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.