Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Serle
Published in 2020, by Europa Editions UK, Fresh Water for Flowers is Valérie Perrin’s English debut. It is one of the best novels I have read in 2021; a triumph that creates the perfect synthesis of grief and joy, cruelty and compassion, anger and hope, suffering and wellbeing, and solitude and companionship.
This is a novel set in a place of death, but Violette Toussaint makes it a place of life, hope, and memory. Caretaker of a Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne (Burgundy), she keeps this final resting place a haven love and pride.
My cemetery is very beautiful. The avenues are lined with centenarian linden trees. A good many of the tombs have flowers. In front of my little keeper’s house, I sell a few potted plants. And when they’re no longer worth selling, I give them to the abandoned graves.
I planted some pine trees, too. For the scent they produce in the summer months. It’s my favorite smell.
I planted them in 1997, the year we arrived. They’ve grown a lot and make my cemetery look splendid. Maintaining it is all about caring for the dead who lie within it. It’s about respecting them. And if they weren’t respected in life, at least they are in death.
I’m sure plenty of bastards lie here. But death doesn’t differentiate between the good and the wicked. And anyhow, who hasn’t been a bastard at least once in their life? [p. 22]
Violette’s world revolves around the tending of the graves and the care of the heartbroken. Her friends are the people who cross her path there, random visitors and her companions: three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest.
As she tells us:
I still have several men around me. The three gravediggers, Nono, Gaston, and Elvis. The three undertakers, the Lucchini brothers, named Pierre, Paul, and Jaques. And Father Cedric Duras. All these men stop at my place several times a day. They come for a drink or a snack. They also help me in the vegetable garden, if I have sacks of compost to carry or leaks to fix. I regard them as friends, not colleagues. If I’m not in, they can come into my kitchen, pour themselves a coffee, rinse their cup, and set off again.
Gravediggers do a job that prompts repulsion, disgust. And yet those in my cemetery are the gentlest, most agreeable men I know. [p. 18]
I recently read that Fresh Water for Flowers became a best seller in France and Italy during COVID and I can understand why. Not only has the author developed characters with whom we want to spend time, but she comforts us by introducing us to a young woman who goes through some of life’s most tragic events and succeeds in keeping her head and her heart in the right place throughout.
It’s when living through what I’m living through now that you know everything’s fine, that nothing’s serious, that human beings have an extraordinary ability to rebuild themselves, to cauterize themselves, as if they had several layers of skin, one on top of the other. Lives one on top of the other. Other lives in store. That the business of forgetting has no limits. [p. 161]
This elegant novel assures us to have hope, keep loving, keep caring and we’ll get through this!
