Fresh Water for Flowers

Fresh Water for Flowers / Valérie Perrin;

trans. from the French by Hildegarde Serle

NY: Europa, c2020

476 p.

Europa always puts out such lovely books; when I saw this one arrive at my library I knew I had to read it. It's been getting a lot of attention from readers, too, and almost all comments that I've seen are overwhelmingly positive.

Sadly, I was not overwhelmed by this book. I thought it was far too long - the middle was really saggy. But there were bright moments that I really loved as well. 

In brief: Violette Toussaint is a caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. She has a small lodge there, and both visitors and her coworkers often drop in for a chat, a drink, some uplift, and of course, information. She seems quite happy with this routine. Then Julien Sole arrives; he's a detective but is there to ask if he can fulfill his mother's last wish to have her ashes interred with someone he doesn't know. There's a story there.

Violette and Julien both have parts of their past that they don't talk about, but as the story progresses more of those secrets come out. Not necessarily to one another, but to the reader at least. The problem is that the reader then can see what's coming for a long time, which is why I found the middle part of the book was a bit dragged out.  

The tone of the book is very French, lots of detail about the dysfunctional relationships of their pasts, particularly Violette's, and she is the typical doormat who puts up with a lot of crap for "love". Terrible things happen; she finds solace from her grinding job as a railway crossing attendant in this new cemetery job. One of the other issues I had with this story was that reading Violette at the beginning, in her tired voice, at her remote cemetery lodge, she comes across as an older woman, quite worn down. I was picturing her in her late 50s or early 60s. She's actually much younger and it discombobulated me as I learned more - I had to keep changing my image of the character to match up.

I would've liked a leaner story with less about Violette's past and the traumatic incident that eventually comes out. It was so horrific, and I found it terrible to keep going back to. The elements in the present day, at the cemetery, interacting with the people around her, were nicely done; interesting characters, funny or meaningful dialogue, the beauty Violette finds in the quietness of life there and her tiny garden. I appreciated that she was able to move on to something more stable and hopefully positive, in her own quirky way.