With Violets by Elizabeth Robards: Review

With Violets has a very attractive premise. It is a fictional account of the life of Berthe Morisot, one of the more prominant female painters in Paris in the 1860's-1870's, and the subject of several of Manet's most famous paintings.

The history covered in this book is very interesting once war breaks out around 1870. Elizabeth Robards is an excellent descriptive writer, and handles this part very well. This, however, does not happen until the reader is well into the book.

Unfortunately, I find the book much less rewarding than I  had hoped.

In the first place, either the author or the editor should have noticed that throughout the book the tenses constantly shift from the first person to the third for no reason. This is especially true in the first half of the book, but it continues to happen throughout. To me, this was both very distracting and hard to forgive in a manuscript published by a company with the resources to make sure things like this do not happen.

I think the book would have been much stronger if it had not been written in the first person at all, because it makes for very awkward reading in many places. And perhaps if it had to be told by Berthe, it would have been better if it had been written as a memoir.

But the main fault of the book is that for page after page, nothing really happens. Berthe carries on an extremely chaste flirtation  with Edouard Manet which finally results in a kiss after over a hundred pages, and then a brief coupling or two, spread out over 300 pages of shallow, silly angst. They go months without even seeing each other, and when they do,  there is no depth to their encounters. Manet comes off as a weak cad and Berthe as a woman of little willpower, compassion, or real feeling for anyone.

In fact, none of these characters show much depth, not even Degas, who probaby shows more real personality than anyone else (and he is a minor character!)  And while I do not want to tell too much about the so-called plot, the ending did not bring the satisfaction to me that would have made the rest of it worthwhile.

I am inclined to believe that this book would have been better if it had been done as a work of non-fiction about Berthe Morisot and the early Impressionist movement rather than as this quite uneventful and unengaging "romance."

If I had to rate this book, I suppose I would give it two out of five stars, for the vivid description in it. But with so many books waiting to be read, this is not one I feel I can recommend.