The Little Paris
Bookshop is such a modest, unassuming title for a book that is anything but.
It refers to The Literary Apothecary, a book store on a barge, moored on the
banks of Seine. Owner Jean Perdu believes books, as well as medicines (or in
some instances better than medicines) have a healing power, especially when a
person’s ailment is more emotional than physical in nature. He has spent his
lifetime divining a customer’s emotional woes and suggesting reading material
to help them heal. In focusing his attention and intuitiveness on strangers, he
has so far avoided turning his discerning eye on himself. For more than 20
years, he has armored himself from the hurt of his lover’s abandonment. Bitter and
resentful, he sealed off the room in his apartment that she had claimed as her
haven when in Paris and has found comfort in his relatively solitary life.
Then a new neighbor moves in to the apartment across the
hall. Catherine has just been ejected from
her husband’s life and home, and has landed in the apartment building at 27 Rue
Montagnard without a single stick of furniture. Surely, the busybody landlady
tells Perdu, he would have an extra table he could spare. Unhappily, Perdu
retrieves his extra table from the room he had sealed all those years before. Catherine
refuses to open the door to his knock, so he leaves it outside the door. Later,
Catherine hands Perdu a sealed letter she had found in the drawer of the table.
It was the letter his lover had written to him upon her leaving, which he had
never opened.
The small act of unsealing that letter wrenches from Perdu
all the emotions he had denied for so long. Now he needs to repair his own
spirit. On an impulse one morning, instead of opening The Literary Apothecary,
Perdu finds his tools, hauls up the gangway between
the barge and the bank, unties his moorings and begins a journey to rediscover
life. But this will not be a solitary journey, as Perdu had planned. As the
barge is drifting away from the river bank, Max Jordan calls for Perdu to wait,
tosses his bags (which don’t make it onto the boat) and takes a leap onto the
barge. Max is no stranger to Perdu, and he harbors his own emotional scars.
I loved this book from the very beginning. The characters
are well-defined and blend together much like an ensemble cast in a television
show. This is true of the minor characters as well. The Paris setting first
caught my attention, but a barge trip on the French waterways intrigued me, to
the point that I did a quick Google search and learned that I could take a
river/canal trip in France, on a hotel barge. If I had a bucket list, that
might go on it!
Sometimes I read a book with action and pace that compel me
to read on and on. Then there’s
The
Little Paris Bookshop, which is written to be savored, sip by sip, to the
very end. Like life on a barge in France -- relaxing, restorative, refreshing,
and unhurried.
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