Book Review: The Little Paris Bookshop

Oh, how I wanted to love this novel! Paris! Books! A premise about a literary apothecary who prescribes books to meet various human emotional needs. A secretive letter long ignored with the potential to heal a two-decade-long heartbreak. The back cover proclaims "The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives." Sadly, the entire book was written from a worldview I cannot countenance and lauded a lifestyle I cannot embrace.

Monseiur Perdu is a bookseller working from his Paris book barge to recommend the perfect titles for each customer who darkens his door. Unfortunately, he helplessly casts about for a remedy to his own soul-sickness, a lost love who left him a departure letter twenty years before. When a new destitute neighbor moves into his apartment building, he is cajoled into offering up a small table to help furnish her space. The woman opens the drawer of the table and finds the long-forgotten (or ignored) letter. When Perdu finally opens the missive, he is shocked to find news he couldn't have anticipated and should have responded to immediately.

As I said, the premise is so full of promise, yet the execution left me yelling at the CD player in frustration. The underlying message to the story proclaims that because "restless love has been with us since the beginning of time," therefore, "love doesn't need to be restricted to one person to be true." Basically, the novel attempts to glamorize adulterous love. How could a person be expected to limit their sphere to one source of love? Why should a person show fidelity to a vow of love? Love, after all, is a magical thing not to be denied. What hogwash! Just because lust has tempted mankind from the moment Eve took of the apple doesn't automatically follow that it is right and good to indulge and cater to that lust. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an individual betrayed by adulterous love who felt it was right and good that their fidelity was answered with infidelity.

I'm actually quite surprised that I kept listening to the darned thing; it wasn't like I was enthralled with the story line - the trip down the Seine felt endless. Perhaps it was due to the mental fog created by my bout with bronchitis. I should have abandoned it. Although the writing was very poetic, I bristled at the very foundation laid in this novel. I could have done with a lot more emphasis on the ode to books and less persistence with the delusional argument for the preeminence of love over faithfulness. I'm not alone in my dislike. The book garnered 157 one star reviews on Amazon. Would that I had spent those eleven hours listening to something more edifying!