Kate Taylor: Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Canadian first-time novelist Kate Taylor weaves together three narrative strands in this story (a la Michael Cunningham's The Hours, to which it has been compared).

It's about literature's resonance down the years, over-anxious mothers and the sons who struggle away from them, the generation gap that's opened up between those who directly suffered during World War II, and the next generation who suffer the consequences more insidiously.

You could also go on to say it's about language itself — words and meaning, and the identity and alienation it implies. Indeed, one of the characters is a French-English translator.

In short, it's a classic first novel, overstuffed with themes and ideas, and in that sense not at all like The Hours, which was so finely focused. However, for all that it bursts at the seams, Madame Proust remains enchanting, wistful, meditative — particularly about memory itself, around which so much of this plot revolves, as did the novels of Proust himself.

Marie Prevost, Paris-born but transplanted to Canada as a child, travels back to Paris to the Biblioteque Nationale, where she sits for several weeks translating the (fictional) diaries of Madame Jeanne Proust, mother of Marcel, the great French novelist.

Around a third of the book comprises these "excerpts", full of quotidian detail about turn-of-the-century bourgeois life and burgeoning anti-semitism as experienced through the Dreyfus Affair.

The research is an escape for Marie from her unsuccessful infatuation with Max, whose mother Sarah constitutes another strand in the story: at age 12 in 1942 she was sent to Canada by her Jewish Parisian parents, who soon after were transported to Auschwitz.

And so the three stories turn on each other, running on different time-lines, yet echoing through the years, and in the many details of daily life. Very nice to spend time with, and should do well on the book club circuit.

Vintage, $26.95