Book Review - Resonance by Michael S. Tobin and Daniel S. Chertoff

My Review

Resonance is a historical novel told in two timelines.  In 1971, Sophie Haddad, an American, is living and working at Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.  When she is asked to go through old documents in the basement, she discovers several diaries that become her obsession.  In 1922, Anna Grinberg arrives in Paris where she hones her craft as a sculptor.  Her diaries go through 1940, with the Nazi threat ever-present in Paris.

I wanted to read Resonance because I love historical fiction.  I enjoy books set in Paris, and the Shakespeare and Company setting was appealing.

This is an interesting book.  It starts as Sophie's story, as she seeks healing from her sad early years, and a sense of direction.  Then there is a long section told in diary format, chronicling Anna's life over the span of 1922 - 1940. The book concludes with Sophie making sense of what to do next with the discovery of the diaries.

It took me a little bit to immerse myself in the world of this book.  The storytelling is formal and stylized.  Sophie and Anna's smallest encounters have very high dramatic stakes, so we don't see a lot of quiet, everyday life.  For instance, Sophie meets different people in a park and has very deep conversations with them right away. 

That said, I found both their lives interesting and especially found the impact of Anna's story on Sophie to be compelling.  I found the epigraph for Part I of Sophie's story to be absolutely perfect:  "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (William Faulkner). 

Anna's story is a winding one - including encounters with Ernest Hemingway, and living in the orbit of Gertrude Stein.  That glimpse of 1920's Paris was fascinating.

I also liked Anna's insights on her journaling process:

"Here is a truth:  I write after thirty-one days of silence to force myself to understand why I do not want to write.  That is a lie.  I know why.  If I write, it is real.  If I do not, memories fade like mist, and pain dulls" (p. 126).

Resonance is a sensitively told novel that meanders through history and through big thoughts and themes (love, art, personal vision) in a serious way.  It is both historical fiction and a distinctly voiced literary novel.

Book Synopsis

PARIS, 1971

In the basement of Shakespeare and Company, Sophie Hadad—a restless Wellesley student from Charleston, West Virginia, motherless and adrift—uncovers a forgotten valise. Inside lies the diary of Anna Grinberg, a Jewish sculptor born in Warsaw in 1900, orphaned when her father is murdered in a pogrom and her mother is claimed by the Spanish flu.

PARIS, 1922

Anna arrives in the city with nothing but her will to create. Her diary is fierce, intimate, and unsparing—alive with the pulse of Les Années Folles, when Montparnasse cafés throb with painters, sculptors, and expatriate writers reinventing art and language. She fights to carve a place among Pascin, Bourdelle, and Frenkel; finds allies in Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; and collides—dangerously—with Ernest Hemingway. Even in those incandescent years, she senses the gathering shadow over Europe and writes as if time itself were fragile.

Half a century later, Sophie bends over Anna’s words and feels them press against her own life. The diary refuses to remain merely historical. It exposes her evasions, unsettles her defiance, and forces a reckoning with identity, inheritance, and the past she has tried to escape.

Resonance unfolds in two distinct voices: Anna’s impassioned diary, lyrical and immediate, and Sophie’s sharp, searching, contemporary narrative. Together they tell a story of art, exile, and Jewish survival—passed not through monuments or archives, but from one woman’s hand to another—across time.

Author Bios

Michael S. Tobin has spent fifty-one years listening to people’s stories and just as long imagining his own. A clinical psychologist and award-winning author, he began writing at twelve with a three-act play on the Warsaw Ghetto—a child’s attempt to understand courage and loss. His memoir won the Silver Prize in the Nonfiction Book Awards, his novel The Veil earned third place in the BookLife Prize, and his essays have been awarded by The Free Press and Letter Review. He writes, he says, “to create characters who live at the edge of beauty and brokenness.” Michael sits on the Advisory Board of The ProHuman Foundation, founded by Daryl Davis.

Daniel S. Chertoff worked in various aspects of the investment industry but retired early to pursue doctoral studies in English literature. He has published academic articles and is an associate editor for an academic journal. Daniel’s first book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel (Toby Press, 2019), grew out of a series of extraordinary letters written by his father during Israel’s War of Independence. Perhaps most importantly, in the summer of 1972, Daniel was a “tumbleweed” at Shakespeare and Company in Paris — where RESONANCE begins.

Thanks to Subplot and TLC Book Tours for a review copy of this book.