A deep little book about the aftermath of the war, about the survivors (have they survived?), about the victors (are there any?). It is about a couple whose lives were separated by the war, by their different wartime experiences they did not want to and could not tell each other. Will they be able to make a bridge over this abyss?

I was intrigued by the flower maker's profession, which is described quite in detail. It sounds really hazzardous for the health. ( )

This is a real mixture of a book, both sad and a struggle, but it ends optimistically, if with no real certainty that they will live happily ever after. . It tells of Jeanne, whose husband returns from WW1, but has a terribly facial injury. It tells of her struggles to survive the war alone, the food shortages, the lack of fuel, bringing up her daughter all the while trying to keep them fed with her occupation making artificial flowers. Set along side er struggles are those of her neighbour, Sidonie, who has similar financial struggles, but a different outcome of her son who went off to war.
It is, at times, terribly bleak. It is, at times beautiful, almost poetic. There were a couple of incredibly startling chapters, one contrasting her flower making and his operations.
It is a fact that those that returned were not supported in a way we would not expect the state to support now. Not every returning soldier had physical scars, but for some the mental scars never healed. And that took a terrible toll on the families they returned to. This makes not attempt to look at the long term picture, this is the initial readjustment to a man returning who is not the same man who went off to war. The book ends on Armistice day and it feels like there has been some progress made on their readjustment to each other and a life together rather than the separate lives they had been leading with the memory of each other.
This is an inventive book, telling of war and the aftermath from a female perspective, we see very little of his war, only through his letters to Jeanne. We see different aspects of the conflict and its wider reaching effects, the population all suffer to some extent.
I can't help feeling that the road ahead will be tough for both of them, despite the first glimmers of hope that the final chapters bring. ( )

The writing in this was gorgeous. The author has written other books, but this is the first and the only on to be translated into English so far. Here's the Amazon blurb:

"It’s October 1918 and the war is drawing to a close.

Toussaint Caillet returns home to his wife, Jeanne, and the young daughter he hasn’t seen growing up. He is not coming back from the front line but from the department for facial injuries at Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he has spent the last two years.

For Jeanne, who has struggled to endure his absence and the hardships of wartime, her husband’s return marks the beginning of a new battle. With the promise of peace now in sight, the family must try to stitch together a new life from the tatters of what they had before."

What is so well done here is that we are given a glimpse into both sides of the story. First, the wife who remained at home struggling to provide for herself and her young daughter. She makes and sells artificial flowers, which is where the title comes from. There is a lot of detail about the flower making, and it is fascinating. We also get to see into the husband's story and understand that he has experienced things that he cannot share properly with someone who wasn't there. They wrote during the war, but in order to spare each other, they did not write of the horrors they were each experiencing. They did not share their struggles. And when her husband is injured and he writes telling her not to come, she is hurt and angry.

"She always woke with a start first thing in the morning. She should have stirred herself, gone straight back to work, but for many months Toussaint's words tore at her. They were dark words.

I want you not to come.

Over time, the unusual construction so intrigued her that she tried to read into it what hadn't been said. Why hadn't he added 'my little darling', as he so often did, why hadn't he written, 'It's better if you don't come for now'? Or 'We need to be patient', or 'The doctor would rather we waited before you visit', or worst of all, 'I don't want you to come'? Touissaint hadn't chosen any of these. Perhaps he's had enough of not wanting, because no one ever listened to him. He had told his wife what he wanted, not what he didn't want.

I want you not to come."

When he finally does come home, bridging the gap seems too big an ask. This, for me, was a perfect read. Thanks so much to Charlotte for bringing it to my attention. ( )

One of those beautifully written short novels that are bigger than the sum of their pages.

Jeanne, a home piece-worker of silk flowers, lives in Paris with her young daughter, a life of poverty in cramped surroundings during WWI. She is waiting for the return of her husband Toussaint. After a long period without word, he writes to her from a military hospital to tell her where he is, but not to come. Six months later he returns home.

Not a word out of place. You feel everything.

Highly recommended. ( )

The War at Home
Review of the Peirene Press paperback edition (October 2021) translated from the French language original [book:Les Fleurs d'hiver|21956025] (2014)

Like all women whose husbands or sons had been mobilized, though, she'd heard countless stories about men's homecomings. Poor women. Those who entrusted a sheep to their country were given back a lion. Someone who'd set out as a young lad was said to have come home an old man, or mad.
And there were so many, Jeanne was well aware, who would never come home at all. - excerpt from pg. 43.

I'll confess that when I first read the synopsis blurb for Winter Flowers from its English language publisher Peirene Press, I thought that it was going to be repetition of La chambre des officiers (1998) by author Marc Dugain (translated as The Officers' Ward (2000)) which I had read in my pre-Library Thing days. It appeared that both books were built around that department of the French Val-de-Grâce hospital which dealt with facial reconstruction surgery for wounded veterans of World War One. I was wrong in that early assessment however.

Winter Flowers is instead about Jeanne, the wife of the veteran Toussaint who has returned home at last just a month before the eventual armistice of November 11, 1918. Toussaint has returned not from the war front, but from an extended stay at Val-de-Grâce, where his shrapnel shredded face has been repaired as best as possible with the medical procedures of the time.

Jeanne has prepared herself as best as she could for the return, after being told not to visit the hospital by a short message from her husband. Toussaint's father did make the journey however and reported his horrified reactions to the various disfigured men recuperating on the hospital wards. Even then, she is not prepared for the masked and silent figure that re-enters her and her young daughter's lives who will not speak a word and only communicates with a single handwritten note to say "Not yet."

Villeneuve builds an affecting story here about how a family has to fight in order to return order and love in their lives after the shattering experience of war and disfigurement. Jeanne's paper flower making job acts as a metaphor for the journey, the construction and preservation of something of beauty out of something as ephemeral as pieces of paper. The family's experience is contrasted with their neighbour Sidonie, who has lost her entire family to tuberculosis and her final son to the war.

I found the reading of Winter Flowers to be a very moving immersive experience which expanded considerably on the world first introduced to me by Dugain's earlier novel. Jeanne's internal rationalizations, fantasies and reactions were built up effectively against the silence of Toussaint as he very slowly and gradually makes his journey home to his family, even though it was several weeks after his actual physical return. I was happy to have this introduction to Angélique Villeneuve's writing in this first English translation of her work. The author has a dozen other books to her credit according to Library Thing's bibliography.

I read Winter Flowers in advance of its official publication in October 2021 due to my annual subscription to Peirene Press. Subscribers receive the publisher's books several weeks ahead of their official release date. Winter Flowers is the third of Peirene's Metamorphoses series for 2021.

Trivia and Links
Peirene Press will likely have an online book launch in the next several weeks for Winter Flowers and you can monitor for it at their news page here. ( )