Valerie Perrin (2020 [2018]) Fresh Water for Flowers. Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle.

Don’t judge the book by the cover. We all do. The cover of Fresh Water for Flowers is iffy. Poor even. But it didn’t stop it being the clichéd: The Number 1 International Bestseller, more than one million copies sold.  Most non-international books (my book included) sell 12 copies, which we’re grateful for without the hype and headlines. But hey, although I bear a life-long grudge, I’m willing do dive right in. In other words, I start reading.

Some books I give one paragraph.  

1

‘When we miss one person everywhere becomes deserted.

My closest neighbours don’t quake in their boots. They have no worries, don’t bite their nails, don’t believe in chance, make no promises, or noise, don’t have social security, don’t cry, don’t search for their keys, their glasses, the remote control, their children, happiness.’

Books ask questions of the reader. The first paragraph is a conundrum. It goes on for another two paragraphs listing all the thing her neighbours don’t do. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed I’ve given the narrator a gender.

2

‘What do you expect will become of me if I no longer hear your step, is it your life of mine that’s going. I don’t know.

My name is Violette Toussaint. I was a level-crossing keeper, now I’m a cemetery keeper.’

My reading taste, I like to think, is eclectic. I favour social realism. Twee sounding homilies piss me off. I’d be lucky to finish more than ten pages. Sshh, don’t tell anybody, I finished 476 pages and if there were more, I’d have read more.

Secrets of writing an international number 1 bestseller. The reader must fall in love with the protagonist. He or she must be rooting for him or her.

Violette Toussaint is an orphan. Charles Dickens knows when characters are orphans, they have a slanted view of the world. They do not expect much and are rarely disappointed. We’re rooting for her from page 1. We like orphans to succeed because it confirms our belief that our world, for all its faults, runs true. That gives us an emotional attachment to the protagonist that is child-like, but keeps us turning the pages. We want Violette Toussaint to win and find love despite herself.  

Violette as the keeper of a cemetery is also the keeper of stories of time and place. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables had a cast of memorable characters that speak for themselves. Violette’s story must echo their story too. When the dead speak, even in diary form of first love and true love, they must be entertaining. This can be used as a plot device to bring characters together.    

3

‘Let them take me or let them take my loved ones since one day all cemeteries will end up as parks.

In 1997, when our level-crossing was automated, my husband and I lost our jobs.’

A protagonist needs an antagonist. Here we have him. Violette’s husband, Phillippe Toussaint. Her first love.  She worked, illegally, in a nightclub behind the bar when she was seventeen in 1985. She poured herself into him. The reader knows it will end badly.  

Women formed a speed bump behand Phillippe Toussaint. They wanted him. He wanted them. His workshy, ‘eternal adolescence’, had been a succession of stories about him taking and not giving. He despises his mother, but knuckles under and takes on her characteristics and condemnation of girls like Violette who have had no upbringing.

He the taker and she the giver, have a child. All books ask questions of readers. Here we have the core. What happened to their daughter, Leonine? Uncover the engine of the story and hear it roar.

‘Death begins when no one can dream of you any longer,’ is an inscription in the cemetery on the grave of a young nurse.

Grief is a love story. Police chief Julien Seul (alone) visits Violette in her new life of opening and closing times. He makes what seems to him a strange request. Life and love gather in the knots of their separate lives. Every story needs a catalyst.

Will he or will she? Does life have second chances?

Stories don’t talk about themes. Characters live them for us. When we turn the page and grow to know them, we get to know our better self. Sweet. Fresh Water for Flowers. Yes. Yes. Yes.