Redheaded Reviews: Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin

Monday, July 22, 2019

Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin

This book is "inspired" by true events since for once the author couldn't find any reliable source material so she made up a great deal. And maybe that made the difference because this book wasn't as good as her other books The Aviator's Wife and The Girl in the Picture. This book was about Master and Mistress Ritz, the Auzellos, Blanche and Claude who run the Ritz in Paris during World War II. It's told through the eyes of both of them--each taking a chapter.

Claude's viewpoint starts at the beginning when they met in 1923 and he takes his job managing the Ritz. Theirs is a whirlwind romance and they're married before they know anything about each other including when Claude wants to take a mistress like all Frenchmen do and tells her about it. This does not go over well with Blanche who believes in being faithful to your spouse.

Blanche's dialogue picks up when the Nazi's have taken over Paris and the Ritz, though the hotel is allowed to stay open for business unlike the other hotels in the area. Sometimes she looks back in time to when she met Lily a Russian communist who goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They form a close friendship so that when Lily returns to Paris and needs help, Blanche gives it and demands that she be allowed to aide the Resistance. While Claude is obsessed with protecting the Ritz, Blanche is doing something important. But Claude promised no more mistresses until the phone starts ringing at odd hours and hanging up. A signal from his mistress to come running.

This book is just one more in a million books set during the War with people working with the Resistance. It is interesting to see how much Coco Channel who stays at the Ritz cozies up to the Nazis and begins a romance with one of them. But this book offers nothing new and I preferred other books such as Code Name Verity and D-Day Girls and All the Light We Cannot See. Maybe it would have been better if she had had more to work with. Or maybe the subject matter is overdone. Benjamin excels at writing books that are based on lots of source material but this book shows that she flounders when she has to make it up on her own. I give this book an extra star for being based on real people which somehow makes it more interesting. My score is three and a half stars out of five.

Quotes

He felt that women were at times more bothersome than they were pleasurable. But only at times.

-Melanie Benjamin (Mistress Of the Ritz p 59)

As if, in talking about her, she is real to him; and if he couldn’t talk about her, he’d be afraid she would disappear.

-Melanie Benjamin (Mistress of the Ritz p 108)

That is what occupation does—it wears you down until you accept evil. Until you can no longer define it, even. Let alone recognize it.

-Melanie Benjamin (Mistress of the Ritz p 238)