The entry below is b eing cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from a 2018 French publication, is a delicately developing mysterious story about people who are a little offbeat but emerge as complex and interesting characters. The principal character, Violette Toussaint, is introduced to us as “the cemetery lady.” She works as the keeper of a cemetery in Brancion-en-Chalon in Burgundy, France, living on site in a cozy house supplied by the municipality by whom she is employed. She runs a shop nearby that sells funeral accessories and flowers from the garden she cultivates. She often serves coffee or tea and sweets to the bereaved who stop by after burials.

Her own story is the thread around which these other stories weave. Violette Trenet was an orphan working in a bar when she met the man who, when she became pregnant, would become her husband, Philippe Toussaint. Initially, they work together as railroad crossing guards, manually raising and lowering barriers to cars crossing train tracks. Handsome and spoiled by his parents, Philippe spends all his time womanizing, riding his motorcycle, and playing video games. In the wake of a fatal tragedy befalling their daughter, Leonine, Violette spends more and more time at Leonine’s grave. Eventually, Violette takes over the job of cemetery keeper there, but shortly after she and Philippe move to the cemetery, he disappears.

Surrounded by a staff of oddball but endearing cemetery workers, Violette keeps a journal of people who are buried in her cemetery and tracks who visits the graves. A particular focus is a famous defense lawyer whose grave is regularly visited by his mistress, Irene. Her son, Julien, a handsome police detective, is also trying to untangle the connections.  Over time, the stories of their lives come into full view and weave together with Violette’s.

The novel is full of adulterous relationships, lifelong loves, betrayals, and tragic deaths of children, grief and resilience. Perrin explores the more vulnerable sides of the toughest characters and the transgressive aspects of characters who present as “good” people.  She empathizes with these contradictions and comes to write about them tenderly. Each chapter starts with an aphorism that reflects philosophically on the lives and deaths contained within each story.

Perrin’s landscape descriptions are vibrant and painterly. The reader is kept engaged by time frames that go back and forth over two decades or more. We work with her to fill in the missing pieces of people’s complicated lives.

Despite a slow start to the novel and a few too many life stories drawn from the tombstones of the deceased in Violette’s care, Fresh Waters ….. is a captivating read.  Its intrigue and charm,  its humanity and hope will  leave a smile on the face of its sternest reader.

Have You Seen Luis Velez by Catherine Ryan Hyde could well be a companion to Fresh Flowers for Water. 17-year-old Raymond Jaffe lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in Manhattan with his mother, stepfather and half-sisters. Every other weekend, he is with his biological father and hostile stepmother.  A biracial child, Raymond has just one friend, Andre’, who moves to California in the first chapter.  At school, as at home, Raymond is an outcast, lonely, awkward and, it seems, understood by no one.

The day of Andre’s departure, Raymond meets Millie, (Mrs. G.) an elderly blind white woman whose family fled the Holocaust when she was a child. She stands outside her apartment door, in a dimly lit corridor, calling out for Luis Velez, a volunteer who has helped her out three days a week and has gone missing. Raymond starts to replace Luis in caring for and doing errands with Mrs. G, shopping and going to the bank, making sure she eats.  At the same time, he undertakes a search of Manhattan for Luis Velez, in the process meeting many others by that name living all over the city.

How the 17-year-old and the 92-year-old become friends, answering unmet emotional needs in their own lives, is poignant and heart-warming. The sweetness of the novel is leavened by the unfolding mystery of the tragedy that befell Luis Velez, the indifference of people to the plight of others outside their immediate tribes; the challenges of privilege, race, gender, justice and injustice, brokenness and hope.

Ryan Hyde’s language is spare, her sentences simple and direct, her story line complicated but discernibly straightforward.  This small, well-told narrative tackles several weighty issues, dealing organically with some deep philosophical dilemmas, within the friendship of these two seemingly mismatched individuals who become like family to each other. One takeaway from the book, as observed by Mrs. G.: “Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it.”