The Flight Portfolio by Julie OrringerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a blend of fiction and nonfiction (troublingly so for many reviewers) based on the life of Varian Fry. Fry worked tirelessly to help smuggle leading artists and intellectuals out of Vichy France during World War II. He helped people such as Marc Chagall, Hanna Arendt, Max Ernst, and about 2,000 others get to safety in America, often against the wishes of the American government. It raises the interesting question of whether one person’s life is more valuable than another’s. With limited funds, is it right to say we will give priority to saving someone who is brilliant and famous rather than someone unknown, who may have shown up at a refugee agency sooner?
Varian Fry was a closeted homosexual, and the story told by Julie Orringer weaves a relationship between him and another man into the storyline to carry the reader along. I’m not sure that was necessary. It made for entertaining reading, but I did feel that that part of the storyline ended too neatly. I wasn’t overly surprised to discover that this part of the story was made up. Unfortunately, it did make me wonder how much of the rest was fictional. As someone who is also working on a book that will blend fact and fiction (because there are important chunks of my subject’s life which cannot be documented), I was curious to see how she approached it. Ideally, I think, there should be a clarifying note to the reader at the start of the book rather than at the end. But, I suppose that would have taken away some of the suspense of the story, so I understand why she chose to put her note at the end.
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