This was a recommendation from my French Canadian friend. She’s young. All her friends loved it. Valérie Perrin is a best selling author in France, and her previous novel Fresh Water for Flowers was a massive hit. But does it work in translation and enchant an older audience? Hell, yes.
Forgotten on Sunday is really two stories. One is of Justine, 21, orphaned and living with her cousin and grandparents in small town rural France and working in an old people’s home, where she listens to stories and has the patience of a saint. (That’s not explicit in the book, that’s just my interpretation of such a person). Justine befriends Hélène, who is nearly a hundred, and they share their secrets. Hélène grew up dyslexic (stupid, it used to be called). She meets Lucien, who teaches her braille. I’m not sure this is probable, but let’s get on. When Hélène learns to read it is described : As if daylight were finally penetrating her and then seeping out through every pore of her skin. She moves like a woman who is, at last, wearing floaty dresses after a very, very long winter. Which is lovely, I think. The writing is nice.
But war comes, Lucien and Hélène do the right thing and are brutally punished for it and it is years before the find their way back. There are lots of stories of war’s horrors, this one focus is on dislocation and in the confused aftermath – who belongs where?
Hélène’s stories are told to Justine, who is unravelling stories of her own about her father and his brother and their wives in a crash that killed them all. Complicated family secrets, the stuff of novelists forever. Twists and turns. In case you think the saintly Justine is too twee to be real, she does go out dancing at the Paradise Club on the weekends and has mindless sex with a bloke whose name she makes no effort to remember. There is not much reason for this, except to give her a bit of an edge.
But there is a further mystery that ties the stories together. At the old people’s home, many of the residents are forgotten on Sunday, which is visiting day. Some scamp is phoning from inside the home to families of the elderly and saying they passed, and the families need to come on Sunday for formalities. So the families turn up and, whoo hoo! There’s grandma, alive and well and delighted they have all, finally, come to visit. Not sure that would always work out so well, but if the book is ever made into a film it would make a great scene.
There is a well constructed ending that rounds off a satisfying read. Highly recommended for a hammock or beach.
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