This was a delightful book, the kind where you savor every paragraph just for the beauty of the words. It is the story of Perdu, a 50ish bookseller operating from a barge in the Seine River in Paris. He offers books to patrons based on his perception of their emotional needs all the while ignoring his own pain at the loss of his great love, Manon. She'd disappeared while he was sleeping, leaving a letter he has not opened in twenty years. When he finally succumbs, it sets him on a journey into the life he's been missing. I enjoyed reading it slowly so much that I didn't mark many passages. It might require a second reading.
Quotes:
"What task do the departed want us to do? To carry them within us - that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then... then we are no longer present either."
"Do we only decide in retrospect that we've been happy? Don't we notice when we're happy, or do we realize only much later that we were?"
"Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh."
Published: 2015 Read: March 2021 Genre: Fiction
No comments:
Post a Comment
Post your comments here, would love to hear what you think