Our April Author: Tatiana De Rosnay

This month's selection was Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay.  The author has a website where you can find links to a few promotional interviews. She also has a separate blog for the book. And she posts to a Facebook page.  In addition, she promotes the book and tells you what she's having for breakfast on Twitter.  I share this, not so much because any of it is worth browsing, but because it might help explain why a book that received no serious reviews or interviews is an international bestseller.  Here is a little promotional video I found on YouTube that gives you a little sample of the author in person:




Of course, the subject of the Vel d'Hiv Round-up is well worth exploring.  The Wikipedia article is quite thorough and I recommend visiting the Paris and Drancy pages of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum site. which include photographs and personal histories of Holocaust victims and survivors.  And be sure to check out my previous post on films about the Vel d'Hiv.

Sarah's Key Film Festival

It seems our book for this month, Sarah's Key, is being made into a movie.  For a film that's already in post-production, there is surprisingly little information available about it.  Perhaps one reason is that  another film about the Vel' d'Hiv Round-up has just been released in France, La Rafle:



A longer trailer (French only) is available here.  Click here for the film's website.  There is no US release date yet.  From the Guardian, a bit of reflection on the import of the film here.

If you don't want to wait (or if like me, you'll pass on Sarah's Key), I recommend the far more subtle and challenging, Mr. Klein,

Mr. Klein is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of the postwar French cinema; Losey's vaunted visual style is here fused with a brilliantly original scenario by Franco Solinas which captures in chilling detail the complicity of the French citizenry in the anti-Semitism of the Nazi occupiers. Of the few films which even tangentially touch on this topic, ...  none has so clearly and effectively articulated the casual acceptance of anti-Semitism in Western Europe. Losey's achievement is magnified by the sophistication of the narrative exposition, which places the theme within the framework of an unconventional psychological detective thriller.