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130 of 137 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A journey of discovery and a tale of a family..., August 14, 2010
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I really enjoyed this very interesting story about a French family and the unraveling of the "secret" that was at the heart of the mystery in this novel. Although set in modern day France, the narrative has a timeless quality about it as a forty-ish, newly divorced man, Antoine Rey, starts investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of his mother, Clarisse, after his sister Melanie is injured in an automobile accident after suddenly remembering something dramatically suspicious about their mother while the two of them are off on holiday.
While his sister is hospitalized and during her recovery from her injuries, Antoine becomes compelled to find out more about his mother and who she was and how she died since both of her children feel as if they never really knew her and the subject has never been talked about within the family. In the course of his inquiries, he discovers and faces the truth about a mother he loved deeply but lost far too soon.
Antoine is a very complex man who is simultaneously dealing with his love and longing for his ex-wife and their three children-- two of whom are surly and distant teenagers -- and with the sudden urge to finally know more about his mother. He suffers loneliness and self doubt, bored with his career as architect, and morose about his lack of close relationships with his children and his father's family. I found him an interesting character with a lot of depth and sentimentality that led to many moments of self examination and introspection. The other supportive characters were not so well drawn, but did provide the means for Antoine to interact with and to push the narrative along.
I read the novel in one sitting. I don't think the story is so much about the revelation of the secret or even the nature of it, but more about the process of discovery and about the importance of exploring the bonds of family relationships and about knowing each other. Do children really ever know their parents -- and should they know everything? It is human nature to question and to want answers to the age-old question -- "why"...
Recommend.
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96 of 108 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Formula Fails, August 5, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
With her first novel, SARAH'S KEY, Tatiana de Rosnay hit upon a winning formula: link a contemporary story set in modern Paris to events that took place a generation or more earlier. Long-buried secrets can work well as a plot device. But the secrets in that earlier book were no small matter; they concerned nothing less than the fate of children in the French Holocaust, and their story was told with a simple directness that quite overshadowed the modern romance paired with it. In A SECRET KEPT, however, the modern romance is virtually the entire story; it is fuller and more detailed than the relevant sections of the earlier book, but is still relatively trivial. And the buried secret, whose disclosure is postponed by every means possible, turns out not to be much of a secret at all, and such tension as there was just dribbles away. This time around, the formula fails.
Antoine Rey is a fortyish Parisian architect dealing mainly in office reconstructions. He is bored with his job and has let his life fall apart since his wife Astrid has left him for a younger man. But he cares enough for his sister Mélanie to take her for her fortieth birthday to Noirmoutier Island, off the Atlantic coast southwest of Nantes, where they used to holiday as children. The visit awakens memories of their mother, Clarisse, one of which so upsets Mélanie that she crashes the car before she can tell it. The remainder of the book is the much-delayed search for that memory and the understanding of its implications. But it is at least equally about Antoine's struggles with his own life, his problems with his teenage children, his difficult relationship with his domineering father, and his self-pity over the loss of Astrid. Parts of this do ring quite true, actually, but when a most improbable romantic partner suddenly drops into Antoine's lap, I lost most of my credulity.
But still kept reading. The writing prattles along serviceably enough, though marred by passages in which the author just tries too hard: "I think of her caffeine-stained teeth, her furry upper lip, her patchouli perfume, her Mozartean Queen of the Night screeches, and my disgust, impatience, and annoyance bubble up with the efficient precision of a pressure cooker." A review on the back cover suggests that the book should be read in one sitting. It almost needs to be, for you read on in the hope that de Rosnay will ultimately come up with something significant enough to make this excursion worthwhile. She doesn't.
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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious Tedium, September 5, 2010
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I am always intrigued by the stories about families, particularly when the same experience holds such different meaning for the individuals involved. While the book started off with potential, it quickly became a tiring and tiresome struggle to read. The lives of the Rey family, historically and in the present, are heavy with repression, judgment, disappointment, and the burden of meeting the expectations of others. Translated from the French (possibly part of the problem?), De Rosnay's writing comes across as a MFA assignment that asked the student to make maximal use of metaphor, epiphany, conflict and other literary techniques to create a reading experience that is congruent with the inner turmoil of the characters. With the exception of the long dead Clarisse, none of these sad souls ever came alive or came together into a believable whole. While that may have been the author's intent and from an artistic perspective, this may be an amazingly successful novel, it did not grab me and would never be a book that I would recommend to anyone else.
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