In her debut novel, 2010s lauded Holocaust epicThe Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer made fiction feel almost unbearably real; inThe Flight Portfolio, her lush-to-overflowing second, she returns to the same era, but finds her hero in the margins of history: Varian Fry, an obscure American who almost singlehandedly took on the task of saving Europes creative brain trust the Jews, Surrealists, and general insurrectionists whose degenerate art displeased the Nazi party, and by extension the Vichy government that marched under their thumb in occupied France.
Theres all kinds of fraught swashbuckling and subterfuge in Orringers meticulously researched recounting: bribes, smuggling, skin-of-the-teeth escapes.
And a gorgeous sense of place, from the teeming, lawless port city of Marseille to the idyllic country villa outside it that doubled as a hideout for luminaries like Andre Breton and Marc Chagall.
Credit: Knopf
But its the sweeping gay romance at its center, and the daily moral quandaries of Frys job how is one life more worth saving than another?
that make the books more familiar elements feel new; its classic storytelling through a transgressive lens.Portfoliooffers a testament to something nicely old-fashioned, though, too: the enduring transformative power of art, and love, in any form.A-
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