E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
Smith / Nors / Li Browse
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78227-253-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World
E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-253-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Ali Smith is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Her novels include The Accidental, There but for the and, most recently, How to Be Both, winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She was born in Scotland and now lives in Cambridge.
Weitere Infos & Material
I’m nine years old, and I’ve been given a book token for my birthday. My mother takes me to spend it. The shop, all polished wood and green carpet, makes me think of a billiard table. I’ve recently read and enjoyed Frank Herbert’s Dune, a novel full of characters with names that strike even a nine-year-old as quaintly improbable (Duncan Idaho, Wellington Yueh), so I pick out the sequel, Dune Messiah, and then I grab the next two volumes in the series, Children of Dune and God Emperor Dune. “Who are you trying to impress?” asks another shopper, before adding, “The best one’s Beach Party on Dune.” “I haven’t heard of it,” I say sheepishly, and he laughs.
Recalling this now, I can picture exactly what the Dune books looked like, even though I gave up on the series halfway through the second volume. But it’s the book that didn’t exist that looms largest in my imagination; Beach Party on Dune really ought to have been written—hello again, Duncan Idaho—and sometimes I fantasize about finding a bookshop so profusely stocked that it’ll be there.
In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges published an essay in which he pictured a “total library” containing every possible book, and he returned to this theme in his story “La biblioteca de Babel”, visualizing a library that encompassed “all that is able to be expressed, in every language”. What I have in mind is a variant on this: a total bookshop, which includes, like Borges’s library, a faithful catalogue of all it contains, a panoply of false catalogues, proofs of the falsity of the false catalogues, proof of the falsity of the true catalogue…
I’m fifteen, and at the local bookshop, a single bright room with tall white shelves, there’s a large display stand dominated by Picador and Faber paperbacks, all of which look enticing. For a couple of weeks I eye up The Great Shark Hunt—a chunky collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism, dense with trippy verbiage. (Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t buy it, but wonder if perhaps it was beyond my schoolboy budget.) One day, while flicking through The Great Shark Hunt, I’m distracted by a friend who wants to go and procure some Nerds—sweets that are like fizzy drips of candle wax—and it’s only when I am a hundred yards from the shop that I realize I have liberated the book. I now face the challenge of returning it, undetected. It would be easier to keep it, of course, and part of me is willing to pretend that Hunter S. Thompson is the sort of writer whose books one ought to steal. But instead I go back and try to sneak The Great Shark Hunt into its rightful place on the display stand—except the stand chooses this moment to revolve extravagantly, and I almost knock it over, and then it almost knocks me over, and the shop’s proprietor, who resembles an angry hawk, swoops in to ask me what the hell I’m doing.
Throughout my teens, bookshops served as places of furtive self-education. I still like the idea that a bookshop can be an informal library, though not a lending library, and I know I learnt a lot about literature by snooping around well-stocked fiction sections. I can remember catching a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at a time when I knew nothing of Virginia Woolf; I concluded that she was someone I ought to be daunted by, and it was therefore a thrill, not long afterwards, to see a whole shelf of her novels (the Oxford World’s Classics editions, each with a yellow spine and a flash of red at the top) and to pluck down Orlando and start reading.
“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it…” What madness was this? The very words “There could be no doubt of his sex” created room for doubt, and I was hooked. The next paragraph, nearly three pages long, contained a word I’d never seen before, asphodel, and the febrile pleasure of encounter caused me to collide with another customer, who clearly—and not unreasonably, though incorrectly—thought this was my idea of flirtation. So much to know. So much to find out. And always the sense of the bookshop itself as a cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, and a place of minor embarrassments.
I’m eighteen, and I am holding a copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This is in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, in the second-hand department, a place where earnestness goes to ramify and breed—and where all the stock seems overpriced but also either urgently necessary or naggingly desirable. Pound’s Cantos is a mixture of the two: I ought to be familiar with these poems, given that I’m about to study modernism, and this particular copy, with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sketch of Pound on the spine, is in mint condition. I turn it over several times, trying to work out how it’ll fit in with the bedlam of my student bookshelves. A voice intrudes: “You won’t understand that.” It emanates from the beard of a visiting scholar I’ve previously noticed haunting the English faculty library, and he removes the book from my hand and says to his young companion, “If I press this on you, will you read it?” I want to tell him that the volume is mine and that he’s a shit-breeched poltroon who shouldn’t be pressing anything on anyone. But he beats me to the punch: “Stick to the easy stuff, little man.”
At eighteen, the easy stuff was the last thing I wanted.
I was determined to stretch myself, to augment my reality.
Pound’s sprawling, refractory epic, with its fusion of personal and intellectual history, was precisely what I was after.
I recently reread the Cantos, inspired to do so by visiting San Michele, the island in the Venetian lagoon where Pound is buried—and where, in the driving June rain, I was wretchedly incapable of locating his grave. Now I look again at my copy of the book. I’ve written the date inside: 2nd November 1993. Hmmm. I was eighteen then, so maybe the visiting scholar’s young companion wasn’t persuaded after all.
I’m twenty-six, and I’m in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which is famous for having been founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and less famous for having been co-founded by Peter D. Martin, who was the son of the anti-fascism crusader Carlo Tresca). I have read Ferlinghetti and think of him as an indescribably romantic figure—the name helps, and so does the fact that he published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and was prosecuted on account of its alleged obscenity. For half an hour I nose around the shop, which somehow puts me in mind of an abandoned tram; I manage to avoid being the rube who asks “Where’s Ferlinghetti today?”, and I buy a copy of McSweeney’s, a newish and much-admired literary magazine I have heard of yet never previously seen. It’s a hardback, costing about double what I paid for my dinner. But it contains a 44-track CD, each piece of music on it corresponding to an item in the magazine; so, for instance, there’s a one-page short story by Lydia Davis, “Oral History with Hiccups”, and the track that goes with it, by They Might Be Giants, is called “Drinkin’” and is an instrumental number featuring a bass saxophone, presumably played by John Linnell, who came ninth in People magazine’s poll of The Most Beautiful People of 1998. The guy manning the cash register looks like he knows all of this. He spins the hardback on the counter, grins, and says, “So now you’re part of the problem.”
The problem? When I replay this episode in my mind, I think he was joking. I entertain the possibility that he regarded me as yet another chin-stroking try-hard, but conclude that he saw me for what I was: a little too eager to be tasting the cool new flavours, but worth encouraging. He wanted me to feel like I was tapping into something edgy, or at least fresh.
So, the “problem” is a good one. A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural events. A centre of dissent and radicalism. A place to disseminate notions too strange or explosive for mass circulation. A means of creating and nurturing coteries of readers. These ideas surface repeatedly in this volume: I think of Alaa Al Aswany’s image of a bookshop as a mustering point for participants in Egypt’s 2011 revolution and of Andrey Kurkov’s portrait of Bukinist, a nerve centre for the artistic life of Chernivtsi, Ukraine’s so-called Little Vienna.
A final note about City Lights: not long ago I read an interview with some of the shop’s current staff, and one, Tân Khánh Cao, reported that “For a while there was a woman who used to sneak in a staff door, and slide down the wooden chute into the room we receive books in. She made herself a bed out of bubble wrap at the bottom of the chute and was found asleep several times.” That’s not the kind of hospitality generally expected of bookshops, yet it seems apt in...
