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

Svetlana Alpers;
Story of My Wife
by Milan Füst—and more. They are all linked to memories of people now dead, or with whom I have lost touch, and to whom I owe an immense debt. That’s the way books get around.
    And I haven’t even started on bookshops. There has always been one in every town in which I have ever lived, some more memorable than others. (Oh yes! I remember Marie-Jeanne Apprin’s Librairie de Provence, in Aix-en-Provence in the 1970s; Brahic’s shop, also in Aix, at the top of the Cours Mirabeau; Madame Tchann’s bookstore on the boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris—later replaced by a shop selling golfing accessories, which quickly folded.) Bookshops with their daily deliveries, laid out on the “new books” table—sometimes their owners even opening the boxes before your very eyes—or with their treasures forgotten on the shelves. Christian Thorel found a copy of the out-of-print
Dom Casmurro
by Machado de Assis in the tiny bookshop called
Ombre blanche
(White shadow) in its early days. Even more precious are the books recommended by a bookseller who is also a great reader, when he or she has a moment to escape the administrative preoccupations that take up most of their time. Bookstores often become informal meeting places, where at certain times of day you are almost sure to find someone to talk to. True bookshops—Tschann has now moved to another spot on the boulevard Montparnasse, or Le Livre in Tours (where they sell more books published by Clémence Hiver than by Grasset!)—have replaced the circulating libraries of the nineteenth century or the literary cafés, where it was a ritual to foregather in the late afternoon to meet people of similar interests. Or on a different tack, I remember José Corti in his bookshop on the rue Médicis in the early 1980s, getting cross because I asked him if he still had the two volumes of André Monglond’s
Préromantisme français
, (French pre-Romanticism) which had long been out of print. He calmed down, and we moved from confrontation to conversation. After checking, I find that I actually have Monglond’s book in my library, but I have now completely forgotten how it got there. I do know I paid a lot of money for it—400 francs—because I have another tic, which is to leave the prices in all the books I have bought second-hand. In this case it was on a thin piece of card with a notch in it, since it had been attached to the book’s jacket in the shop window.
    Reviewers and writers are another source of ideas. Would I have found my way to reading Joubert, Broch or Musil without reading Maurice Blanchot’s
Le Livre à venir
(
The Book to Come
)? How would I ever have got to Ammianus Marcellinus, or reread Grégoire de Tours without Auerbach’s
Mimesis
(my copy is in the Gallimard collection, Tel, dated 1977)? Would I ever have gone back to Rousseau without Jean Starobinski’s
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle
(
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction
)? And among the many critics who have helpedme to understand Proust better (Deleuze, Revel, Beckett, Poulet and more) there is the precious stylistic approach of Leo Spitzer (
Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics
). These critics—and some others—were not satisfied simply to analyze the books, but went on to shed new light on them for readers already familiar with their contents, while at the same time persuading new readers to seek them out. As did some authors, such as Claude Simon, who used to speak so luminously of Proust, or Julien Gracq, whose
Lettrines
and
En lisant, en écrivant
(Reading, writing) conveyed the impression of having a friendly conversation, of remarkable interest, with someone who had read the same books as oneself.
    One final curiosity: lists. I have spent a good deal of my time drawing up lists of books to read or re-read, or