Review: The Rain Watcher

The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4 Stars

The Rain Watcher is a brief novel about family and the traumas that shape us. Linden Malegarde*, the central character, is a Franco-American San Francisco-based photographer who arrives in Paris for his father Paul's 70th birthday and his parents, Paul and Lauren's fortieth anniversary celebration. Linden's sister Tilia arrives from London shortly after him and they await the arrival of their parents as a steady rainfall in Paris begins what will become a major flood event. (Those who follow European news know just how real, and distressingly frequent, the flooding problems are in Paris.) This celebratory gathering, by design, excludes spouses and children, though we quickly learn that Paul has seemed to resist meeting Linden's fiancé Sacha and you start wondering if that's why spouses and children were excluded. Tilia, who is stuck in a terrible second marriage with a psychologically abusive alcoholic, is haunted by an accident that occurred in her mid-twenties, which left her with mobility issues. As we quickly see from Linden and Tilia's interactions, much is left unsaid in this family. Linden's confidantes are his supportive maternal Aunt Candice and his niece, Mistral, who quickly shows up in Paris, despite the lack of invitation from her grandmother.

Interwoven with Linden's observations are Paul's memories which center on childhood recollections of a beautiful young woman named Suzanne. His fateful recollections of Suzanne are cast like breadcrumbs throughout the book. Although we see Paul's contemplation of his beloved trees (he is famous for saving celebrated trees around the world) from the very first moment of the book, for I time I felt like he was almost a cipher, because there was so much going on between Linden and his mother Lauren, especially given his rather painful coming out to her and her clumsy, self-consumed response to him. But the dark heart of the story surrounds Paul and the mysterious Suzanne (a name that makes "something inside me break").

This novel has an almost dreamlike quality to it, as so much of it deals with remembered events, or more accurately traumas, great and small. There is a gradual swell of emotion set against the backdrop of a literal rising flood in Paris. I was reminded of the Coleridge lines, "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." For the all the emotions pent up in the Malegarde family there is so little emotional communication to provide sustenance to their relationships. That is until it seems that everything just spills over and becomes unstoppable, like the flooding Seine.

An interesting portrait of a dysfunctional family.


*Malegarde is literally "bad guard"? One can analyze the choice of the name given the memories of a boy sheltering, too afraid to call out or fight, in the linden trees.

Trigger warning: rape, murder

I received a copy of this book from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley, along with a paper review copy, in exchange for an honest review.

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