The Flight Portfolio

Julie Orringer Explores Varian Fry's Unbearable Moral Conundrum

Publisher's Weekly, Mar 22, 2019

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From award-winning author Julie Orringer: a gripping, emotionally powerful narrative that, like her first novel, The Invisible Bridge, brilliantly juxtaposes the sweep of history with the fate of the individual.

The Flight Portfolio tells the story of one young American’s quest to save the lives of artists and writers fleeing the Nazis after the invasion of France. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor, recognized the darkness descending over Europe and decided to take action. With a group of like-minded New Yorkers he formed the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose mission was to help threatened artists and writers emigrate to the States; in 1940 he flew to Marseille as the Committee’s on-the-ground leader.

Amid the chaos of wartime France, and in defiance of the United States’ restrictive immigration policies, he procured false passports, secured visas, sought out escape routes through the Pyrenees and by sea, and every day made impossible decisions about who should be saved—all while under profound pressure, and in a state of irrevocable personal change. Among his many clients were Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall.

At the novel’s core is a provocative moral question: How do we weigh human lives? Is the life of a great artist any more valuable than that of an ordinary human being? And how might our personal concerns—embodied, in these pages, in the return of a powerful and unconventional love—shape our own actions and the fates of others?

Masterfully crafted, exquisitely written, and impossible to put down, The Flight Portfolio is an indelible and profound book, a tour de force from one of America’s most gifted novelists.

Praise & Reviews

“Magnificent… As in 2010’s superb The Invisible Bridge, Orringer seamlessly combines compelling inventions with complex fact… Brilliantly conceived, impeccably crafted, and showcasing Orringer’s extraordinary gifts, this is destined to become a classic.”
Publishers Weekly [starred review]

“An elegant, meditative novelistic reconstruction of critical years in the life of Varian Fry… The central point of intrigue, providing a fine plot twist, is also expertly handled, evidence of an accomplished storyteller at work. Altogether satisfying. Mix Alan Furst and André Aciman, and you’ll have a feel for the territory in which this well-plotted book falls.”
Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“Gripping….Orringer is a beautiful prose stylist who captures depth of meaning about complex human issues, and she addresses head-on the moral dilemma of making value judgments on individual lives. Vivid.”
Booklist

“Varian Fry lit a small, bright lamp in a world of darkness, and in the deft hands of Julie Orringer—under the spell of her masterful prose, her feeling portraiture, her classic spy-thriller plotting and her vivid recreation of that beautiful and terrible world—I found the radiance of Fry’s courage, flawed humanity, and steadfast resistance shedding an inexhaustible light on our own ever-darkening time.”
—Michael Chabon

“No book this year could possibly compare with The Flight Portfolio: ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less

“A historical novel absolutely relevant to our own time, The Flight Portfolio brings to life a hero as complex and engrossing as the agonizing ethical questions he faces. Orringer not only recreates the world of wartime Marseille, but seems to drop the reader there by way of a masterfully fashioned literary trapdoor–and anyone who picks up this spectacular novel risks a swift descent into its vivid and consuming swirl.”
—Nell Freudenberger