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Summary
Summary
A 2020 INDIES INTRODUCE PICK
A POIGNANT RUNAWAY BESTSELLER full of French charm and memorable characters, Fresh Water for Flowers is Valérie Perrin's English debut.
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues--gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest--visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences.
Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole--local police chief--who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien's inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette's own difficult past.
With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin has given readers an intimately told story that tugs on the heartstrings about a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, despite it all. A number one bestseller in France, Fresh Water for Flowers is a heartwarming and tender story that will stay will readers for years after the final page is turned.
"Breathtaking."--Unidivers
"Thundering applause. And, believe us, the word 'thunder' is not too strong."--La Marseillaise
Summary
Violette Toussaint è guardiana di un cimitero di una cittadina della Borgogna. Ricorda un po' Renée, la protagonista dell'Eleganza del riccio, perché come lei nasconde dietro un'apparenza sciatta una grande personalità e una vita piena di misteri. Durante le visite ai loro cari, tante persone vengono a trovare nella sua casetta questa bella donna, solare, dal cuore grande, che ha sempre una parola gentile per tutti, è sempre pronta a offrire un caffè caldo o un cordiale. Un giorno un poliziotto arrivato da Marsiglia si presenta con una strana richiesta: sua madre, recentemente scomparsa, ha espresso la volontà di essere sepolta in quel lontano paesino nella tomba di uno sconosciuto signore del posto. Da quel momento le cose prendono una piega inattesa, emergono legami fino allora taciuti tra vivi e morti e certe anime, che parevano nere, si rivelano luminose. Attraverso incontri, racconti, flashback, diari e corrispondenze, la storia personale di Violette si intreccia con mille altre storie personali in un caleidoscopio di esistenze che vanno dal drammatico al comico, dall'ordinario all'eccentrico, dal grigio a tutti i colori dell'arcobaleno. La vita di Violette non è certo stata una passeggiata, è stata anzi un percorso irto di difficoltà e contrassegnato da tragedie, eppure nel suo modo di approcciare le cose quel che prevale sempre è l'ottimismo e la meraviglia che si prova guardando un fiore o una semplice goccia di rugiada su un filo d'erba.Un romanzo avvincente, commovente e ironico la cui lezione universale è la bellezza della semplicità e l'eterna giovinezza in cui ci mantiene il sogno.
Author Notes
Valérie Perrin was born in 1967 in Remiremont, in the Vosges Mountains, France. She grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris in 1986. Her novel The Forgotten Sunday (2015) won the Booksellers Choice Award and the paperback edition has been long-selling best-seller since publication. Her English-language debut, Fresh Water for Flowers (Europa, 2020) won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was named a 2020 ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next List title. It has been translated into over thirty languages. Figaro Littéraire named Perrin one of the ten best-selling authors in France in 2019, and in Italy, Fresh Water for Flowers was the best selling book of 2020. Perrin now lives in Normandy
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Perrin's English-language debut is a tender and poignant exploration of love, loss, and redemption. Violette Toussaint, a middle-aged cemetery keeper, narrates the events that lead up to her husband leaving her. An orphan who survived a chaotic childhood, Violette taught herself to read and married the well-off, older Phillipe Toussaint in 1986, when Violette was 18. After a year, Violette grows distant after she senses Phillipe's infidelity. When their jobs on the railway become automated, they move to Brancion-en-Chalon to become cemetery keepers. After a month, Phillipe leaves and doesn't return, leaving Violette to develop a pleasant routine entertaining visitors with food and wine in the cemetery's bucolic lodge. When Julien Seul, a detective, shows up to bury his mother, Violette is unnerved by how much he knows about her life. Perrin plaits the novel with the complex backstories of Violette, Phillipe, Julien, and Julien's mother and her lover. While the storylines sometimes feel as if they're competing with one another and tamp down the tension, Perrin keeps the reader engaged with a gradual payout of secrets that each character tries to protect. Perrin is adept at creating a flawed, amiable cast, and Violette is a delightfully engaging narrator. This enchanting indulgence in nature, drink, food, and friends is worth a look. (July)
Kirkus Review
French bestseller Perrin makes her English-language debut in an atmospheric novel rife with adulterous romances, bad marriages, mysterious deaths, and lots of burials. The frequent burials are because narrator Violette Toussaint is a cemetery keeper at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery in Burgundy. She arrived there some 20 years ago with no-good husband Philippe, a philanderer and spoiled mama's boy who did her a favor by disappearing shortly after they took up the post. Except Philippe turns out to be living 100 kilometers away with another woman, she learns from Julien Seul, a handsome detective who came to the cemetery because his recently deceased mother, Irène, had inexplicably decreed that her ashes be placed on the grave of a man buried there who was, needless to say, not her husband. At first, Perrin unspools her plot in a leisurely manner, intertwining Violette's recollections of her trying marriage, the records she keeps of what was done and said at individual gravesides (touching testimonies to the infinite varieties of loss and grief), and amusing portraits of the eccentric cemetery staff. Once Julien enters to disrupt Violette's neatly ordered world, the author augments an already busy narrative with plot strands concerning Irène's decadeslong affair, the growing attraction between her son and the cemetery keeper, the tragic story of the Toussaints' daughter, and a chorus of new voices that soften our view of the not-quite-as-rotten-as-he-seemed Philippe. It's a lot for one book, and the novel does sometimes falter under its own weight, but Perrin's eye is so compassionate, her characters so many-faceted, and the various mysteries she poses so intriguing that most readers will happily go along for the long ride toward a pleasingly romantic conclusion tempered by one last funeral. Overstuffed, at times rambling, but colorful and highly enjoyable and pulled together by an engaging narrator. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker of a cemetery in a small French village. At middle-age, she lives comfortably in solitude, as her philandering husband Philippe left years ago. Her contentment is disrupted when detective Julien Seul turns up with an unusual request--to inter his mother's ashes on the grave of her longtime lover--as well as an unexpected revelation--he knows where Philippe has been living. Eager to get a divorce, Violette contacts him, stirring up reminders of their troubled and tragic past. Perrin reveals Violette's personal history in alternating chapters, showing the reader the path that led her to her solitary and contemplative life, as well as the reasons why Philippe left. Serle's translation is fluid and rich in detail, capturing Violette's unique perspective and her vivid inner life. The story is full of unexpected turns and painful revelations, but there are joyful moments interspersed throughout as well. There's no pat, happy ending here, but a finale full of contentment and hope that fits with the tone of the story. Fans of Elizabeth Berg will enjoy this thoughtful take on the inner life of an unforgettable woman.
