Recent Reviews
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
As this tumultuous year comes to an end, I decided to read Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop. After watching this book stay steady on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year, I thought a book about books might bring me comfort. Though the novel seems to be two novellas competing for control of the plot, it is a worthwhile book to read if only to remind us that literature can be a powerful and healing force.
John Perdu’s bookstore is a floating barge tied to a dock on the Seine River in Paris. Perdu views his bookshop as a “literary apothecary.” After his first love leaves him, his heart is broken and he spends his days selecting books that will hopefully mend his customers’ broken souls (and at some level his own). With an almost psychic sense of what ails a customer, he zeroes in on which book might heal that person. The premise is a bit overdone, yet that experience resonates with anyone who has felt the comfort of a powerful book.
Here are my two favorite Perdu quotes about books:
“I sell books like medicine. There are books that are suitable for 1 million people, others for 100. There are even medicine – sorry, books – that were written for one person only.”
“I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they're apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven't got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn't develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion for those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.”
Of course, like most people, Perdu’s intuitive directives don’t apply to himself. When the married woman he loved left him twenty years ago, he retreated into his bookshop and didn’t open the letter she left him. His view of her is naïve and immature (and did I say she was married?). But Perdu's overwhelming grief and fear caused by her departure prohibits him from opening the letter (a form of literature) that would have brought him some solace.
In the second part of the novel, Perdu unties his bookshop barge and begins both a physical and emotional journey to confront his feelings about the ending of that relationship. As his new friend Catherine states, “Everybody has an inner room where demons lurk. Only when we open it and face up to it are we free.” And that is what Peru does. He faces his demons and is able to start another chapter of his life. On this adventure, he begins to understand more about himself and the way he copes with pain. He concludes that his parents’ divorce affected him more than he realized and that his acute sensitivity rendered him emotionally paralyzed.
The second half of the book is less charming and concludes too neatly. Yet being in the presence of John Purdu and his two traveling companions as they float down the Seine discussing the importance of love, the meaning of life, and books that matter, it is easy to be swept away with them.
Away From Her by Alice Munro
Alice Munro, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 2013 for her book Dear Life, is among the greatest of short story writers. In her scores of stories, she offers microscopic observations that reveal larger truths about her characters. While her writing is precise and observant, the motivations of her characters are imprecise and opaque. I recently reread one of my favorite Munro stories, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which was made into a movie in 2007 titled Away From Her.
This heartbreaking story captures the slow painful effects of dementia on a long and complicated marriage. Fiona and Grant have been married for almost 50 years and Fiona, now at 70, is losing her memory. Munro’s narrator lays out the facts of Fiona’s decline without sentiment, “Over a year ago Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house.” After Fiona wonders off at the supermarket, she says to Grant, “You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you? You’re going to have to put me in that place. Shallowlake?” And Grant says, “Meadowlake. We’re not at that stage yet.”
But a paragraph later, on a cold January afternoon, Grant moves Fiona into Meadowlake. The transition is painful, as the rules prohibit Grant from visiting for a month to ease Fiona’s adjustment. Grant suffers. When he starts visiting Fiona, who acts as if she doesn’t know who he is or why he keeps coming to see her, Grant is perplexed. He asks the nurse if Fiona is “putting on an act.” During that month of acclimation, Fiona has become the constant companion to a man named Aubrey who is living at Meadowlake temporarily. The reader wonders if Fiona is retaliating for Grant’s past infidelities, or if Fiona is protecting Grant from her eventual demise.
When Aubrey returns to his home, Fiona is devastated. So Grant visits Aubrey’s wife, Marion, to ask her to let Aubrey visit Meadowlake for the sake of Fiona who has descended into depression. Grant’s primary motivation seems noble. He wants to ease his wife’s pain. That Grant loves Fiona is never in doubt. Grant has exhibited a version of loyalty in their long marriage, but he has not been loyal. So is he also atoning for his guilt? Is he proposing a relationship with Marion in exchange for Aubrey’s return to Meadowlake? When Marion calls Grant to ask him to attend a dance, is he acting on his pattern of infidelity or is he sacrificing himself for his wife? Munro describes their encounter but divulges nothing. Grant probably doesn’t entirely understand his motivations. And - spoiler alert - the reader simply learns that Grant has arranged for Aubrey to visit Fiona.
Munro’s captures the complexity of human emotion with her linguistic agility. Her writing is precise as a pinprick. She never becomes maudlin, nor does she pass judgment on her characters, even though this reader did!
Munro’s genius is that she writes engrossing stories and understands multiple motivations. With plenty of puzzle pieces provided, her readers can put the puzzle together in whatever way they choose. Each conclusion is plausible because there are so many complicated emotions percolating inside her characters. As Fiona says to Grant on the last page, “You could have driven away. Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me, Forsooken me. Forsaken.” Is she speaking of Grant's past betrayals or her present living situation at Meadowlake? Probably both.
This is a tragic story about the effects of dementia on a marriage characterized by steadfast love and constant betrayal. Maybe Munro is saying love, in all its possible permutations, is still love. And due to her exquisite restraint, she leaves her readers reaching for their own conclusions.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.
Nichole Bernier’s novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. explores the multi-dimensional facets of personhood. It reminds me of Elizabeth Strout’s collection of stories about her eponymous protagonist Olive Kitteridge. In each story, Kitteridge reveals a different dimension of herself depending on her role and relationship with the other characters. Similarly, Bernier examines, in her novel, the ways one character expresses and represses different aspects of herself. The integration of the different selves into one person can be difficult.
In Bernier’s novel, Elizabeth dies in a plane crash leaving her husband and three young children without a wife and mother. Her will states that her friend Kate should be the recipient of her trunk full of journals. The narrator suggests that Kate and Elizabeth are good friends. But as Kate begins reading Elizabeth’s journals, Kate realizes just how little she knew about Elizabeth. Their friendship begins when Elizabeth and Kate meet at a playgroup for their young kids. The intensity of raising young children is overwhelming and their shared journey of motherhood forges a bond between them. In this dimension of Elizabeth’s self, she is a confident, capable and loving mother.
Yet, as Kate begins reading Elizabeth’s journals, she learns that Kate had a sister who died when Elizabeth was twelve. It becomes clear to Kate that Elizabeth’s sister’s death was the pivotal event of Elizabeth’s life. Filled with guilt, shame and pain for the girl she had been, Elizabeth cannot shake the feeling that she killed her sister. Elizabeth’s parents divorce, her mother starts drinking and Elizabeth carries, like an internal weight, the guilt of the family’s disintegration. Elizabeth does not trust anyone; she learns to only confide in her journals. How can she trust another person when she doesn't even trust herself?
Elizabeth marries Dave Martin who is congenial and caring, but emotionally undemanding. There is good chemistry but she knows little about him and he knows even less about her. At some level she feels unworthy of a deeper connection. In her mind, she had killed her sister. Elizabeth wants to escape the sad, lonely and depressed girl she had become after the accident. She wills herself to be upbeat, cheerful and light. But she wrestles with her darker emotions by writing in her journals. She represses her feelings and makes safe emotional connections with people that don’t probe and push to discover more about her. Thought one could argue it is a gift to have the opportunity to reinvent oneself by omitting formative facts from one’s youth, in Elizabeth’s case, her firm façade was beginning to crack and bigger issues were emerging.
Elizabeth lives with the snowball effect of never processing the trauma of her youth. She keeps the ordeal and its aftermath to herself by hiding her suffering through sins of omission and bravely wearing a happy face.
Kate is stunned about this “other Elizabeth” she finds in the journals and concludes that she (and all people) should act with more empathy since everyone is suffering about something, even those we think we know well. These journals spur Kate to think about her marriage, career and life choices. Elizabeth’s journals also teach Kate to be more honest with herself and those around her. To paraphrase Kate, if you knew all there was to know about another person, you could forgive them anything.
Bernier’s ambitious novel attempts to explore the dimensions of friendship, honesty, repression, guilt, secrets, isolation and the gift of journal writing as the most honest form of self expression. Given the enormity of her task, she mostly succeeds. The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. reminds us of the emotional burdens people carry and encourages us to act with empathy and grace whether we know their burdens or not.
