essa mensagem de esperança e capacidade de regeneração que está patente no título original, “Changer L’Eau des Fleurs”, que adquiriu um carácter mais fatídico e funesto em português, com “A Breve Vida das Flores”, quando, para mim, a ideia é a oposta: rega-se uma planta ou muda-se a água a um jarro para que a vida se prolongue, para que haja uma segunda oportunidade na vida, a hipótese de ser feliz mesmo quando se é menos jovem. With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin gives readers the funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness. Reading this one on your deck, in the backyard, or in the garden is the perfect place to enjoy this one.

A recluse in a way, at night when it’s quiet and the people she interacts, with the gravediggers - Nono, Gaston, Elvis , the undertakers - the Lucchini brothers and the priest Cedric have left for the day. Her first novel, Les Oubliés du Dimanche, has won numerous prizes, including the 2016 Lire Élire and Poulet-Malassis prizes. At 22 percent I stated "This book has won me over but is absolutely devastating me over and fuckin over and fuckin over again. She maintains the grounds and graves and grows vegetables and flowers in her gardens, creating a wonderful sense of place that provokes your sense of sight, smell, taste, and sound. Life, loss, redemption, memories, happiness, growth, pain, and healing and different types of relationships.My little vignettes are a meditative representation of books I love reading and which bring me comfort, and of places I visit to find calmness and solace, especially during anxious times. Violette Trenet, born to a mother who doesn't want her, is thought to be stillborn until she unexpectedly turns pink and takes a breath. I was like a swimmer, dipping my toes in the water and then walking away, until finally, the story and the beautiful prose took me all the way in and I began to swim.

This beautifully translated almost poetic novel tells the story of Violette and people visiting the cemetery. For a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. She is the translator of A Winter’s Promise and The Missing of Clairdelune, atmospheric, absorbing tale. I have just finished reading Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle and I wish I had the time to start reading it all over again. Violette foi abandonada pela mãe à nascença e conheceu várias famílias de acolhimento, mas isso não a tornou amarga nem revoltada.Thankfully, Perrin avoids easy, inadequate clichés What may on the surface of it appear gloomy and morose, in Perrin's hands is an appealing indulgence in nature, food and drink, and, above all, friendships. Sarà che l'esperienza di lettura è stata paragonabile a un giro in moto in cui ad ogni svolta non sai quale lo scenario cui ti troverai di fronte.

Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole--local police chief--who has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. Per certi versi l'ho trovato somigliante alle "Ninfee Nere" di Bussi, forse proprio per la struttura e le modalità in cui è costruito. Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother’s story of clandestine love breaks through Violette’s carefully constructed defences to reveal the tragic loss of her daughter, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible. A heartwarming depiction of unexpected connection and the poetry of everyday life, Perrin’s beautifully observed story of a cemetery caretaker coming to terms with the loss of her daughter combines gentle humour with emotional insight to wondrous effect. Violette seemed like enough to me, although I suppose it would be harder to appreciate the journey she makes from death back to life without the rich ambience the novel provides, in which life and love and loss and death and humor and tragedy and pain and beauty are constantly mingling and the sheer variety of human character and experience is a recurrent motif.She speaks like she dresses: winter outside (“classic, somber clothes, for the eyes of others”), summer underneath (“light, colorful clothes meant only for me”), “nothing to do with the seasons, but rather the circumstances. Eloquent, fluctuant, picturesque, poetic descriptive writing that appeals to your senses of sound, smell and taste. This book is exquisitely composed and utterly devastating in places, packed with meaningful meditations on life, death and love, and may leave you longing to adopt some of Violette’s considered routines – while also hoping to avoid the heartbreak which led her to this more thoughtful way of life. This is a beautiful literary novel and the translation from French by Hildegarde Serle seems superb. In 1997, Violette and Philippe Toussaint arrived in Bourgogne to become the cemetery keepers at Brancion-en-Chalon Cemetery.