According to Amazon, "For every reader who adored Chocolat, Julia Stuart's The Matchmaker of Périgord is a delectable, utterly enchanting, and sinfully satisfying delight." I tend to disagree.
The premise of Julia Stuart's novel is this: Guillaume Ladoucette is a barber of long-standing whose customer base has aged, lost some hairs, and generally found themselves to have far less need of his services than in years past. Looking around his little town (Amour-sur-Belle, population: 33), Guillaume decides to convert his little barber shop into a matchmaker's office. The results are about what you would expect, or so it seemed when I finally gave it up...
For some reason, I expected The Matchmaker of Périgord to be something like Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (read just before this blog, unfortunately, so the Amazon page will have to suffice). It was not. Neither did it put me in the mind of Chocolat either, despite the lush French countryside Stuart depicts and the somewhat timeless nature of the story. (I thought it was historical fiction when I began, and continually had to revise my guess as to when this was set as more recent dates and events appeared.)
Instead, in light of the innumerable individual quirks, I was reminded of the Confederacy of Dunces, still one of my most-loathed books ever. And, yes, I'm aware that the latter has been described as a masterpiece. To each his own. Call me crazy, but I just don't find two elderly women who have an on-going feud which has been regularly stoked by overripe tomatoes, entertaining. And I was frankly revolted by the idea of an "ancient cassoulet" which has been tended for decades first by Madame Ladoucette and now by her son the barber-turned-matchmaker. On the whole, I found all of the characters very weird, and I just couldn't move beyond that.
I have only myself to blame, as I did not care for Stuart's previous novel, The Tower, The Zoo, and the Tortoise for many of the same reasons. Alas, c'est la vie.
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