Rat Man of Paris

The superb historical novelist Paul West's greatest accomplishment is this short, unsentimental yet oddly moving love story between a Parisian vagabond and the young woman who (against all bourgeois judgement) cleans him up and falls strangely in love with him in occupied Paris. Loosely inspired by stories of sightings of a real life character who wandered the city of lights with a trained rat during the war, West's gritty, twisted love story is among the best three novels I have read from the 1980s, along with White Hotel and Libra. A strange, rewarding read.