Review by New York Times Review
AFTER SURVIVING A CIVIL WAR, a devastating fire and a property dispute, the 89-year-old Catalonia bookstore in Barcelona closed in 2013 and was reborn as a McDonald's. Witnessing this sacrilege was Jorge Carrión, a Barcelonabased novelist and essayist who at the time was preparing a cultural history of bookstores. "Of course, it is an obvious metaphor," he recalls glumly, "but that doesn't make it any less shocking." Fortunately he holds off his pessimism until the end of "Bookshops" (so named because its seasoned translator, Peter Bush, is British) since his real purpose is to celebrate bookstores. And he does so by wandering the globe in search of those that play - or have played - a special role in the intellectual and social lives of their communities. They become Carrion's personal mappa mundi. True, he notes, libraries also deal in books, but "the Bookshop is light; the Library is heavy." "While the Librarian accumulates, hoards, at most lends goods out for a short while," he explains, "the Bookseller acquires in order to free himself from what he has acquired; he sells and buys, puts into circulation. His business is traffic and transit. The Library is always one step behind: looking towards the past." It is the bookseller, then, who must stay in touch with the world to survive. And by tracking down what claims to be the oldest functioning bookstore in the world, the Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, with its logo displaying 1732, Carrión demonstrates that survival is possible. But what a struggle! While writing, he discovers that some bookstores he has admired have since closed. Still, beyond a nod to ancient Greece's book trade and the Library of Alexandria, he finds recent history worth revisiting, not least Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de l'Odéon in Paris, which served as a second home to the Lost Generation and first published James Joyce's "Ulysses" in 1922, before closing in late 1941 during the German occupation of France. Its namesake, though, lives on. Founded by George Whitman as Le Mistral in 1951, it became the new Shakespeare & Company in 1964 and, to this day, it draws crowds of writers and tourists to its labyrinthine quarters near Notre Dame. In his early years, Whitman befriended expat American writers, among them Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who on his return to San Francisco founded City Lights, which naturally Carrión also visited. At times, "Bookshops" reads like a collection of notes, leaping between topics, comparing discoveries in different countries within a single paragraph, stopping to discuss writers like Julio Cortázar and Roberto ? olaño, recounting the history of publishing from China to Gutenberg, digressing to recall those authors, like Jean Genet, who began their careers by stealing books. All this, while profiling scores of bookstores. Repression is a reality because regimes can know their enemies by what they read and write. Book burning was routine for Spain's Inquisition and Franco's dictatorship as well as for Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong and a good many other dictators. Myriad authors have also seen their books banned, from Charles Baudelaire, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller to Salman Rushdie. The United States is no innocent, Carrión notes, "with the present proscription of books enforced by thousands of bookshops, educational institutions and libraries for political or religious reasons." Our peripatetic author's explorations are most enjoyable when he goes beyond such landmarks as Foyle's in London, the Strand Book Store in New York and L'Ecume des Pages in Paris to less obvious corners, for instance, Antigua in Guatemala. There, La Librería del Pensativo opened in 1987 in the midst of a civil war when "distant shots fired by the guerrillas, army or paramilitary echoed around the volcanoes surrounding the city." Under its tenacious owner, Ana María Cofiño, Carrión writes, it became a "center of resistance." In the postwar years of Paul Bowles's Tangiers, it was La Librairie des Colonnes, with its shelves full of English, Spanish and Arab titles, that served as a meeting place for fugitive or visiting writers, among them the Beats William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar and Juan Goytisolo. Yet even with the support of leading Arab writers like Amin Maalouf and Tahar Ben Jelloun, the bookstore had to be rescued from closure in 2010 by Pierre Bergé, the late French fashion industrialist and philanthropist. In Cape Town, Carrión was charmed by the warmth of the Book Lounge, but he noticed that each of the shelves marked Paulo Coelho, Gabriel García Márquez and J.M. Coetzee had a card reading, "Ask for his books at the counter." Puzzled, he inquired. "They are the three most stolen writers. The only ones people steal. So we keep their books here," the bookseller explained, pointing to a pile behind her. For all Carrion's love of independent bookstores, another reality is the mass marketing of books, which began with stands in 19th-century railroad stations and later airports, spread to chains like Barnes & Noble and Waterstones in Britain and eventually spawned Amazon. But even as he admits to occasionally buying online, he considers his mission incomplete. "I devote many of my Sunday afternoons to surfing the web in search of bookshops that still do not exist for me," he writes, "though they are out there, waiting for me." ALAN RIDING is a former European cultural correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Spanish novelist and travel writer Carrión's English-language debut explores the place of bookshops (and books) in Western intellectual and consumer history. He weaves together an investigation of the different social functions of bookshops and libraries, a travelogue of bookshops he has visited, and a philosophical inquiry into the role of literature in the world. For Carrión, contemporary readers find in bookshops "the remains of cultural gods that have replaced the religious sort." He is alive to the contradictions inherent in reading and book collecting, activities that are simultaneously consumerist and spiritual. The idea of books and bookshops as sites of resistance to totalitarianism is discussed but not blindly romanticized; he notes that Hitler was a bestselling writer and Mao an erudite reader. Discussing destination bookshops, including Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the oldest bookshops in the world, and several that claim to be the biggest, Carrión explores the fine lines between pilgrimage destination, touristy gimmick, and decent bookshop. This is the perfect book for those who feel compelled to visit every bookstore they see. Agent: Nicole Witt, Mertin Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A literate mappa mundi to bookstores.This is the first of Spanish author Carrin's books to be translated into English. He writes that "every bookshop is a condensed version of the world," this book like a "cartography of a bookshop." Entering this Borges-ian labyrinth of books, readers will encounter bookshops as "archaeological sites or junk shops," police censorship, the lives and works of booksellers, reading as "obsession and madness," and the "bookshop as the world." This is no mere travel guide but rather a philosophical, reflective, wide-ranging inquiry into the world of books. Carrin began the first of his many voyages in 1998 at a bookshop in Guatemala City. He reminds us that the "oldest bookshop in the world" is in Lisbon, not far from his home in Barcelona. Along this journey, readers are guided by Montaigne and Diderot epigraphs as well as wisdom from a vast array of writers, including Goethe, Mallarm, and Benjamin. The bookseller is a "critic and cultural activist," and since ancient Rome, bookshops have been "spaces for establishing contact." Carrin is excellent discussing Paris' most famous shops, American Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare Company, where Joyce's Ulysses was born, and Adrienne Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres. Both also functioned as lending libraries, art galleries, hotels, and cultural centers. Carrin sees bookshops as political bastions and recounts The Satanic Verses uproar, Hitler as bestselling author, Mao Zedong's bookshop/publishing house, and book burnings. His trip across America includes visits to New York City's Gotham Book Mart and the Strand, Denver's Tattered Cover, Portland's Powells, and San Francisco's City Lights. The author also discusses the impact of the brick-and-mortar chains and Amazon, the "supreme Virtual Bookshop," as well as the sad story of a 100-year-old Barcelona bookshop that became a McDonald's. An insightful, educational, and erudite paean to bookshops. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
