Bookshops

  XI

  Books and Bookshops at the End

  of the World

  What was the first thing I did when I arrived in Sydney? I looked for a bookshop and bought a paperback edition of Chatwin’s The Songlines, the Spanish translation of which I had read some time ago, and of Austerlitz by Sebald, which had just been published in English. The next day I visited Gleebooks and got one of the first stamps on my invisible passport, which at the time (mid-2002) had what you might call a transcendent significance for me; I made pilgrimages to cemeteries, cafés, museums, the temples of modern culture I still worshipped. As you will have guessed by this point, I embraced my status as a cultural tourist or meta-traveller some time ago and stopped believing in invisible passports. Nonetheless, I think the metaphor is quite apt and, in the case of bookshop-lovers, could serve to camouflage a fetishist and, above all, consumerist drive, a vice that at times seems too much like Diogenes syndrome. I returned from that trip to Australia with twenty books in my rucksack, some of which I discarded in my various house moves before I read, leafed through, or even opened them.

  As I was saying: the next day I went to Gleebooks, though I bought the two key books for that trip in an ordinary bookshop. One must distinguish between the world’s great bookshops and emergency bookshops. The latter supply our most urgent reads, the ones that cannot wait, bring light relief on a flight or train journey, allow us to buy a last-minute present, and give us—on the same day it has been released—the book we’ve been waiting for. Without these emergency bookshops, the others would not exist, would have no meaning. A city must have a range of book outlets: from the kiosk to the main bookshop, there is a whole gamut of modest and middling bookshops, of book chains, bestseller sections in supermarkets, second-hand bookshops, bookshops specializing in film, comics, crime fiction, university textbooks, the media, photography or travel.

  I ventured to 49 Glebe Point Road, that colonial-style house with its Uralite porch supported by metal columns, because my guidebook singled it out as the finest Australian bookshop, one that had several times won the prize as the best in the country. It was July 2002 and this book was just one project among many. My notes from that visit, anchored in time, contrast with the bookshop’s web page, constantly being updated. “Founded in 1975,” I now read in my old handwriting. “Wooden shelves,” I read:

  An appearance of chaos (there are even books on the floor). The back opens onto a rough-and-ready yard with a few trees. A large amount of Australian, Anglo-Saxon and translated literature. They sell Moleskine notebooks. A mural with the front covers of books signed by their authors. A delightful attic, carpeted like the floor beneath, with lots of natural light, fans and wooden beams, an exposed roof. An edition of Carey’s novel on the Kellys, imitating old paper and typography. An up-to-date magazine stand. Literary events are held in the attic. I leaf through a novel about a nineteenth-century prison shot through with absurd humour.

  Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang was published in Enrique de Hériz’s Spanish translation a few months before my trip. In yet another display of his ability to ventriloquize, the Australian writer takes on Ned Kelly in the first person: the orphan, horse-thief, pioneer, reformer, outlaw and policeman. Oedipus and Robin Hood reincarnated at the end of the world. Namely, an interpretation of European myths in a country that, to invent itself as a nation, turned its back on a complex, ancient local culture while simultaneously trying to exterminate or assimilate the indigenous population. Like all Australian bookshops, the layout of Gleebooks demonstrates the unhealed scar that runs across the island continent like a trail of gunpowder: sections called “Aboriginal Studies” and “Australian Studies,” because two Australias are thrusting themselves on a single map and each defends its own boundaries.

  There are no more bookshops in my archive from that trip to Australia: none of those I visited in Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin or Perth seemed particularly seductive. I found the main titles for my research on Spanish migration to the other end of the planet in museum shops. Ten years later, I visited Melbourne and had the chance to get to know its two main bookshops, which did seem memorable: Reader’s Feast Bookshop, in whose armchairs I discovered contemporary Aboriginal literature through Tara June Winch, and Hill of Content, without doubt my favourite, as much because of its books as its context. The whole city is articulated through its café cult, so bookshops seem like an appendix to a ritual whose rhythms are totally in step with those of reading. Pellegrini’s is an old cafeteria and Italian restaurant, a real Melbourne institution, less than a hundred metres from Hill of Content, and Madame Brussels a sophisticated spot on the third floor of the building opposite. Between vintage antique (the owner speaks dialect to her assistant in the kitchen) and retro modern (only the crockery in Madame Brussels is really old) is where I began to read Under the Sun, Chatwin’s letters, and Travels, the anthology of Bowles’ travel writing, both recently published and still not to be seen in my bookshops in Barcelona, yet displayed in the window of one of these bookshops at the end of the world.

  Cappuccinos served in Melbourne and the insistence on teatime, the excellent wines and beach huts, pavement cafés and restored arcades can all be seen as a tug-of-war between a Mediterranean, European, and, if you will, international style of life and a degree of resistance to abandoning the British colonial past, the Commonwealth heritage. Just like South Africa: the same cappuccinos, teatime, fine wines, colourful beach huts, the pavement café culture now shared by the majority of countries across the world, the same arcades (and, basically, identical restoration). In the most picturesque in Cape Town, the Long Street Arcade, bookshop and café rub shoulders with antiquarian bazaars and shops selling militaria, a mixture you find in all city arcades in what was once the British Empire.

  What was the first thing I did when I landed in Johannesburg in September 2011? Naturally, I asked after the best bookshop. I could not visit it until my last day when, on my way to the airport, I asked the taxi driver to stop and give me sufficient time to get to know it. It was Boekehuis, which specializes in literature in Afrikaans. It is the only bookshop I know that occupies a whole villa, surrounded by gardens and protected by a high wall and a watchtower. A hundred years old, the colonial-style building used to be the residence of the daughter of Bram Fischer, a leading anti-apartheid activist. The fireplaces have been blocked, but it retains a homely atmosphere, the cafeteria is a kind of oasis and the carpets in the children’s section welcome storytellers of a weekend. Now that I possess the library that I need and can store books on my tablet, I only buy those titles that can be really useful to me when travelling, the books I cannot easily find in my city and really want to read. So I bought nothing in Boekehuis. Nor in the Book Lounge, the best bookshop in Cape Town.

  I had André Brink’s Praying Mantis in my suitcase. Set in the country’s murky dawn, the novel is a rewriting of the true story of the trouble-making Cupido Cockroach, who became a fervent missionary and experienced in his own black flesh the conflicts that were to plague South Africa’s future. Both True History of the Kelly Gang and several books by J. M. Coetzee employ the same strategy: a manuscript found and rewritten, a dialogue with material from the past. The re-imaginings of the country’s troubled beginnings is there in Coetzee’s own beginnings as a novelist: the first part of Dusklands, “The Vietnam Project,” starts with: “My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that. Here goes,” and the second part, “The narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” in which J. M. Coetzee figures as translator: “Five years ago Adam Wijnand, a bastard, no shame in that, packed up and trekked to Korana country.” Disgrace could be translated into Spanish as Vergüenza, Shame. Just before my trip to South Africa I had read Estética de laboratorio, by Reinaldo Laddaga, one of the few good book-length essays, like The World Republic of Letters or Atlas of the European Novel, in which the author does not focus on one language or a concrete geographical area but tries to draw a mappa mundi: li
terature cannot be understood if one retains an anachronistic faith in borders. Unlike Laddaga’s previous books about Latin American literature, this new title situates the spectre of present-day literature on a wavelength similar to mine (Sebald, César Aira, Sergio Chejfec, Joan Didion, Mario Levrero, Mario Bellatin), alongside other areas of contemporary artistic creation, like music or the visual arts. One chapter analyzes an aspect of Disgrace that had escaped me though I had read it several times. In the course of the novel, David, the protagonist, tries to write an opera, the story of Byron in Italy, and the fiction concludes with a desolate image: the character tuning his daughter’s old banjo, wondering whether the throat of a dying dog could bring the woeful tone the work requires, sitting on an old chair, under a beach parasol, with jet black, incomprehensible Africa extending as far as his eyes can see, and which does not speak English and is not familiar with the myths and languages of Old Europe. Laddaga argues that this creative endeavour that obsesses David throughout the novel contains the seed of all Coetzee’s later books: pages written from meagre materials, like jottings, diaries, interviews and letters, without the prestige of “the literary,” failed essays, attempts to fine-tune a music that refuses to be sublime, where the writer’s alter egos appear on the scene and reiterate their inability to elaborate a perfect, rounded story in the twenty-first century.

  So similar to Hill of Content or Eterna Cadencia that they could be sisters, the Book Lounge is a charming bookshop with large wooden tables and sofas and a basement with rugs that makes you want to stay on and live there. Its aesthetic is completely classical and therefore familiar, but when I walked around, I confronted an enigma. As I looked at the books, shelf by shelf, I kept finding empty spaces. The first was Paulo Coelho: his novels and self-help books were not there and a small card noted their absence. The second was Gabriel García Márquez. The third, Coetzee. In each case, the same little card with the same message: “Ask for his books at the counter.” What could Coelho, García Márquez and Coetzee have in common? The bookseller was chatting to a friend and I was too shy to interrupt, so I killed time taking photographs of the shop and browsing. Finally she was free and I asked her to solve the riddle. And she did: they are the three most-stolen writers. The only ones people steal. So we keep their books here, she said, pointing to big piles behind her. I asked her for Coetzee’s. There was not one I did not already have at home, but I leafed through his Nobel Speech again, beautifully cloth-bound by Penguin, which I purchased in the Seminary Co-op years ago. I scoured the edition of Disgrace with notes that Penguin Classics had just published and intended for university students for a reference to the aesthetic of precariousness, to the opera that David is writing as the seed of Coetzee’s future fiction, or to its poor execution on an out-of-tune banjo in a place only inhabited by dogs. All in vain.

  Summertime is the book where Laddaga’s intuitions most strike a note. His analysis goes as far as Diary of a Bad Year, but it is in Coetzee’s latest masterpiece to date where he might have reached a splendid epiphany. A harsh, fictionalized memoir, it is a novel without a centre, without a climax. And yet I remember with peculiar intensity the night John spends with his cousin in a truck, a powerful scene like a whirlwind within a maelstrom despite an apparent indolence, the veneer of non-action. That is the precise moment the reader feels he is at the end of the world. It is a powerful sensation: like crossing Australia or South Africa or the United States or the north of Mexico or Argentina, and suddenly halting after hours journeying through monotonous landscape, stopping at a service station or a village, suddenly being in the middle of nowhere, feeling dizzy at a frontier post where you gaze at the horizon and anticipate the barbarians who never in fact appear, an anguish that prompts the inevitable question: what the devil am I doing here?

  In Patagonia I followed the traces of Chatwin like nowhere else on the planet. My copy of the Muchnik edition of his first work thickened out over those few weeks until it became a folder: ridges caused by pencil underlinings were joined by bus tickets, postcards, tourist leaflets, like the ones for the Harberton Ranch or Milodón’s Cave. There were two moments when I felt nearest to the author of Anatomy of Restlessness: when I interviewed the grandson of Hermann Eberhard (“In the morning I walked with Eberhard in driving rain. He wore a fur-lined greatcoat and glared fiercely at the storm from under a Cossack cap”) in Punta Arenas, who told me of the strange visit by writer and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, who, at one point in the interview, became obsessed with buying his old fridge, since he collected them, and kept returning to the subject of domestic electrical goods until it became the only topic of conversation, and when I walked around Puerto Consuelo to the legendary cave and ended up being chased by a pack of dogs. I had to jump over fences, because the path ran across private property, until finally, by the time I was feeling scared to death, a rough, unkempt guy stepped out of a rusty mobile home that had been converted into a permanent abode and calmed those hellish dogs down. Chatwin, creator of myths: you could not possibly have done everything you describe in your book and yet what an intense feeling of truth radiates from everything you wrote.

  What was the first thing I did when I arrived in Ushuaia in the spring of 2003? I visited the Prison Museum and in its souvenir shop bought Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges, the story of his life at the end of the world, among the Yahgans (indigenous people), the Onawas (nomad hunters) and his family of British immigrants (owners of the Harberton Ranch, the first on Tierra del Fuego). It is one of the best travel books I have read and the antithesis of Chatwin’s story. Bridges pits unity against the latter’s fragmentation; and against his superficiality—inevitable given the speed of most memorable journeys—a depth seldom seen in the Restless Tradition. Its author studied the language of the aboriginals, befriended them, established a bridge between Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures that does not even surface in In Patagonia as a possibility. Bridges’ truth is superior to Chatwin’s. Strange but true: literary truth comes in degrees and honesty, unverifiable though it is because with time, facts become ever more elusive, can have a profound effect. A traveller can often see what the native is unable to appreciate, but it is not the same to be a tourist at the end of the world as to have lived there.

  I imagine that what I felt on my fleeting stays in Tierra del Fuego, the Cape of Good Hope or Western Australia, that frisson of the remote and the finite, must have been similar to what Roman travellers and medieval pilgrims experienced when they contemplated the different ends of the earth with Celtic resonances where Western Europe hurls itself into the sea. After reaching Santiago de Compostela, a university city with an annual bookselling and book-pawning fair which dates back to 1495, the pilgrims would continue for three or four days until they came to Finistère, where on the beach they would burn clothes they had worn over months of wandering before beginning their slow trek home, on foot, as always. If all religions share some things, it is the need for the book, the idea that walking brings one nearer to the gods and the conviction that the world will come to an end. For the ancients that certainty was expressed in physical terms: at a certain point, once a particular frontier had been reached, it was impossible to go any further. We have mapped the most remote corner of the globe and eliminated the mystery of space: all that remains for us to do is to register the end of time.

  It has been our fate to witness the demise of the paper book, though it is proving so slow perhaps it will never happen at all. Yet in Bécherel in Britanny, birthplace of the fictional material shaped by Chrétien de Troyes that was so worthy of imitation, a few miles from the French département of Finistère, in a single afternoon I visited seventeen bookshops and art galleries linked by ink and calligraphy with the translator François Monti. Bécherel forms part of a spider’s web of small bookselling towns that may seem anachronistic, but are very striking. Hay-on-Wye was the first, founded by Richard Booth in 1962; today it has thirty-five bookshops. Small bookselling towns
exist in Scotland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Finland, France and Spain. Before 1989 there was not a single bookshop in Bécherel. Its old textile glory had been reduced to street names: rue de la Chanvrerie (Hemp Street), Rue de la Filanderie (Weaving Street). The imposing merchants’ residences speak of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when this area exported the best Britanny linen. The bed and breakfast where we stayed had a distaff and a bookcase full of books. I have never seen so many bookshops with wall-to-wall carpeting.

  The houses are old, but the shops selling old books are new and their lack of order is carefully contrived: a retro scenario within vintage architecture. With its two floors and a conservatory adorned with metal sculptures next to the presbytery garden, the Librairie du Donjon is one of the most beautiful I have ever visited. Nonetheless, I find it hard to forget that I am in the midst of a tourist operation. That Bécherel is a book theme park. An old dynamic has been turned upside down: libraries, in total economic crisis, with their collections of games and videos, are more vigorous than ever, yet bookshops are being transformed into museums as part of a strategy for survival.