegan, the priest in\ncharge of the Waifs\u2019 Home, to contact the baby\u2019s father who she claimed was a\nCount. The priest refused, and Josephine committed suicide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teenager, Brown played his clarinet at Madame Lala\u2019s\nMahogany House (flaunting both Louisiana law and Father Gohegan\u2019s rules), an\ninfamous bordello that brought together top jazz players. These connections\nwere renewed once he moved to Paris, joining the many musicians escaping U.S.\nJim Crow laws. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with his mentor and fellow clarinetist Stanley\nBontemps and his live-in girlfriend, Hannah Korngold, Brown lives in Paris in\nrelatively peace and prosperity into the 1930s. Hannah helps Brown run his\nnightclub, but she is an American Jew whose future under the Nazis will be just\nas precarious as his own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Williams writes Brown\u2019s first-person story with an emphasis\non what happens, not why or how. He doesn\u2019t engage in lengthy descriptions of\npeople, places or events and will even slide past significant dramatic\nopportunities. This spareness is both bothersome and energizing\u2014bothersome\nbecause you don\u2019t always know why Urby Brown does what he does. At the same\ntime, it establishes a powerful narrative energy. The author apparently assumes\nreaders have a pretty solid mental picture of the fascists and the threat they\npose his characters and of Paris between the wars, and he relies on our imaginations\nto fill out the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within that general atmosphere of risk are the very specific risks to Urby Brown. His father, to whom he bears a remarkable likeness, is indeed a count, a confidant of Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain, and leader of the Oriflamme du Roi, a group of right-wing thugs who parade around like stormtroopers in advance of the real thing. Murder, blackmail, and spying are their stock-in-trade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the arrival of the Nazis, Urby and Hannah desperately attempt to escape back to the United States, but every indication is they\u2019ve waited too long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Kirby Williams \u2013 A book with Paris in the title two weeks in a row? It\u2019s enough to make you stock up on croissants. While the title of this one echoes Dov Alfon\u2019s contemporary crime thriller, A Long Night … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****The Long Road from Paris - between the wars, two Americans--an octoroon jazz musician and his Jewish lover--run a jazz club in Paris. Too good to last, all is threatened when the fascists turn up.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,40,266,126,32],"tags":[1531,1320,1532,446],"class_list":["post-7833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure","category-fiction","category-history","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-kirby-williams","tag-paris","tag-the-long-road-from-paris","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Paris-1940-Adolf-Hitler-1.jpg?fit=512%2C533&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-22l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7837,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7833\/revisions\/7837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}