Valerie Perrin, "Cambiare l'acqua ai fiori"

#books

There are those who hated this book and those who loved it. I belong to the second category. I picked it up with the intention of just giving it a first glance, but as soon as I opened it, I was immediately captured by that French aura - Valérie Perrin is Claude Lelouch's woman - by that delicacy of Valenciennes lace. Then, however, I plunged into the maelstrom of her mystery and into the constant changes of perspective and meaning, into the intrigued and deliberately mixed plots. A novel that, despite forcing you to an active and participatory reading, lets you read one chapter after another, precipitously, without being able to detach.
Violette is a cemetery guardian, she is ageless, elegant, her house smells of rose, tea, candles, candy pink dresses appear under her severe coats, a colony of cats and a few dogs live in her cemetery.
She has not always been a well-groomed and cultured woman, she has a past of abandonment, illiteracy, sloppiness. But she has always given so much love to everyone, she has always stood aside for others, she has always taken care of someone. Raised in a foster home, she then gave body and soul to a profiteering and anaffective but beautiful as a god husband. A husband that everyone falls in love with. A husband who cheats on her every night with those in range. She has a daughter with him, who perishes in an accident, which happens, no one knows how, in a summer colony. Violette dies inside along with her daughter and is then reborn.
As I said, the perspective of this exciting novel is constantly reversed, the development contemplates continuous time leaps, back and forth, which, however, always make the plot progress. What seemed to us in one way at first is transformed into other with twists and turns. The husband, Philippe Toussaint, who in the surname already seems to presage his wife's job, acquires interiority, becomes the main character, beyond any subplot. We understand his motivations, his sudden disappearance, his renunciation.
The protagonist is death, as omnipresent as it must be in a cemetery. It is neither exorcised nor sublimated, but lived, considered a common and ineluctable fact, analyzed in its everyday life and in universal, philosophical meaning. Violette attends all the burials, she notes the farewell speeches, the shape of the tombstones, the wood of the coffin. She takes care of the flowers, cleans the graves, receives inconsolable relatives in her house, collects their confessions, witnesses their past loves. The love stories told in this book are many, a deep, lasting love that goes beyond death.
Perrin has a light hand even when she is talking about mistreatment, suicides, sex without love, but the anguish still grips us, slowly, inexorably, made of chiaroscuro, impalpable details, and a veil of melancholy covers everything, sweet and fragrant like Violette's face powder, like her roses.