A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable

A Paris Apartment is a fictional treatment of a fascinating real life event. In 2010, a 91-year old woman died in the south of France, leaving in her estate an apartment in Paris that had not been touched for 70 years.  She had inherited it from her grandmother, but abandoned it in 1942 and never returned. Her grandmother, Marthe de Florian,  had been a Belle Epoque courtesan, and her apartment was a time capsule filled with fine furniture, books and newspapers, and most spectacularly a never-before-seen portrait of de Florian by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. I recall hearing about it at the time and thinking, "What a fantastic idea for a novel." Apparently Michelle Gable did as well.

Gable builds her fictional world around April Vogt, an antique furniture appraiser working for Sotheby's to catalogue the find and help prepare it for auction.  She is enduring a rough patch in her marriage, so she jumps at the chance to leave New York and work in Paris.  Upon arrival she falls in love with the Boldini portrait and becomes obsessed with finding out more about the original owner, the glamorous and mysterious Marthe de Florian. The two women's stories are interwoven, as April slowly reveals her own secrets while also reading entries from Marthe's diaries.

The novel offers rich and fascinating details of Paris in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century and the author has a talent for pacing and creating suspense. However, it struck me as somewhat formulaic.  There seems to be a current fashion in novels where the author takes some historical period or incident, overlays it with a modern narrator, throws in both a romance and a mystery, fills it with lots of historical detail, shakes vigorously, and shazam, it's a bestseller.  Gable has managed to combine all, but occasionally falls into predictable and cliched situations.  At times I was left wondering if I was reading an art history text book, a contemporary travel guide to Paris or perhaps a Harlequin romance.

In order to keep the interest level high, Gable layers multiple stories into the narrative, so we are introduced not only to April's husband, his ex-wife, her step-children and the handsome Parisian lawyer Luc, but also learn about her conflicted relationship with her own father and mother--in addition to all of Marthe's loves, friendships and rivalries.  Eventually it feels a bit too much. Like the apartment it describes, the novel is jam-packed full with the beautiful, the arcane and the trivial, all demanding the reader's attention.  A Paris Apartment might have been more successful, if it had been slightly less ambitious.

Three smileys out of five. 😀😀😀