Aurélie Thiele is the author of the new
novel The Paris Understudy. She is also an associate professor at the Lyle School of Engineering of Southern Methodist University. She lives in Dallas.
Q: What inspired you to write The Paris Understudy, and how did you create your characters Madeleine and Yvonne?
A: Years ago, I heard about the French soprano Germaine Lubin, who sang Wagner and collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation.
I realized, however, that she wouldn’t make a good protagonist in a novel because she had no character growth: she never expressed any remorse for her behavior during the war, including having a German officer as her lover, and justified herself by saying she’d wanted to sing.
I decided to split the personality of Germaine Lubin into two characters: the wealth and status as a famous opera singer went to Madeleine, and the associations with the Nazis went to Yvonne. Both go through many changes throughout the novel as they grapple with the choices they must make in pursuit of their art.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I studied in Paris as an undergraduate, so I was already familiar with the city, including the Palais Garnier, which was the site of the opera house at the time. (Now it’s used for ballet.)
I read a couple of biographies of opera singers, diaries of French intellectuals who lived during that time and listened to Wagner. I also attended the Bayreuth festival, which plays a key role in the novel. Germaine Lubin sang Isolde there in 1939 and I managed to attend Tristan und Isolde there. It was eerie to imagine Lubin singing that role on that stage decades earlier.
For the rest, I used the Internet, especially for descriptions of the opera house and maps of Paris.
One thing that surprised me is that the real-life director of the opera house during the war, Jacques Rouché, kept Jewish musicians on the payroll until the Vél d’Hiv roundup although it was against the new laws introduced by the Nazis. After the roundup it became too dangerous.
Q: The writer M.B. Henry called the book an “engrossing tale about war and choices--wrong ones, right ones, yet always difficult ones.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love it! It’s spot-on. There are many novels set during World War II, and I find that they often emphasize the “good vs evil” angle.
It’s always inspiring to read, but a sad truth of the Occupation by the Nazis (and I can say it because I’m French) is that many French people didn’t actively resist the Nazis. Some collaborated with the enemy, and most of the others kept their heads down and hoped it’d be over someday. Only a small percentage of the population joined the Résistance, in part because of the immense risks.
Now that we know the outcome of the war, it’s easy to forget how bleak things seemed for the Allies in the first few years of the war. The Vél d’Hiv roundup in particular was a great source of shame for the French after the war because the roundup was done by the French police.
I wanted to write a novel set during World War II that captured the complexities of living in an occupied country, not knowing when it’d end and, for one of the characters, finding herself more and more entangled with the wrong side even if she doesn’t support their politics.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote this novel?
A: Compelling characters faced with inner and outer conflict make the reader turn the pages. It’s important to get the historical facts right, but there are plenty of history books about World War II. Readers don’t pick up a novel to get a history lesson.
This being said, I was careful to check all the details, especially the weapons, vehicles and uniforms, because there are so many World War II buffs out there.
It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of historical research without writing, though, especially regarding a war that killed so many, because you want to honor the dead by getting the facts right.
Personally, I am an “overwriter.” I tend to write in too many historical details and have to edit them out when I revise. I think you can intuit the balance when you reread your manuscript after not working on it for a while and you catch yourself skipping over those details. But it’s good to be aware of historical details to create the world of the novel, even if I don’t use them in the final draft.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am finishing a novel set in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War and doing research for the next one, which involves ballet and the Soviet Union. I like to have multiple projects at different stages. It makes me feel like I’m traveling the world in a time machine.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It took me 12 years, on and off, to write this novel! It went through multiple iterations of full drafts, meaning that there are several hundreds of pages I wrote that didn’t make it into the final product.
A couple of years ago I had shelved it but the story wouldn’t leave me, so I decided to make a final push to complete it. It took several more years of revisions before my agent, Betsy Amster, found the perfect editor and home for the book, Holly Ingraham at Alcove Press. There were many times where I thought I was foolish to be so obstinate, but it paid off in the end.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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