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Paris My Heart (2017) • On Saint Ronan Street (1976)
Two Novels, Same Story, 40 Years and Two Cities Far Apart.
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9. Same Characters, Same Story, But Oh Wow
In Paris Affaire, the characters are closely modeled on those in On Saint Ronan Street but Parisian.
The young poet mows lawns, not around Yale University but around a Sorbonne campus in the Latin Quarter. His name is Marc Fontbleu, and his poetic pseudonym is Léopold Montblé. His beautiful young faculty wife illicit lover is the wealthy, stylish, lonely young Emma Delors. Marc is 23, Emma about 30. Same story, same everything, but here's the oh-wow. What I didn't quite see as a 27-year-old novelist I saw quite clearly and viscerally as a writer in his late sixties.
Without giving much away, I'll say this. It was all there in the original manuscript of Jon+Merile, so long ago. I've said for a long time that a good writer, on a good project, just becomes a typist (a metaphor I actually did invoke two or three times with artistic license in the midst of my very large opus lately titled Airport Novel). In a story that's working well, the characters take over, have lives of their own, and interact with each other in ways that often make the author feel like an intruder in the room.
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