Europa Editions hide caption Valérie Perrin's novels have been enormously popular in her native France, and it's no wonder. Forgotten on Sunday, her third to be translated into English, evokes something of the heartwarming whimsy of the 2001 movie, Amélie, which gets a shout-out in the book. A recurrent theme in Perrin's novels is the life-changing magic of friendships across generations.
Her latest is narrated by a charming misfit, a 21-year-old nurse's assistant at a retirement home in her tiny village. Justine Neige is so interested in her patients' lives that she often stays after her shift to hold their hands and talk to them. She announces on the second page: "I love two things in life: music and the elderly.
" Like Violette Toussaint, the caretaker of a cemetery in Perrin's Fresh Water for Flowers, Justine has an unusual gift for empathy that enables her to elicit confidences from the people she encounters in her work. Despite the sadness of some of the stories, including their own, both of Perrin's idiosyncratic heroines remain obstinate optimists and romantics. Justine has a favorite patient, 96-year-old Hélène Hel, a retired seamstress and bistro owner whose life story she records in a blue notebook.
It's a love story disrupted by the German occupation of France, deportation to Buchenwald, and years lost to amnesia -- all frequent subjects in French literature. Unusually, dyslexia and Braille play into it. So do blue eyes.
A seagull is asked to carry more sym.