Read Online Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet - Free Book Online

(
Steppenwolf
for instance—in French, the title is
Le Loup des Steppes
[Wolf of the steppes]—before I had any idea who Hermann Hesse was); or it might be the book’s jacket (
Lolita
in the 1971 paperback version, at a time when I had never heard of Nabokov, but was very taken by the illustration on the cover: a close-up of the nape of the neck of a girl with blond plaits, against an elegant green background). Or perhaps I might have seen the film before reading the book (Visconti’s
The Leopard
, from the book by Lampedusa;
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, by John Huston, from the book by B. Traven;
The Big Sleep
, by Howard Hawks from Raymond Chandler’s original;
The Lady with the LittleDog
by Kheifetz from Chekhov’s story). It might be an anecdote—in one case, an article by Gilles Lapouge, which related how he had left a copy of Hamsun’s
Pan
on a park bench, only to find it again the following year, at a second-hand
bouquiniste’s
on the banks of the Seine. The article in question also had the bewitching attraction of evoking a “secret society” of admirers of Knut Hamsun. How could one resist the chance to join a secret society of readers!
    My systematic acquisitions come firstly from habits I have acquired as an eternal autodidact. No, I don’t set out to read all the paperbacks there are in alphabetical order, though I do like to take a look at anything generally thought worthy of note. But it also comes from wanting to read everything by an author I have come across by chance. Or else by following a chain of affinities between different authors—for example, Diderot’s
Jacques le Fataliste
led me to
Tristram Shandy
, Arthur Rimbaud sent me to Germain Nouveau. Leonardo Sciascia to Luigi Pirandello, and Pirandello to Giovanni Verga. Or perhaps a book by a single author has encouraged me to try and discover a whole body of literature. Let me take the example of
Pan
again (I still have Lapouge’s article in a cutting from
Le Figaro littéraire
from 1972—with on the back an article by Bernard Pivot entitled “134 French novelists, including ‘43 yearlings’ [first-timers],” predicting who would win the Prix Goncourt that year). That single book drew me first to read all the rest of Hamsun’s books that had been translated into French, which was not easy, since at the time most of them were out of print. I took years to find
August
, the last on my list, and that was in the BibliothèqueNationale, the old one, in the rue de Richelieu, when the books I had ordered for work purposes were taking a long time to arrive. I will never forget the feeling that flooded through me as I at last held in my hands the book I had been chasing for years, when it arrived on a trolley in the great reading room, the Salle Labrouste. At last I was going to find out what had happened to the unpredictable Edvarda! Then I embarked on reading all the Scandinavian literature translated into French that I could lay hands on (Dagerman, Lagerkvist, Jonson, Martinson, Vesaas, Laxness, and many more) and I even wrote a very serious article on Hamsun’s novels
Benoni
and
Rosa
entitled “Une bague et un coeur que l’on brise” (A ring and a broken heart) in
La Quinzaine Littéraire
in 1980. But that wasn’t all. I note, while looking at my copy (P.-J. Oswald Editions), that
Pan
was number four in a French collection entitled “La source de la liberté” or “La solution intégrale” (the publisher of which announced that “this collection will publish great poets who chose to express themselves in prose”), and that at the time, I explored the whole collection and discovered the following numbers: (1) Haniel Long’s
The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca
followed by
Malinche
, prefaced by Henry Miller, with the subtitle
Stories translated from American English by F. J. Temple
; (2) Hermann Hesse,
Demian
,