Howard Waldman

Back There Howard Waldman

Harry Grossman sees his world through the viewfinder of a battered camera. And he photographs it all, from the peeling posters and graffiti on grubby city walls to the most intimate moments of his mysterious French sweetheart. He becomes a permanent guest at her family's ramshackle country cottage, thirty miles and more than half a century away from modern Paris. Harry, the New York outsider, calls it paradise and photographs the Model T Ford on the roof, the archaic well and scythe, the top-secret wild mushroom spots, and the reluctant Lauriers themselves. They assume that Harry will soon be a member of the family, but the strange photographer with his growing mountain of prints and negatives and imperfect French is not a man for snap decisions. Aren't things already perfect in this paradise? Someone once said, though, that the only paradises are lost paradises. Back There is a touching and powerfully nostalgic transatlantic love story, sometimes verging on the comic, sometimes on the tragic. France and the French, too often caricatures of their own special reality, are presented with absolute authenticity. With soft-focus subtlety, Howard Waldman shows that Europe and America are two continents divided by a perceived common culture of art and love and that light-years separate Paris and Manhattan and the lives and values of the Lauriers and the Grossmans.