Tatiana de Rosnay's The House I Loved evokes a 19th-century French city's transformation and trauma

Can a novel make us nostalgic for a place we've never been? With her third English-language release, an uncomplicated story brimming with homespun details, Tatiana de Rosnay presents a convincing case. Nearly every sentence evokes the appeal of mid-19th-century Paris, the city she clearly loves, and her empathy for the citizens whose homes and dreams were obliterated by the march of progress.

The premise of The House I Loved is laid out in stark black lines before the first page is turned. The map on the endpapers depicts the colossal transformation Paris underwent in the 1850s and '60s, the new superimposed upon the old. Under the aegis of Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine, its narrow alleys and crowded medieval buildings were razed to make way for a sanitary, safe and modern metropolis.

These changes were called "embellishments," a horribly inappropriate term in the mind of de Rosnay's angry, strong-minded heroine.

St. Martin's Press (2012)

Rose Bazelet, an aging widow, is distraught that her beloved home on the rue Childebert sits on the planned route for the boulevard Saint-Germain – and she intends to take a stand. Hiding in her freezing basement long after her neighbours have moved away, she stays put, dependent on the provisions a rag-picker scavenges and brings her. In these pathetic conditions, she writes a long letter to her adored late husband, Armand. Interspersed are notes addressed to her by friends and family.

The epistolary form can be a forced kind of storytelling, with the writer telling the recipient things he already knows for the reader's benefit, but Rose's touching account is as much confession as love letter; she wants to unburden herself of long-held secrets.

Charles Marville, Haussmann's official photographer, recorded her district and others for posterity before they were demolished, but Rose describes images much more vibrant than any black-and-white photos can provide. Her mind's eye roams around her close-knit neighbourhood and through every room, and she expresses her remembrances in lavish detail: the enticing smells of the market; the green-fringed chair of her kindly mother-in-law, Odette; the elegant flower shop run by her renter, Alexandrine, her closest friend.

Rose sees her home as a refuge from a difficult childhood, and it also shelters her during street riots against the Bourbon monarchy; her tale explains her understandable loyalty to it and her fury at the men who enforce its destruction.

De Rosnay has said that she wrote in longhand, by candlelight, to capture the rhythms of yesteryear. Her technique seems to have worked. Rose's leisurely paced world is one our technology-based society wouldn't recognize, a time when ordinary Parisians passed winter evenings stitching embroidery and playing dominoes, and she illustrates it with care.

But: "I know that bringing back the past is never a peaceful process," Rose writes, and she also endured many sorrows, including Armand's early-onset dementia. She rarely has a kind word for her grown daughter – which shows her least sympathetic side – and she hints at a decades-old tragedy involving her "little one."

This episode is teased out to the ultimate degree. While somewhat easy to guess, the devastating reveal goes far in explaining Rose's decision (and state of mind, it should be added). In the end, whether her stubbornness is admirable or pitiable – or both – is left for us to interpret.

De Rosnay's Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept, international bestsellers both, tell of painful secrets from the past re-emerging in the present. While incorporating this same theme, The House I Loved also shows the past and the future in a violent clash, a city's trauma made deeply personal. Unlike the author's earlier books, it is more domestic than dramatic, but this slim and perceptive diversion has an unhurried charm of its own.

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This review was originally reviewed for the Globe & Mail.  It hasn't appeared on the blog before, and the online version is paywalled.  My initial idea was to post it here for Women in Translation month, but I've since remembered that De Rosnay, who was born in Paris and is of Franco-British parentage, wrote this novel in English!  Still a good book worth highlighting, though. In a recent (June 2025) essay for LitHub, she discusses how she decides to choose one language over another, and the weirdness of reading someone else's French translation of her English-language novel, since she wasn't permitted to adapt it herself even though she's bilingual.  Her latest historical novel is Blonde Dust, about the unusual friendship between Marilyn Monroe and a chambermaid at her Reno hotel.

Between 2010 and 2012, I wrote eight book reviews for the newspaper, and having a platform that large was a unique and eye-opening experience. I got emails from almost everyone I knew in Canada when my first review ran in print.  I also got emails from a few cranky people I didn't know who felt compelled to tell me how wrong my opinion was, but it was good to see the reviews being read and discussed. I'm not Canadian (though have family there and am descended from Canadians!) but decided to keep the Canadian spellings in the review above.