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

translated into French by Denise Riboni, and (3) Albert Cossery,
Les Hommes oubliés de dieu
(
Men God Forgot
).
    So once again I found Hermann Hesse in my journey through books and, above all, discovered Cossery (this must have been the first time I came across his books, a detail I had forgotten). Onchecking, I find that the Cossery is still on the shelves, but not the Haniel Long, which I am nevertheless certain I have read (have I lost it, lent it imprudently, or shelved it wrongly?). Nor is the Hesse—on the other hand, I do have the 1974 Stock edition of this, in the same translation by Denise Riboni, only it has been “revised and completed by Bernadette Burn” and “prefaced by Marcel Schneider.” After that, I read everything I could find by Cossery:
Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile
(
The Lazy Ones
);
La Maison de la mort certaine
(
The House of Certain Death
);
Mendiants et Orgueilleux
(
If all Men were Beggars
). I went to see whether I had shelved the Long under Miller, but no. However I did find Miller’s
Time of the Assassins: a study of Rimbaud
, which was number six in the collection. And this informed me that number five was
Séraphita
, which I then duly found shelved with the rest of my Balzac. And I was indeed to re-publish Balzac’s
La Théorie de la démarche
(Theory of walking) a few years later for Pandora editions in 1978. So starting from an article in
Le Figaro
, I have systematically read through Hamsun, explored Scandinavian literature, and acquired books from a particular collection, which in turn led me to other discoveries. I have only gone into so much detail over this example to indicate how infinite the ramifications of one’s reading can be. One has only to imagine hundreds of cases like this, to end up with thousands of books on the shelves.
    As the years go by of course, the field of discoveries shrinks, the continents are explored one after another, surveyed, mapped and sometimes even colonized, which does not prevent one fromtime to time discovering a lost tribe in a particularly inaccessible region—recently, I found the surprising and delicious
The Time Regulation Institute
by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which shed light for me on some gaps in my knowledge of Turkish literature, despite my early appreciation of Nazim Hikmet.
    And finally there are all the conversations. Those foreign friends who affectionately deliver to you the greatest authors in their own literature—which are not always the ones you would have guessed from the translations available—the books about which they speak to you with a tremor in their voice that inspires you to seek them out for yourself, the books they recommend to you as a special part of themselves, re-editions published by discerning readers. For example, the collection
Fins de siècles
(Ends of centuries), published by Hubert Juin in the series 10-18 in the 1970s and 1980s, led me to discover Marcel Schwob, Jean de Tinan, Octave Mirbeau, or Hugues Rebell. And what about the chance encounters? The Goncourts’
Journal
, spotted on the bookshelves of Leonardo Sciascia in his modern flat in Palermo, and which, to my shame as a Frenchman, I had never read.
Spoon River
by Edgar Lee Masters, recommended to me by Louis Evrard during a dinner in the rue Lepic. William Kennedy’s
Legs
, recommended to me by Jim Salter when I asked him to name the American novel that he most regretted had not yet been translated into French. Another writer is John Cowper Powys, described enthusiastically by Max-Pol Fouchet, one evening on the French TV book program
Lecture pour tous
(Reading for all) or
Apostrophes
—I’ve forgotten which now. I could go on. Don Marquis’s
Archy and Mehitabel
; Anders Nygren’s
Agape and Eros
, Mario Praz’s
The Romantic Agony
; Yuri Kazakov; Silvio d’Arzo’s
Casa d’altri
(The house of others);
Petersburg
by Andrey Bely;
The Art of Describing
by