Парижката книжарница

"…My name is Jean. Jean Albert Victor Perdu. Albert after my paternal grandfather, Victor after my maternal grandfather. My mother is a professor, and her father, Victor Bernier, was a toxicologist, a socialist and mayor. I’m fifty years old, Catherine, and I haven’t known many women, let alone slept with them. I loved one. She left me.’

" I read books – twenty at a time. Everywhere: on the toilet, in the kitchen, in cafés, in the metro. I do jigsaw puzzles that take up the whole floor, destroy them when I’ve finished and then start all over again. I feed stray cats. I arrange my groceries in alphabetical order. I sometimes take sleeping tablets. I take a dose of Rilke to wake up. I don’t read any books in which women like — crop up. I gradually turn to stone. I carry on. The same every day. That’s the only way I can survive. But other than that, no, I do nothing."

"The herbs from the Goldenbergs’ little garden. Rosemary and thyme mixed with the massage oils used by Che, the blind chiropodist and ‘foot whisperer’. Added to that, the smell of pancakes intermingled with Kofi’s spicy and meaty African barbecued dishes. Over it all drifted the perfume of Paris in June, the fragrance of lime blossom and expectation.'

'... As night took flight, abandoning Paris to a Saturday morning…'