THE CHATEAU opens with some good:

'He sat up and looked through the porthole and there it was, across the open water,
a fact, in plain sight, a real place, a part of him because he could say he had seen it."

If only the book had offered more memorable scenes instead of devolving into insecure and timid half melancholy/half sadness:
why took a day to ask where the toilet was, why not set the twin beds next to each other, why not ask for heat? a tub? hot water?

Around page 150, the plot and characters were finally enlivened from the repetitive daily boredom of sitting around and talk-talk-talking
while fake pleasing each other, even the husband and wife, Harold and Barbara, when The Frenchman, Eugene B. asked frank American questions.

As my chosen AAC challenge book, I had decided to plow through and finish it until arriving at page 202: "I prefer a nigger to a Jew."

Zero response from Harold.

End reading. ( )

This is one of the most affecting and beautifully written books I have ever had the pleasure to read. A gem. ( )

The Chateau is, at first glance, somewhere in between Henry James' tales of American innocents abroad in wicked old Europe, and Nancy Mitford's comic tales of the duplicitous, but irresistable post war French aristocratic classes. Maxwell keeps his story of a young American couple, adrift in a Europe that veers from romantic to baffling, welcoming to resistant, fresh and light. The story focuses on the impossibility of communication between different cultures and languages, an America flexing its modern muscles partly in love and partly in hate with the 'old world'. Conversations and gestures, near misses and hits, ordering in restaurants and finding a bed in a hotel, French plumbing and French history, all slyly show a cultural gap that sometimes gapes as wide as the Atlantic, sometimes narrows to a kiss on the cheek. This is a wise and clever novel.

The Chateau is part unscripted mystery, part travel journal, part piercing cultural study. The premise-- an American couple traveling in France after WWII only to find things less perfect and picturesque than expected-- is interesting enough. But, it is Maxwell's writing that really carries this book from a 3 star to a 4 1/2 star novel. He perfectly captures so many personal, yet universal moments in language that is subtle, moving, even ethereal.

The real treat of the book (besides the writing) is the very unconventional "Part II: Some Explanations" aka the last 50 pages of the book. Here, in an entirely different tone, which is a Q&A between himself and a reader, Maxwell explains the many stories behind the story-- the French story. Knowing this part was coming did help me through some of the more agonizing parts of the plot in Part I.

There are many passages in French, some long. you can make enough sense from the context to limp through, but if you can read French (or have a spouse who can) it does help. If you are hoping for an action packed plot, The Chateau will disappoint, but there is a plot; it is very carefully doled out much as life's plot is, and is delivered in such beautiful prose you won't want it to end. It is a pity that Maxwell's works seem to be largely unknown, particularly in the U.S. ( )