Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.Īfter Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.
The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. But a collection of amusing characters who we meet along Jean's travels south bring colour and amusement to the overwhelming sense of loss.Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart. We feel the overwhelming weight of Jean's loss through each page and this does bring a heaviness to the book. This is a story of love lost, the pain of grief, and healing to love again. Why did she leave? This is a pain which Jean must face if he is to find happiness again. This means going to Provence and finding the goodbye from Manon which he had missed. While Jean spent years trying to cure others ills through prescribing books, he comes to realise that the only way to cure his own pain is to live and embrace the joys of life and not just read about it in a book. Jean is left with only the emptiness of loss and constant memories of Manon. His 5 year affair with the married Manon ended abruptly when she returned to Provence and failed to come back to Paris as she did each 6 months to re-kindle their love.
However, we come to understand how Parisian, Jean is suffering his own ill from the sudden departure of his beloved, carefree, spirited French love Manon (a resident of Provence in the south) from his life 20 years earlier. He describes his profession as " putting the right novels to the right ailments to sell books." He customers step on board the barge, tell him their concerns and they leave with just the right novel to make them feel better. They are suffering from afflictions of the heart and soul and as a literary pharmacist, he knows that books are the only medicine for their ills.
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