Soon after this season’s year was announced, finding nothing published in 1949 in the local library, I logged onto the Internet Archive and, at first, found only a few options.

One of them was an exhibition catalogue of Palestinian artifacts held in Toronto that year, which included a compact history lesson that felt so urgent, so relevant, that I read it straight through.  It was seemingly staple-bound, about 60 pages long, with black-and-white illustrations, which was also interesting, as today’s exhibition catalogues are so fancy: hardcovered and glossy-paged.

I looked for it again this week, but no luck. I did, however, find other publications which create an interesting picture of life in Canada in 1949:

A few months ago, I visited the second-hand shop, where I found two novels (including John O’Hara’s and Elizabeth Goudge’s) which I added to two from my own shelves, as a small stack of potentials for this week’s reading. But neither of them suited my mood at the beginning of the month: O’Hara’s reads like a cross between dos Passos and Metallious, and Goudge’s like a cross between Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton.

In other moods, either could have been a match. But the days were slipping past, and I started to think, well, maybe a short story by Jean Stafford (“Children are Bored on Sunday”) would be the only viable choice.

But, Stafford can be so unsettling, I thought, so I picked up Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski (1915-1988). In my mind I had muddled it with another Persephone reprint, Miss Ranskill Comes Home, so you can see that I thought a story about a woman who finds herself alone on a desert island was my only hope for a lighter-than-Stafford story this event.

In fact, Little Boy Lost is not that story, it’s a light-hearted and buzzy little book about family life and home, set in France.

Noooo, it’s not THAT story either.

It’s the story of a young man (Hilary) who’s been fighting in the war and has returned home, to news of Lisa having been shot by the gestapo, the whereabouts of their baby boy (whom he hasn’t seen since the night of his birth) unknown. The story also spirals around another man (Pierre), who has gotten in touch with the military man, because he knew Lisa too, and made a promise to search for—and, hopefully, reunite—father and son. The search takes them to various places in and around Paris, and along the way, readers observe how wartime conflict has extended (rebuilding being more or less complete, severed ties being more or less bridged).

Of course, this story is bound to be sad, as neither man can escape their wartime experiences while they are navigating present-day France, where some were complicit with the Nazis and others were resistant. And as they move through the process of assembling the story of what-might-have-beens, they are also assembling ideas about what it means for both people and a nation to have endured such horrors, and for survivors to inhabit a world where memories loom large.

For me, the most interesting characters were a laundress (Mme. Quilleboeuf in the town of A—) and a Mother Superior at an orphanage there, who have each been positioned differently during hard times. As in her other novels, including To Bed with Grand Music (1946) and The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953), Laski’s women are complex and multi-faceted characters, who are always believable and not always likeable (who among us is ALWAYS likeable anyhow).

All of the characters are believable enough to carry readers through a gruelling and complicated process; the story is compelling right to the last page.

And it was an added bonus to have been reading it alongside the third volume in Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War (also about WWII) and Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, which was written during the war. Jansson’s author’s note begins: “It was the winter of war, in 1939. One’s work stood still; it felt completely pointless to try to create pictures.” But then, in 1945, Jansson picked up her half-written story, in response to a friend’s prodding, and she captured that time in pen and ink and paint. Just like Laski and so many others have done.

This week’s #1949Club is hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Thanks you two, for taking my reading in unexpected directions. Even when I don’t make a good decision for good reasons, there’s often a good book in the end!