Lucien’s mistress, Adele, is too mercenary in her ambition. Colonel Schlegel is so extreme in his hatred and vengeance. In some regards, each of the characters is an archetype. As realistic as it might be, The Paris Architect is not for the easily disturbed. Violence happens without warning, and people are brutalized in the most extreme fashions. Instead, it is the idea that people would go to such extreme lengths to find one or two persons. However, it is not the gory details, of which there are plenty, or the mere idea of torture that are the most disturbing. Along the same lines, the torture scenes are also very uncomfortable to read.
It is a cold picture of the blinders people wear in order to survive. People are shot, the bodies picked up and driven away, and everyone goes about their business as if there were never any interruptions. People shot for living in the same apartment building as someone hiding a Jew, people shot for looking Jewish, for running without cause, for running with cause, for failing to collaborate, for capitulating too easily – no one was safe, but also no one looked askance when such things happened. What makes The Paris Architect such a difficult read is the speed with which a situation devolves into violence and the even more shocking speed of recovery from that violence. The German attitudes and actions towards Jews, in particular, but also anyone caught undermining German rule are nothing new many a book discusses them or uses this malevolence to further their own stories. Thoughts: The Paris Architect is brutal in its matter-of-factness. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.” Ultimately he can’t resist the challenge and begins designing expertly concealed hiding spaces-behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe-detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life for a cause he doesn’t really believe in. “Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews.
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