Robert Eisenman

Suzanne Fisher Robert Eisenman

Suzanne Fisher continues the story of Triphammer Falls but now all the action is in Europe. It follows James Levin from the time he lands at Le Havre till a month later when he meets Suzanne at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Once in Paris, they take a room together on the Left Bank, but find there really wasn't much they could get done there nor achieve living as they were in a dollar-a-day hotel room in "The Latin Quarter." The book takes place completely in Europe at a time when it really was a "Bohemian Paradise" and there wasn't any place you really couldn't get a room for less than a Dollar a night. Suzanne is petrified of her father and that he will find out they are living together in Paris and, therefore, bring her home. Levin decides to solve the problem unilaterally, as it were, and goes, albeit unwillingly, not to Vienna - where he had always wanted to return - but to Alt Aussee in the Austrian Salzkammergut, which some people at a Café on the Left Bank, The Contrascarpe - known for its guitar-playing folk singers, French, English, Scottish, and American, near where Hemingway used to live - had recommended to him. From there, still unable to work effectively because of worrying about Suzanne alone in Paris, he goes to Vienna and several times back to Paris before finally going down to Hydra off the Coast of the Peloponnesos (since made famous by Leonard Cohen in his song So Long, Marianne) and the Greek Islands. It has also recently been discovered by the editors that Theodore Herzl, the acclaimed Zionist Thinker, used regularly to spend his summers at Alt Aussee. In Hydra, not only are Levin's adventures there described, but from there the last stages of his relationship with Suzanne Fisher are worked out before he finally returns to Paris one last time where the book reaches a climax.