The Little Paris Bookshop.

Nina George’s novel The Little Paris Bookshop, originally published in German as Das Lavendelzimmer (“The Lavender Room”), was a global bestseller shortly after its 2013 release and has been translated into over 30 languages. (Her website says “335 languages,” but I’m going to assume that’s a typo.) It’s … fine. It’s better than most popular fiction, certainly, and George infuses the work with her own expansive literary knowledge, but for a book that’s been marketed and reviewed as an inspiring, life-affirming sort of story, much of the plot itself left me rather cold.

Monsieur Jean Perdu runs a quaint bookshop on a little boat that’s moored in the Seine in Paris, from which he dispenses books like medicine, ‘reading’ his customers’ needs and diagnosing the proper books to treat what ails them. Of course, the one person he can’t help is himself; he’s been mooning over his lost love for twenty years, after she left him without warning to return to her husband, leaving just one letter that he never opened because if he had there wouldn’t be much of a story here. A circumstance occurs in the form of a new neighbor in his apartment building, a woman who’s just been thrown over by her husband, whom Perdu helps with a book and some furniture, and who ends up opening the letter and thus opening the rest of the story, in which Perdu, a young, bestselling author with writer’s block named Max, and a few stray eccentrics they pick up along the way set sail for the south of France to get the answer to the twenty-year mystery of Perdu’s paramour.

This book could have gone very, very wrong, but George at least avoids the most hackneyed or sentimental tricks of popular fiction – she has Perdu discover early in the book that his former lover died shortly after leaving him, to pick one ending I was afraid we’d get, and if you get the sense that Max might be Perdu’s son, as I did at one point, he’s not. The ending is a little sappy, and frankly not that believable given what we know of the two main characters; there’s also an absurdly coincidental answer to Perdu’s secondary quest, the search for the actual identity of the author of one of his favorite novels. Max is also a stock character, a literary wunderkind (and, apparently, a handsome devil) who’s stymied by the success of his first book and can’t seem to get started on his second one, only, of course, to find his true or second calling in the course of their sojourn down the river.

Perdu is at least the novel’s one credible, three-dimensional character, more than anything else for the way George portrays his grief. Perdu’s life outside of his work stopped when his lover left him, and if we can overlook the absurdity that he’d refuse to open the letter (but, say, would trash his furniture in despair), his arrested development after that point is a thoughtful depiction of someone who just can’t get over the death, or at least in this case the disappearance from his life, of a loved one. Telling the reader “you have to continue to live your life” as an answer to grief isn’t exactly profound, but the way that George incorporates Perdu’s knowledge of literary fiction, mostly real books, is novel (no pun intended) and gave the book a level of interest for me that elevated it above most popular fiction I’ve encountered. George didn’t stick the landing, but she didn’t flub it, either.

Next up: Just about done with Margaret Ayer Barnes’ Years of Grace.