To Capture What We Cannot Keep
Beatrice Colin, 2016
Flatiron Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250071446
Summary
Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young Scottish widow and a French engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.
In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Emile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris, France—a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear
Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is forced to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges. Emile is expected to take on the bourgeois stability of his family's business and choose a suitable wife.
As the Eiffel Tower rises, a marvel of steel and air and light, the subject of extreme controversy and a symbol of the future, Cait and Emile must decide what their love is worth.
Seamlessly weaving historical detail and vivid invention, Beatrice Colin evokes the revolutionary time in which Cait and Emile live—one of corsets and secret trysts, duels and Bohemian independence, strict tradition and Impressionist experimentation.
To Capture What We Cannot Keep, stylish, provocative, and shimmering, raises probing questions about a woman's place in that world, the overarching reach of class distinctions, and the sacrifices love requires of us all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Scotland
• Education—B.A., University of Glasgow; Ph.D., Strathclyde University
• Currently—lives in Glasgow, Scotland
Beatrice Colin is a British novelist and radio dramatist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. She has several novels under her belt, including two for children, and has written original plays for BBC Radio 4.
Born in London, England, Colin's family moved to Scotland when she was still a child. Her parents come from a line of Russian-Jews, who converted to Christianity in the 19th Century and departed Russia during the 1917 revolution.
One of her great-great-grandmothers had been a bestselling novelist in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, and her great-aunt, Nina, had been a film actress in Germany between the first and second world wars. Nina became the inspiration behind Colin's 2008 novel, The Glimmer Palace (the UK title is The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite).
Colin attended the University of Glasgow where she studied English; following graduation, she worked as a journalist for the arts & features pages of the Scotsman, Sunday Herald, and the Guardian. She returned to school, earning her doctorate in 2010 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her doctoral dissertation argued for the potential of historical fiction to reclaim individuals who, due to the absence of diaries or memoirs, have never been recognized through the lens of history.
Novels
Colin's novels include To Capture What We Cannot Keep (2016), The Songwriter (2010), The Glimmer Palace (2008, US title), Disappearing Act (2002), and Nude Untitled (2000). Her two children's novels include Pyrate's Boy (2013) and My Invisible Sister (2010), which has been adapted to film by Disney.
Plays and short stories
Colin has written extensively for radio—both adaptions and original plays—on BBC Radio 4. Perhaps her best known play is The True Life of Bonnie Parker (2013), which was broadcast as a Woman’s Hour serial.
The author's short stories have been broadcast and published in anthologies and literary magazines such as Ontario Review and the London Magazine.
Beatrice is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Strathclyde University. (Author bio adapted from The Scotsman and the author's website .)
Book Reviews
Even while telling a very intimate story, Colin attends to the extraordinary mechanics and publicity surrounding this controversial project.... Colin is a talented literary engineer.... To Capture What We Cannot Keep will provide a string of shocking plot twists.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
It’s sexy escapism, but the book’s real selling point is its illumination of 19th-century Paris and that phenomenal landmark (Book of the Week).
People
Colin ably brings to life a time before the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower became an iconic part of the Parisian landscape. To Capture What We Cannot Keep is part history lesson and part thrilling love story, leading to an ending full of depth, promise, and hope.
BookPage
(Starred review.) To be in Paris to witness the construction of the Eiffel Tower is a magnificent occasion: to have a hand, however small, in its building, even better…. This exquisitely written, shadowy historical novel will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including fans of the Belle Epoque
Library Journal
Beautifully restrained love story, told in a refreshingly unhurried manner and grounded in the era’s social constraints.... Drawn with care and suffused with stylish ambience, Colin’s Paris is a city of painters, eccentric aristocrats, desperate prostitutes, secret lovers, and the magnificent artistic vision taking shape high above them.
Booklist
Colin has a sure hand with the atmospheres of both [Paris and Glasgow] and with the mores and dress of the period, and she manages to continually raise the stakes for her characters without ever resorting to melodrama. A novel of soaring ambitions, public and private.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s epigraph, by Gustave Eiffel:
Before they meet at such an impressive height, the uprights appear to spring out of the ground, molded in a way by the action of the wind itself.
What sort of tone does the epigraph establish? How does it resonate with the novel that follows?
2. Caitriona is very much a woman constrained—by her status as a widow, by her poverty and her fall from high society, even by the clothes she wears. In our introduction to her, on the novel’s first page, Beatrice Colin writes:
She had laced tight that morning, pulling until the eyeholes in her corset almost met, and now her chest rose and fell in shallow gasps as she tried to catch her breath—in, out, in and out.
Were you therefore surprised by how her story turned out?
3. Jamie describes Cait as "a lady with real class," despite the fact that she is penniless. Discuss the complex and nuanced portrayal of class in To Capture What We Cannot Keep. How is class tied to material wealth, education, social status, and family? How do the classes mix in the novel, and what is the fallout?
4. Eiffel tells Emile, of Paris, "reputation in this city is everything, you know that." How does reputation shape the lives of Colin’s characters?
5. During a sightseeing boat trip in Paris, Alice watches...
with a mixture of horror and delight, as one of the women, still with a glass of red wine in one hand, pulled up her skirts to reveal purple bloomers and danced alone on the deck.
Discuss how Alice is frequently pulled between social propriety and Bohemian freedom. Does her character evolve over the course of the novel?
6. It’s clear that all of Colin’s characters are participating in sexual adventures. Yet as Jamie and the count show, the men seem immune to any censure while for the women, it can be their ruin. Does this double standard surprise you? Do you think things are much different today than they were back then?
7. Why is Gabrielle so devastated when she discovers that it was Emile who bought all of the paintings of her? When she laments, "I thought, I thought that at last all this meant something," what does it reveal of her insecurities about her romantic life and her artistic legacy?
8. Do you find Gabrielle likable or sympathetic? Did your opinion of her change as the novel progressed? Discuss your feelings on the likability of the characters in general.
9. Discuss the important role the Parisian art world plays in the novel. Were you surprised at the contemporary reactions to now-beloved Impressionist painters? How does the aesthetic of the Eiffel Tower fit in (or clash) with Impressionism?
10. Emile believes that, in his art class, "his style was the exact opposite of his technical work; his line was loose, economical, free. And he wanted to capture what he couldn’t keep, the fleeting, the transient." He believes, of his engineering, that "there was finesse in his composition of girders and blots; it was bold and brilliant, it was art." How do these two artistic passions shape him? How do they complement his attraction to both Cait and Gabrielle? What does the novel’s title mean to you? How do you think it speaks to the other characters in the novel?
11. Why do you think Emile’s mother holds such sway over him? What does she represent in the novel?
12. Discuss this conversation between Cait and Emile, about the Eiffel Tower:
But the fact is that it is not trying to be anything rather than what it is. Nothing is hidden and the reverse is also true; nothing in the city can hide. From the top on a clear day, you will be able to see everything. It will all be gloriously transparent.
It’s what we want, isn’t it? Transparency. One so rarely finds it.
What is the symbolic importance of the Eiffel Tower in the novel, and in Emile and Cait’s relationship?
13. To Capture What We Cannot Keeps moves between Glasgow, Paris, Edinburgh, and West Africa. How are the characters affected by setting, and how is a sense of place evoked in the writing?
14. Were you surprised that Cait moved to West Africa? What do you think her future holds?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)