The Mark of the Angel

Vintage, 2000. Good. From Nancy Huston, a Canadian writer who's lived in France for a couple of decades, comes a modest proposal in the form of a novel: Maybe millennial f iction shouldn't look forward. Maybe it should look back to the shames and sadnesses of the 20th century. The Mark of the Angel, Huston's U.S. debut a nd a bestseller in France, tells the story of Saffie, a young German girl w ho takes a job as a housekeeper in 1957 Paris. Her employer, a brilliant yo ung flautist named Raphael, falls hard for her, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he finds her "impassive" and "impenetrable." Hard-eyed S affie seems to sleepwalk through life, and as if in a dream, she and Raphae l marry and have a son, Emil. When Raphael sends her off to have his flute repaired one day, he little suspects what he's setting in motion. In András , the instrument maker, Saffie finds a damaged twin. Both are victims of th e horrible experiment of Hitler's war: German Saffie has endured not only r ape and torture but also the knowledge of her own family's Nazi sympathies. Hungarian Jew András has lost his family and his country. The two embody t he horrors that Europeans visited on each other in the middle of the 20th c entury. And they covertly embark on a five-year affair, during which their love comes to be sorely tested by the Algerian war for independence from Fr ance.