Why a Booktrail?
2000s: The famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris becomes a world where the ghosts of the past mingle once more..
Zade
What you need to know before your trail
Père Lachaise Cemetery – the place in Paris renowned for the dead that are buried there, many of them famous such as Parisian artists. This is the place where Zade feels most at home. When she meets Driss in a cafe, then start a love affair, Paris opens up to here but following tragedy, she retreats to her cemetery for some kind of solitude and a place to heal. The relationship was one of first love, its loss pains her deeply but it’s amongst the dead of Paris’ creative past that will start the healing process.
Travel Guide
Père Lachaise Cemetery is famous and much visited Cemetery in Paris for the kind of people who are buried there. Zade feels comfortable here for she is creative and France’s great artists and singers are buried here. Zade likes colour, she has always been aware of colour – preferring pale blue as it’s “the colour of idealism”
This graveyard is the resting place of famous artists such as Moliere, and Picasso, singer Edith Piaf and of course Jim Morrison.But it’s France’s past, France’s greats who comfort her and give her wisdom and the will to carry on. This is a place where memories settle ‘ like snow in the skull: and where she is sad that ‘the dreams of the dead are locked in the world as they knew it” so the worst thing about death is never seeing the world move on.
But these spirits guide her forward, their ghostly voices giving her advice, sharing their thoughts. Edith Piaf consoles her about love, sharing her own painful experiences, the spirit of the graveyard becoming Zade’s psychiatrists couch.
This is the real spirt of Paris, the voices of its creative masters who return to give timeless advice and to walk freely in the city that they love. And all the while, a girl named Zade at the receiving end of such timeless and ghostly inspiration and advice.
Streetview Maps
A) Pere Lachaise - One of the entrancees on Boulevard de Menilmontant
B) Pere Lachaise -The 'Leafy entrance' close to Edith Piaf's grave
Booktrailer Review
Clare: @thebooktrailer
A haunting novel with a very neat premise – of visiting the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery and meeting those who now lie there, in their ghostly home. Their advice and talking is timeless as dead people don’t move on, but when Édith Piaf talks about love and loss, you realise that there’s not much that ever changes in some respects. I found this a nice thought – being able to speak to those who have passed on, but not family but rather those you have only read about and admired, whose work lasts for ever. As each one speaks, they talk to each other, their characters and the air is filled with ‘ a conglomeration of others’ words and visions. It reads like a dreamlike sequences, the sense of consciousness ebbing and flowing in waves of thought. This is a novel to think about after you’ve read it, to question your own immortality and your own experience and views on death and the afterlife. It’s comforting and chilling in equal measure.
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