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Chargement... Bastille Daypar Greg Garrett
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"Veteran TV journalist Calvin Jones travels to Paris, where he negotiates love, friendship, and despair in award-winning novelist Greg Garrett's Bastille Day. With brilliant pacing and gorgeous prose, acclaimed novelist Greg Garrett tells the story of American TV journalist Calvin Jones, who travels to Paris to work with a producer friend he knows from their dark days covering the war in Iraq. On his very first day on the job, Calvin meets and falls for a Saudi Muslim woman, Nadia, educated in America but now in Paris for an arranged marriage to a Saudi sheikh. Their brief relationship is interrupted by the terror attack in Nice, which Calvin is sent to cover, and complicated by his nightmarish memories of his sojourn in Iraq. Cal Jones has had a quiet ten years, by design. After surviving the loss of two people he loved in the Iraq war, which he covered as a national correspondent, he fell apart and retreated to a local news job in Texas. Cal is still wrestling with those old demons when he goes to Paris to work with an old friend and encounters Nadia, a brilliant, lovely, and sad Saudi woman in Paris to wed a Saudi sheikh in a family-arranged marriage. Against his own better judgment, Cal falls for Nadia, even dragging her from the Seine when she attempts to solve her insoluble problem by taking her own life. He begins to risk a heart he thought was too badly broken to ever love again, and as the wedding ticks closer, to hope that perhaps Nadia can make a choice that includes him. Then their time rescuing each other is interrupted by the terror attack in Nice, which Cal is called out to cover. Back in that setting, Cal is thrown back into the memories of senseless violence and extremism that shattered him in Iraq-and that threaten to shatter him and his hopes now. Garrett's characters wrestle with the ghosts of their pasts, as they long for love, friendship, and faith in the present. Bastille Day is a gloriously-affecting novel about how our histories can damage us, but hope can heal us"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Brave. And broken. Like James Bond. That is how Calvin Jones describes himself. Jones had been a war correspondent in Iraq where both his father and driver Khalid died in bomb attacks. He blamed himself for Khalid. He fled to the security of working at a local news station. For ten years. Life was good. He was in a serious relationship with Kelly McNair, an interior designer. They looked good together. Sex was pretty good. Then, before his eyes at a Black Lives Matter rally five police die including the officer he was riding with, who he watches bleed out before his eyes. The man had protected him with his life. And all the dreams, never distant, came back.
Rob, a fellow correspondent, sensing the troubled state of a former colleague invites him to join Rob’s news agency in Paris to cover terror attacks in Europe. He arrives the Monday before Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016. While waiting to meet Rob in Harry’s New York Bar he meets a beautiful Muslim woman, Nadia, highly educated but unhappy. In days she will be married to a Saudi millionaire, an arranged marriage that will greatly benefit her family. Except she doesn’t want this marriage and has contemplated suicide, jumping off a bridge into the Seine. As they part, he gives her his business card. Call, if she needs to talk. He doesn’t expect to hear from her. The marriage is in five days.
Out on a run, he receives a text. She is at the bridge, ready to jump. By providence, he is near, and when she jumps, he goes after her, rescues her, and takes her back to his apartment to dry off. And so begins an improbable love affair. He realizes that he never loved Kelly and that he does love this woman and doesn’t want her to marry the millionaire, even as she grapples with the implications for her family, herself, and even other Saudi women, if she refuses to take the burqah.
Amid all this, the Nice truck attack occurs, in which a Muslim, shouting Allahu-akbar (“God is greater”), drove a truck for a mile down a boulevard crowded with Bastille Day celebrants, killing or injuring 500. Cal is sent along with cameraman Ahmed, to cover the attack. It surfaces all the memories, the trauma, the anger. And he takes it out on Nadia, forgetting all he has learned of her and other honorable Muslim friends. Too late, he realizes how he has wronged the woman he loved and desperately tries to communicate. Silence.
He is a wreck. Drinking too much. Barely holding it together. Yet loved. By his Uncle Jack in Texas who would hop on a plane in a moment, talks straight sense. He and his wife pray like crazy. By Rob and his wife, going through a rough patch in their own marriage. By a former military chaplain and by Clarice, the dean of the American cathedral. And by Allison, an attractive lesbian and good friend. They have faith when Cal has lost his. No cliches. Presence. Honesty. Love.
Cal will need it. To face the complicated relationship with his deceased father. His guilt over Khalid. Over the police officer. Over Kelly who he does not love. He is broken and needs to find “brave” within it. Especially with Nadia who he can’t bear to lose despite the obligations she faces.
This is an adult novel from a Christian publisher. There is sex outside of marriage, though not graphically portrayed. There is violence that is graphically described. There is also a quietly compelling Episcopal community (as well as Uncle Jack) who make space to include Cal in their journey as far as he will go. He is both skittish from a fundamentalist youth, and broken from the horrors he has seen, including the horror he sees in himself. We wait to see how brave will he be.
Greg Garrett offers a finely drawn story occuring in the space of a week, peopled with characters we come to love, including Frederick the bartender at Harry’s New York Bar. We consider Christian-Muslim relations, in ways integral to, but never overshadowing, the plot. The dialogue is never trite, but reflects people who care about their lives and those of others, wrestling with fraught choice, life’s ambiguities, and the unanswered questions of suffering and loss. I will be thinking about Cal, Nadia and their friends for awhile…
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. ( )