Fresh Water for Flowers (Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle)
2020; 496 pages
World tour stop #31
This showed up when I browsed through my local library’s ebook recommendations. I was in the mood for something European.
Blurb: Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues—three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest. Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother’s ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother’s story of clandestine love breaks through Violette’s carefully constructed defences to reveal the tragic loss of her daughter, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible. The funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, Fresh Water for Flowers brings out the exceptional and the poetic in the ordinary. A delightful, atmospheric, absorbing tale.
Yes, the book is “well-written”, from the point of view of style and literary technique, and of engaging the reader. But I was left with the question: what’s going on here, morally? What is this “love” of which so many people speak? Marriage seems to mean nothing, there is no commitment, affairs okay, it’s simply the “feel-good” that matters. It’s more subtly put than that, of course, but that’s the bottom line. And it seems as if the author supports this, and tries to get the reader to support it too – or, rather, presumes that the reader does so.
I wish the themes had been really explored.
I never knew that “cemetery keeper” is a fulltime job in France. That’s the way it’s described here, anyway.
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