The Double Life of Liliane

On the back of the book under the picture of Liliane or is that really a picture of Lily Tuck as a child, is written the words, "A Novel".  It is found on the Fiction shelf of the library.  This could be one of the most confusing fiction stories you will read this year.  An autobiographical fiction account of author, Lily Tuck's childhood, it is hard to know where real life ends and fiction begins.

This is the story of Liliane, whose double life she says begins when she boards an airplane to visit her father in Rome.  There are many descriptions of a double life in this novel.  There is the double life of Jews who are escaping the Nazis.  Liliane's father, Rudy, Jewish by birth, is imprisoned in a detention camp when the Nazis take over France, and then later fights with the French Foreign Legion.   Irene, his young abandoned wife and Liliane's mother, takes ten month old Liliane and the 19 year old nanny and drives to Portugal, then boards the SS Exeter in Lisbon and sails to America, landing of course in New York.   There is the double life ,later after the war, of reconnecting with her father, who now is estranged from Irene and as a young teen travels between her father, Rudy, visiting him in Rome, where he eventually settles down, and her mother in New York with her second husband, Gaby.

There is also the double life of fact and fiction, which here is very hard to discern.  The book reads like a biography, fairly dry without delving deeply into any one characters mind.  In the end you are not emotionally attached to any of the characters, feeling like you only have scratched the surface of their persona.  This story is totally based on factual evidence.  There are the news stories of the time, the locations and people who were really apart of Lily Tuck's biography.  Then there are the family pictures included as real family members, as would be apart of a autobiography.  So blurred is the line between fact and fiction that at the end of the book, Liliane takes a writing class at Harvard with Professor Paul de Man, who mentions in a lecture, "...Marcel Proust, saying that in A la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time) which is meant to be autobiographical, it is impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction."

Though her family goes through many traumatic momentous experiences during her formative years Liliane keeps the narration of this novel on such an even keel as to feel monotone.  As a typical teenager, bored with her life, angry at the world and resentful of her parents, Liliane relates her privilged life of ballet and international travel between her divorced parents to bulimia and her college boyfriend Mark with the red MG convertible as an unemotional deconstruction of her life.