Tuesday, September 1, 2015

A Lovely Book

I just finished reading Nina George's The Little Paris Book Shop, and I am so pleased that what I thought might be at best a mild and pleasant diversion turned out to be so much better and so much more.


What a delightful book this is! I've been reading things that are very good but rather grim, it seems, and this lovely novel was such a breath of fresh air. But it's not fluffy or silly; all the pleasures are earned, and the characters change and grow beyond the pain they begin with. Jean Perdu is a lonely man whose name ("perdu" is French for "lost") reflects his emotional condition. He lives a solitary, spartan life in his Paris apartment, and although he knows his neighbors most of his social contact comes at work; he owns a floating bookshop on a barge on the Seine, where he practices his uncanny ability to know what a customer should read. 

But he's not so good at taking care of his own emotional needs. Perdu is lonely because the love of his life left him twenty years earlier and he has never recovered, and then, suddenly, he is presented with a letter she wrote to him before her departure, a letter that changes how he feels about everything. He casts off his barge and begins a life-changing voyage down the Seine and ultimately to the wine country of Provence, to discover what happened to his beloved Manon. On this journey he is accompanied by a young novelist who can't deal with his fame, who leaps onto the barge uninvited, and two cats (Kafka and Lindgren). Along the way they meet a wonderful assortment of characters who help Jean (and Max, the young novelist) to take stock of themselves and their feelings so that when friendship and, yes, love arrive, they can recognize them and appreciate them.

I couldn't help thinking of this as a sort of French Huckleberry Finn since, after all, we have two male characters floating down the country's most important river, one older, one quite young, both in search of something - freedom, happiness, resolution of issues from the past. But The Little Paris Bookshop is very different, really, and not just because it feels very French. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of an older man who is, at last, becoming wiser about things of the heart; it is a gentle, meditative reflection on those things, and I found myself reading slowly because I wanted to savor every observation, every feeling. I was happy while I was reading it, and it makes me smile to remember it.