The Little Paris Bookshop
has an interesting premise: a middle-aged bookseller dispenses
emotional advice as he sells books, matching buyers with books to heal
their maladies. But Jean Perdu, the proprietor of the moored
boat-turned-bookshop on the Seine, hasn’t been able to overcome his own
depression.
When we find out that he’s been depressed for 20 years, and why, the
book starts to lose credibility. His lover Manon had left him without
explanation two decades before. When she sent him a letter weeks after,
Jean put it in a drawer of a desk he then locked in the locked room
that was Manon’s favorite. He doesn’t read the letter until he donates
the desk to a neighbor who needs furniture, and then he finds out that
Manon was dying of cancer. Now feeling guilty as well as
grief-stricken, Jean unmoors his floating bookshop and sets out down
the Seine to Manon’s home in the south of France. It was there that
Manon returned to die — to her husband, whom Jean knew about all along.
He would always have been the other man in Manon’s life, and yet he’s
not been able to get over her and have another relationship.
The Little Paris Bookshop was
a bestseller, probably because it hit the right notes with its happy
ending, eccentric characters (Jean excepted), and travelogue of the
Seine. But it’s predicable as well as unbelievable.
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