“Surrender to the treasures of books . . . Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes . . .” — Literary apothecary, Jean Perdu
Virlee wrote, “I have a ‘wall of words: 14 feet of space in the living room. There are also bookcases in all the other rooms except the bathrooms and laundry room. Books give me comfort….I like to see them stacked on the floor, spilling out of bookcases, stacked on chairs and stools! Sometimes they also accumulate in the car.”
The Little Paris Book Shop by Nina George that friend Jana recommended has been added to my list of favorites. It’s a charming, poignant and funny story of guilt and redemption and love lost and love found with a cast of unique characters.
Its protagonist, fiftyish Monsieur Perdu, is quirky, secretive, solitary, standoffish, and melancholy. However, since he’s also very kind, he’s talked into giving an unused table to a beautiful, sad, distraught woman who has been discarded by her husband and thrown into poverty and has moved into an apartment where he lives.
What to do? The table is in a room across which he has built shelves of hundred of books — “a wall of words,” as he calls it. He hasn’t been in there for years and dreads entering it now. I asked myself, “Why is that? Could the skeleton of someone he’s murdered be in there?” You’ll have to read the book. I won’t bore you with a he-said, she-said, they-did synopsis of the plot. I heard too many of them when I taught English!
Perdu is the proprietor of a bookstore of 30,000 volumes on a barge parked on the Seine. He views the shop as a sort of a pharmacy and calls himself a literary apothecary. He has the unique ability to use his ears, eyes and instincts to discern what each soul lacks and prescribes the right books to help. He refuses to sell patrons books that he considers unsuitable for them.
He explains, Books are like people, and people are like books.
I prepare a medicine made of letters: a cookbook with recipes that read like a wonderful family Sunday. You see, a book is both medic and medicine at once. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments, that’s how I sell books. Books are more than doctors. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip on the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some . . . well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a brief, torrid love affair.
Alas, Perdu whose name means “lost” has been unable to mend his own broken heart and has walled himself off from relationships. And then unexpected events turn his tranquil, detached life upside down. He discovers that memories will out and must be dealt with. He precipitately embarks on a voyage that takes him and his barge via canals and rivers to the South of France.
The Little Paris Book Shop is a love letter to books and France and a sensual journey from the Seine to the Mediterranean. It also brought out a naughty streak in me. Perdu and a woman he loved danced naked to the music of the Argentinean tango. Oh dear! I keep imagining various couples . . . wclarke@comcast.net
P.S. A new image has been stored in my internal trunk. Last night, even though it was raining, the western sky featured a lovely orange sunset while a big rainbow was spread across the eastern sky. I felt as the great Wordsworth wrote, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.”