Dale Allan Pelton has illuminated modern history in a way that keeps the reader enthralled. Against a tender love story, conversations with recollections and numerous historical details depicting the traumas of modern and ancient war are brought to light. This volume of love and war has a poetic flow that makes for an enjoyable read. For those who enjoy deciphering the truth from legend, “Celine on Fire” will keep you fascinated beyond the point of just another review of history.
Young Celine is studying dance during post World War Two in Paris, where her beloved sister is a professor at the renowned Sorbonne University. As their lives develop against the Parisian background, Giovanni, a young Italian-American trumpet player becomes involved in the lives of both women. The historical facts flow throughout their conversations as well as those of the many colorful characters who enter their lives. African American Jazzman, Les Gordon relates the story of Emmett Till, a boy from Chicago who went to Mississippi and was killed because of an assumption of flirting; the flamenco dancer and political refugee from Franco’s Spain, Tomás Montoya pungently describes the American psyche being responsible for supporting McCarthyism: "He didn't create the fear, he just exploited it—Americans already had the fear." Marie Dvoracek, a painter in Prague, and Mansur Hashim, a Muslim African-American musician, contribute cultural theories on art and music—while dance and music provides an entertaining contrast to the grizzly historical accounts of a nation’s fanaticism and its destruction. >From ancient to present times, the incredible stories of injustices, atrocities and hardships as well as bravery, altruism and benevolence move throughout the pages questioning the morality of world leaders.
Pelton's thorough research into the "whys and hows" of how we got to where we are today is highly commendable. However, this is far more than a historical account of modern history, it is an intimate story of a young woman coming to an understanding of herself and the world around her. “Celine on Fire” provides an enchanting center of the remarkable world that we live in. It is a big book that is hard to put down because each chapter is an illumination of our American story that is full of fascinating facts, many of which are little known.— Esther Shaw
Every once in a while a book comes around that challenges your thinking and “Celine on Fire” realizes that challenge. To sum it up “Celine on Fire’ is a tour de force. When two sisters, Celine and Yvonne Colbert, fall in love with the same man, Giovanni Sandretti, a jazz musician and immigrant from Italy, it provokes a complexity of emotions difficult to resolve. While it is first and foremost a love story propelled by intense sensuality, what makes the novel so original is Dale Allan Pelton’s ability to weave into the story by means of the characters’ conversation—the fall of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler and the fatal consequences of World War Two in Europe and the Far East, the agony of the French Resistance, the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising by the Nazis, the horrors of Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and how European intellectuals and artists dealt with that reality.
While the music segues from Maurice Ravel to Claude Debussy, from Irving Berlin to Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra to Miles Davis, Pelton uses music as a multi-faceted lens to bring to life the 1950’s night life of African-American and French jazz musicians, the many moments reminding me of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in “American in Paris.” With her best friend, a French Algerian, the worldly 18-year-old Yasmina Hamina, Celine goes shopping at Galerie Lafayette trying on hats in the millinery department when suddenly before the mirror they burst into a hat dance, hitting a groove, trying on all of the hats, making up a dance to fit the hat, trying on berets and toques, bowlers and straw boaters, sailor hats and turbans, felt hats trimmed with “pink roses, yellow jonquils and purple lilies, spinning around and around, whirling faster and faster, wilder and wilder like drunken bacchantes.” Yasmina spins a straw hat at Celine who grabs it out of the air and spins it back. While the straw hat is still in the air, Yasmina spins another hat at Celine, with hat after hat flying overhead, till soon the air is filled with a flock of flying hats until they are nabbed by the floor manager, “a lady no taller than a gremlin, an aquiline nose, tortoise eyeglasses, and amber quartz necklaces ringed in heaps around her birdlike neck.”
On the night that the lovers are forced to separate, in a moment of desperation mixed with manic euphoria, begin to dance ecstatically in the rain, spinning their umbrellas, splashing in the puddles like Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain,” Giovanni and Celine dancing down boulevard Saint-Michel at rush hour, “sashaying through shoppers and sailors, students and lovers, leaping over trash cans, spinning around street lamps, leaping on top of fire hydrants and benches.” Turning down a side street, Celine leaps on the hood of a car and then on the top, with Giovanni following as she leaps to another car and then another all the way down the block, crosses the street, jumps on another car, leaping from car to car back to boulevard Saint-Michel where Celine runs out of cars—the lovers are suddenly trapped in a whirl of automobiles creating a traffic jam—a policeman blowing his whistle as they escape into the portal of a shop. Luxuriating in their sensuality, the lovers make love in the parks of Paris in sunshine and rain, a counterpoint to the violence of the Algerian War of Independence where torture and atrocities rage between French Paratroopers and FLN insurgents.
While Giovanni, the Italian-American trumpet player, is traveling on a jazz cultural exchange tour behind the Iron Curtain, we glimpse the grimness of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe in 1959, Tito’s break with Stalin, Truman’s airlift that saved Berlin, and the heartbreaking tragedy of the Hungarian Revolution—themes eerily similar to many of the forces we are seeing in today’s global climate, especially the conflict between the Ukraine and Russia, the results of Wahhabism, the bitter divide between Shia and Sunni, conflict between the Turks and the Kurds, Palestinians and Israelis—animosities still unresolved after World War One and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Not only is “Celine on Fire,” a passionate love story, it will appeal to amateur World War historians who will devour the drama Pelton delivers. It is intense reading—a profound work of literature and a must read! --- Mark Konjevod.
Though it is set in Paris in the 50s and early 60s, I found that “Celine on Fire” was really a book about why we are who we are now. Celine herself is a 14 year old who is in the process of becoming a dancer and a woman. The story ebbs and weaves through a Paris that has been a vortex in the history of the previous century. I like that its young Parisians, especially Celine, generate a wealth of stories of failed dynasties and strident conquerors and bizarre influences that all contributed to WWI and II and the Cold War period up to the Cuban missiles. The author Pelton seems to care about both the vagaries of current history and the arts that captivate young people, and by the end of the Celine, I discovered that I care about both as well.
I guess that to say you will learn many things you did not know will not be a surprise to readers of history. Celine offers the reader a chance to follow one young woman’s intriguing odyssey through a decade, but also, as a real bonus, lets you learn about French cooking and Flamenco and jazz trumpeters and Gypsies and the plight of American Indians -- and U.S. Marines trapped in Korea’s Chosen Reservoir -- along the way. Seriously, this should be a warning to people who cannot tolerate digression. But for the rest of us this book, Celine, holds out a “Welcome Home” sign to readers (and I am one of those) who delight in a read fraught with interesting and important historical issues that weigh upon the main characters, and weigh upon our current moment even more.--- David Hon.
