The Rose Grower - Softcover

De Kretser, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099284057 ISBN 13: 9780099284055

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

In a corner of south-western France, a young rose grower nurtures a private passion to breed an exotic new flower. But the year is 1789, and the world is about to change...

The Rose Grower throws a subtle, slanting light on the underside of history, as a young woman and her family are caught up in the bloodthirsty years of the French Revolution.

Her private passion is to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose, the first of its kind in Europe. But, as public events in Paris are duplicated in Gascony, her world turns upside down. An American balloonist falls out of the sky and into her life; while Joseph, a young working-class doctor, is also drawn into her orbit, and finds himself fatally torn between reason and desire, revolutionary zeal and unrequited love.

About this title

Review:

14th July 1789, Montsignac, Gascony. The Saint-Pierre family is caring for American artist Stephen Fletcher after he's fallen from his balloon, and landed in a haystack. Jean-Baptiste de Saint- Pierre is a magistrate with three daughters. Claire, the eldest, is beautiful and married (in a way that seems to require little personal involvement) to the odious and malodorous aristo Hubert. Sophie is plain, single, intelligent, good, competent and obsessed with growing roses. And Mathilde is eight and entertainingly precocious: when Stephen remarks on how he adores children because "'They are so ...innocent and yet so perceptive in their apprehension of the world'", Matty dismisses him instantly. " 'Oh no--another Rousseauist,' said the child with unconcealed disappointment. 'I'm not like that at all.' " And then there's Brutus, the dog who "only bites people whose smell he doesn't like."...

But the Saint-Pierres' existences--like those of everyone else in the locality--are about to fracture as the Revolution gathers momentum and the shockwaves from Paris push out into the provinces. The book's epigraph: "Small change, small change"-- Napoleon Bonaparte's comment on surveying the dead on a battlefield--signals this to be a novel of small people caught up in big events. And, indeed, Michelle de Kretser takes us from the co-operative and optimistic start of the Revolution as it manifests in Montsignac, through factionalisation, fanaticism and Terror, denunciations and betrayals, through love and loyalty to a quiet, damaged aftermath, with a vivid cast of surprising heroes, unexpected villains and not-quite-innocent bystanders.

The Rose Grower is a hypnotically engrossing novel that illuminates the biggest of issues with the lightest, most fragrant of touches. --Lisa Gee

Review:

"A meditative tale of unrequited love... De Kretser's writing is by turns poetic, metaphorical and delicately elliptical, capable of evoking a mood or change in direction in the subtlest of ways" (Independent on Sunday)

"Beautifully written, full of wit, pathos and evocative images... There is a great deal to enjoy in this book. It opens magnificently... her final pages are a triumph" (Guardian)

"Kretser's native style is clear, vigorous, sensitive to mood and cadence, and strongly narrative" (Ursula Le Guin Guardian)

"De Kretser is an elegant and accomplished storyteller" (Daily Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099284057
• ISBN 13: 9780099284055
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320