Il Museo delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan

 Il Museo

delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan is pretty diversified.

I found it, I confess, pretty dispersive, because the thematics opened by the author are many and maybe because I would have preferred to read  more adventures and magic of the museum of broken promises (hoping to read a book of museum of kept promises, we musn't be constantly pessimistic regarding the human nature) than the heavy, complicated, multiform past of Laure.

I have been to Prague during the Communism, 1989, close to the end of this dictatorship, so I tend to read books where Prague is one of the main attractions because I left there a good part of my heart! It's a city simply enchanting and unique.

Said this, the story starts with a failed marriage, the one of Laure, the idea, being childless and completely alone of opening a museum of broken promised, a choice, this one, because of her connection with the past, in the enchanting city of Paris. The musem is not just successful: the museum is great because puts in connection the feelings of people with the objects that they find in the place, and rooms that they visit. Sometimes their reactions are violents, other ones more calm but always profound. 

Laure hides a lot of her personal story and starts to be affectionated to a starved, loney cat.

A reporter from the South of the Usa, young and with the desire of writing a good piece in connection with Vanity Fair, contacts Laure. Laure is diffident because young reporters are more aggressive than the rest of the category to her point of view.

Slowly, the museum becomes always more pale while the main story becomes the one experienced by her when she was as an au-pair in Prague, baby-sitting two children and spending time with a depressed woman and a husband worried for his wife. That ones were the years of the Communism and people whispered more than talking, together, spied, considered enemies if they spoke a fluent english. Soon Laure meets along her way an artist, Simon who is also trying to make oppisition to the regime...

Plenty of questions that will be resolved at the end, there won't be a happy end in the classic way we imagine it: the author hasn't completely captured what it meant the lack of freedom in the Communist Prague to me, but she went close to it. 

It was a palpable feeling and a sufferance that was in grade of capturing every sphere of the person.

Said that, the book is a good reading for sure and I highly recommend it to you.

Anna Maria Polidori