Exclusive interview with author Nina George and a review of her novel about a man who cures people by giving them the right book
Rating: 3 Stars
“Books heal,” says The Little Paris Bookshop author Nina George. “I’ve lived in books ever since I was a baby. It was only in their presence that I could find peace. Just as I was about to begin researching my story, in April 2011. My father died…in the middle of a sentence. He was my best friend and a mirror of myself. I think that books are about more than fame, popularity and power. And as I began to write about those things, I suddenly saw a path leading straight to myself and to the story of Jean Perdu. I immortalized my father as Jean Perdu’s father.”
In the book Jean Perdu is a 50-year-old man living in Paris with his own literary apothecary, a boat full of books he sells only to the customers he feels needs them. He has a talent for picking the right book for his patrons because he’s great at reading others, but not himself. He lost the love of his life to another man 20 years before and is still emotionally scared by it. Perdu listens and observes people and he then knows what is the right book to help them get better. At the end of the book there are recipes and Jean Perdu’s Emergency Literary Pharmacy list of books.
George’s premise of a floating bookshop in Paris is enchanting. The description of local, food music and books are wonderful. The details make an engaging beginning but as the story continues it could have more emotional connection between the reader and the characters. An interesting detail would have been to focus on the people the book changes and how.
“Naturally I went to Provence during my research,” says George. “Many of the places and a handful of the characters are real, for example Bonnieux and Sanary-sur-Mer. I raced back and forth through the mountains of Provence at great speed, 1,000 miles, looking for places where I would feel…it.”
“I came up with the idea of a ship full of books as I was sailing to New York on the Queen Mary II,” says George. “It has the world’s largest floating library containing 8,000 books. That’s how many Jean Perdu has on board his floating Literary Apothecary, the pharmacie littéraire. Rue Montagnard, the location of Monsieur Perdu’s Parisian apartment in the book, doesn’t exist. I named it after a French smear-ripened cheese.”
George has written 26 books, over 100 short stories, over 600 articles for columns and 3,000 reports and essays. With her husband Jo she writes French crime novels under the name Jean Bagnol. Her novel The Moonlight Musician received the DeLiA, the German Prize for the best romance of the year. The Game of Her Life, a short story published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, won the Glauser for the best crime short story of the year. The Little Paris Bookshop is on the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
Georges says most of the players in the international book market are women, but that translators are male. “Men virtually rewrite the book,” says Georges. “The Americans get all finicky when it comes to the graphic nature of my erotic scenes. They prefer to leave a lot of it up to the imagination…more Barbie doll sexlessness, less Anais Nin eroticism. It’s because of the linguistic censorship that Apple imposes on e-books. Too much explicit sex means the book won’t be sold through iBooks. However, the author has the final say. Always. And I want to keep the….”
Georges is currently writing the novel Das Traumbuch. She also is writing for magazines. She’s an advisor at German PEN on author’s rights and the digital market. She’s the founder of Fairer Buchmarkt that help authors to understand contracts and fight for author’s rights.
Georges lives half of the year in Brittany, the other half in Berlin. She was born in Bielefeld, Germany.
Book The Little Paris Bookshop: A Novel by Nina George. Hardcover: 400 pages, Publisher: Crown; 1St Edition edition (June 23, 2015). Language: English, ISBN: 9780553418774 $25.00
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