074 - Book | The Nightingale
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The Nightingale has been on my list to read for probably three years as it's one of my dearest friend's all time favorite books, and she's an avid reader, so I knew it was going to be good.
It absolutely did not disappoint.
Listen, I am not a huge fan of novels or fiction books, but I think this book may have changed that for me, I could not put it down. It was so good. On the night I finished reading the book, I was in the bed, wiping tears from my eyes as I finished the last pages, not wanting it to end. A heart wrenching historical fiction about two sisters in France, during World War II when the Nazis took control. It was really a true glimpse into the horrific tragedies and trauma of war and the important role of women in that war.
So if you're looking for a great novel to read this summer or this fall, this is it. But be prepared to not be able to put it down, especially once you get to the halfway point. All in all, this book has given me the gift of perspective. And for that, I'm so grateful.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through it below!
Okay, so if you haven't read The Nightingale, here's a quick summary of the book without giving away too much of it. It's a story about two sisters, the setting is a small town in France, right outside of Paris, it's during World War II when the Nazis invaded and took over France before the Nazis eventually lost the war. Now the sisters' names are Vianne and Isabelle and their personalities and stories, they're so different. But the beautiful thing about this book is that it illuminates the important role of women in the war, it shows the deep losses and traumas they face, the unknowns, the abuse, the family relationships, the love and their story, and just how they risked their very lives again and again to help others and how they ultimately survived after the war. Oh, it was so good. I'm so sad the book is over.
At this point, I will say moving forward that there are going to be some major spoilers in this episode.
So, if you haven't read the book yet and you want to, or you're considering it: now is the time to turn off this podcast and come back to it once you're done.
As I do for each book in the Nancy Ray Book Club, I'm going to give my three biggest takeaways in this episode. And if you want to learn more about the book club, just click here and you can see all the books we're reading this year, you can get on the email list with reading plans and kind of follow along with some of the books I've chosen to read this year. And again, we'll do it next year. It's just a really fun way to have community and read similar things and I like to share what I'm reading with people, so it’s pretty fun.
Alright, let's jump into my three takeaways from the Nightingale!
Now, disclaimer, I know this is a fictional book. Just know that if I talk about these characters like they're real, or like these things happened in real life—I know it was a fictional novel. But it was based on reality—it's a historical fiction and the author did so much research on World War II before ever writing these fictional characters. So I might talk about them like they're real, but I understand they're not. I just wanted to put that out there.
Now my first big takeaway is that this book gave me such an incredible perspective for this year that we're living in, in particular.
It's given me the gift of perspective in 2020, because there's a lot of hard things going on this year for all of us. It's been a hard year and I'm not downplaying that, but the beauty of history and looking back, it gives us perspective to see that maybe this isn't as hard as it's been for some people. I mean, the truth is people before us have had it way harder than we have it. We have a lot of good in our lives still. And it's just allowed me to have this deep sense of gratitude as I've read the pages of this book.
Some of the parts of The Nightingale that have really driven this home for me and given me this perspective is the fact that I don't live on the run. I don't live in fear of my actual life. I don't have a government that dictates what I do or what I believe in or what I don't do or who I'm allowed to live with or I mean, anything and everything. My husband lives at home with me right now, and he is not off fighting in a war and I am so grateful for that. I don't have a Nazi living in my home. I could not believe that that was actually a real thing. When I read this book, I was like, wait, is that real? Did Nazis actually just come in and stay in people's homes without permission? That's nuts. That's crazy to me.
Also, I can buy as much food as I'd like, whenever I'd like to. There are countries in the world today where that's not a reality for people who are given rations. I just never want to take these things for granted. So yes, it's given me immense gratitude for living in this country at this time in the world. We have so much to be thankful for, even though it is 2020, there is still so much to be thankful for.
My second biggest takeaway is just the trauma of war paired with the trauma of life and how heavy that really is.
Isabelle and Vianne—they have their own stories and their own trauma and their deep wounds and pain from childhood long before this war ever began. They both suffered the loss of their mother when she died and they were young. And then of course the emotional absence and physical absence of their father. I mean, think about their father, the life that he lived, fighting and living through two wars and how horrific his life, the things that he saw and experienced. Again, I know he's not real, but there were people who did this and it's mind blowing, the heaviness of that, the weight of that.
Just looking at Vianne's life for a moment. She lost her mom, she lost her father in a lot of ways, completely emotionally absent, sent her away, she got pregnant at a very young age, then got married on the heels of that, grew up way too fast and then was basically asked to be the mother or caretaker of Isabelle. And she could not, she did not have the emotional maturity or capacity to do that.
And then Isabelle's total rejection from her father. I mean, Isabelle was rejected blatantly by her father, as well as her sister who couldn't take care of her. She was completely alone in life. And then after all of this, the war happens and the trauma they went through and the war was unfathomable. I mean, the bombing raid that Isabelle survived, the things she saw and experienced. I'll never forget that one glimpse in the very first bombing raid that she experienced was she said she saw like this child in a diaper crying next to his dead mother. And she wanted to scoop up that child and help her and they had to keep going. All of that. I couldn't wrap my mind around that experience.
And then of course she lived on the run, quite literally. She had no home base, no real identity. Her very name was taken from her. She could not use her real name, no family to return to and Vianne, being a single mom with no real way to provide for her daughter while Antoine was off at war. I mean, she was fired from her only job after she questioned an officer, having to learn to provide for themselves on literally nothing, and then trying to help her best friend and her children escape. And it was not a successful escape. In fact, it was the opposite. It turned into the worst tragedy she's ever experiencing, a young girl she knew and loved being murdered in front of her. And then her best friend, she was sent to a concentration camp just like a day after hiding in her bunker, the hole or in cellar the whole day, she came up one time. And at that very moment, she was caught and sent away.
And then taking her young boy and immediately gaining a son and having to change his identity and cutting his hair short and dressing him in boyish clothes and making up a whole story about his life and trying to explain that to this precious three-year-old boy. I think the thing that blew my mind the most was, all of this trauma, all of the experiences, I thought that it was at its worst. I thought it was done. It couldn't get any worse and then it wasn't done.
It did, in fact, get even worse.
Vianne ended up killing Officer Beck—which, their weird, toxic relationship just was so weird; I'm just going to leave it at that. It was so hard. I could not imagine living in the tension of that every single day and night, just so hard. But she ends up killing him out of self-defense trying to protect Isabelle and herself, but she had to live with the secrecy of that. Even though it was in self defense, I mean, she felt it was murder. How do you live with a secret like that? That’s actual torment.
And then the new Nazi came, emotionally abused her, raped her, and got her pregnant. And as soon as a glimpse of relief happens in her life, that precious moment when the kids are playing and Antoine is home and all seems like it could be right again, these men show up at her door to rescue the son that she had adopted and saved and fallen in love with. And in their rescue of him and sending him back, sweet Ari or Daniel back to his extended family in America, she lost him in a moment. And in a few minutes, in an afternoon, it happened so fast in a whirlwind of grief, completely out of her control. And not only did they take him away, she had to facilitate it. That was the part that like, oh, I could cry talking about it. I cried my eyes out on those pages where she had to actually help him get in the car and go to his relatives in America after she had convinced him that he was her son.
I don't think I cried harder at any other point in the book, than those pages. I mean, it was so heavy. It was just remarkable. The grief and the trauma and the loss and Isabelle, oh my word. One of my favorite characters I've ever met in a book.
Her defiance, her fierce loyalty to what is right, her unbreakable spirit, her willingness to risk everything again and again, and again, she's truly remarkable. Just recently,—this is kind of an aside—we watched this movie called Midway. It's all about the Battle of Midway, which happens in World War II. It's really interesting that I was reminded of a pilot in this movie, but it was actually a real pilot in real life when I was thinking about Isabelle.
Quick recap of the movie, and then I'll let you know how it all ties into Isabelle: the movie, Midway, recounts the Battle of Midway, which was an incredibly important turning point in World War II. It's fascinating, I highly recommend it, it is gut wrenching in every way. It's so good. It's a true story. And this one pilot, this one American pilot had such bravery and almost carelessness with his life that he went straight into the line of fire every time to bomb these massive Japanese aircrafts. You've got to watch the movie to understand what I'm talking about. But the bottom line is at the end of the movie, all the credits are going, they highlight the real people who are represented in this movie who actually fought in the Battle of Midway and this pilot who's name was Richard Best. He was a dive bomber pilot who hit and sunk, not one, but two of the four Japanese aircraft carriers in this battle.
The bottom line is, at the end of the movie, credits are rolling, it said this about him:
"He led his squadron against the Japanese invasion fleet during the Battle of Midway, June 4th through 6, 1942. And he did it with such boldness, determination and utter disregard for personal safety that he contributed in a large degree to the magnificent victory of our forces."
That is how I felt about Isabelle when I was reading about Isabelle. She had such an utter disregard for her personal safety. That's the only way that she helped those pilots who had crashed and were rescued. It's the only way that she had the victories that she had is she literally had an utter disregard for her personal safety. She dealt with the loss of her mom, the rejection of her dad and sister, the rejection of every school she was ever in. And she risked everything starting out, just distributing the pamphlets and then taking the men across the Pyrenees Mountains and then doing it again and then doing it again and doing it again.
Every single time she risked her life and she kept going and the trauma kept going, peaking when she was captured at one of these attempted crossings of the Pyrenees, tortured, questioned, and then sent to a concentration camp to barely survive, barely make it out alive. I love this line in the book, it says,
"If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this. In love, we find out who we want to be. In war, we find out who we are."
And I think that was so true of Vianne and Isabelle. Yeah, I'm just going to leave it at that. So good.
The third takeaway is that the human spirit has a greater capacity for love than we realize.
In all of this trauma, in all of the heaviness and all of the brokenness and the tears I shed reading this historical fiction, I was so moved by the capacity for love and healing. And there are three scenes in particular where this was so evident and true, such a beautiful picture of our capacity to love and how God made us for love.
Scene 1:
When Isabelle is weak and crumpling and sick and dying after being brought home from the concentration camp, I think Auschwitz and then Gaetan comes to the gate. He holds her, he cradles her and he says that he loves her. And it's the thing she's wanted the entire book. The entire book, she was just wanting to hear those words from anyone. And he avoided it the whole time. He never told her he loved her, even though she was wanting it so badly. And we all knew that he did, but when he finally said it, oh my word, I just sobbed. It was so precious.
In the back of the book, I read some of the extra author notes and Kristin Hannah who's the author said, "She knew it was good when she couldn't read it without crying." And she read it several times as she's editing the book and reading it and rereading it and bringing it to life. And she said, "I knew there was something really special in this moment when I couldn't even make it through without crying." I mean, it was just so powerful and so sweet.
Scene 2:
And then another moment is of course, when Vianne had to let Daniel or Ari go. I mean, she had hid him at her house. She finally got up the courage to take him into town and to lie to everyone in town and say that she had adopted him from a cousin and she trained him to say I'm Daniel. I'm Daniel, you're my mama, you're my mama, again and again, she did everything she had to, to keep him safe, cut his hair, did everything. And then in a moment, in a moment, one afternoon, she had to say goodbye and let him go. And I think that's such heartache, but what an act of love, like the capacity. I mean, she did not even have the capacity it seemed like to love in that way, but she did it. She let him go. And that was her loving him, was sending him to his family, even though it didn't feel like it. I mean, it was so heavy. I'm getting like emotional thinking about it.
Scene 3:
Okay, moving on to the third scene that I think showed the beauty of the human spirit's capacity to love is when Vianne chose to keep the secret from Julien, her son, the very end of the book. If you've read the book, you know the secret I'm talking about. The end of the book, she's standing there with Ari, the son that she had to let go and Julien. And Ari a the stranger to Julien, but he knows more about the war and about what they suffered through than Julien. And Julien is about to find out everything. It's such a powerful gripping moment.
But even in that moment, Vianne chose to keep her secret from Julien and where he came from and who his real dad was. And she chose to keep that secret because she wanted to preserve his dignity and right or wrong of her to do that. I mean, I don't know that I would have done that. I feel like that secret would have probably eaten me alive, but I'll let you decide. Right or wrong, all, it shows me this character in this book has shown me that the human spirit has a great capacity to love, to hope and to look to others and what's best for them more than yourself, more than we ever could understand or realize. Thought it was just beautiful.
All in all, I'll never forget this book.
I will forever be grateful I read it this year in particular because it is such a gift of perspective. It's reminded me we really never know what someone has gone through. And it will always remind me of the great and beautiful capacity that God has given us to love instead of hate.
So grateful, loved The Nightingale and I hope you love(d) it, too.
Work & Play Cornerstore
This is where I share a book I'm loving and I think I'm loving. And for quick access, I just want to say, you can always head to nancyray.com/cornerstore and it's going to take you directly to Amazon so you can see everything I've ever mentioned here on the podcast or on Instagram.
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So of course my book is going to be The Nightingale. If you listened to it and you listened to all the spoilers and you still haven't read the book, and now you really want to just go and get yourself a copy because it's so good.
The other “thing” I wanted to mention is my camera. I know that's maybe like, oh yeah, Nancy takes pictures. I don't know. But my camera is actually a new camera that I bought after the end of Nancy Ray Photography. It's smaller, it's still full frame, it's mirrorless and it takes gorgeous pictures. It's the Sony A7 III. I still don't know the professional way to say it. That's kind of embarrassing, but that's what it is. I'm going to leave a link. I have just really loved it mostly because my Mark III is kind of bulky and big, but this one is smaller and it's so easy to take with me wherever I go. And it's incredible. That's all I'm going to say. I really enjoyed it this summer.
All right, I'm going to close with some of my favorite words from The Nightingale:
"But love has to be stronger than hate or there's no future for us."
May you choose love this week, friend.
