posted on 25 Oct 2016

Bookshops by Jorge Carrión trans. by Peter Bush

I tend to read most books about books – it’s become something of a habit – but probably my favourite in the whole genre are books about bookshops. When I come across a book that details the search for, or obsession with,  bookshops as places in their own right, I can mentally settle down, relax and know I’m in the company of another believer, someone who understands me. I also get the impression that the authors of these books know this too – they understand their audience and know which strings to pull and as a result there is a confederacy that’s easily created between the author and the reader.

Spanish author, Jorge Carrión has produced something which at one and the same time conforms to these conventions but also challenges his readers to stretch themselves out of the relative comfort of the cosy bookshop narrative and into something altogether more challenging. Bookshops is in many ways an interesting hybrid – partly a global tour of bookshops, partly a travelogue, some part literary social history and topped by a substantial dollop of critical philosophy that asks what we think bookshops are for.

I think he’s right to start by drawing distinctions between the bookshop and the library – the bookshop is always driven in some measure by two things that libraries can often ignore : the need to make a profit from the transaction and the constant need for the new and novel to drive those sales. It seems obvious to say it but unless bookshops find a space and purpose within their communities and can turn a profit in doing so, they will simply cease to exist. And, as you might suspect given an undertaking like this one which occupied him over an extended period of time, shops he visited and extolled have closed – even, as he rather movingly recounts, in his own home neighbourhood where a long established bookshop gave way to McDonalds.

However, there’s also plenty of evidence here for the way long established second-hand or independent bookshops become a critical part of the cultural landscape and his travels across Europe, North and South America tend to confirm this. Bookshop owners can be extraordinary people in their own right ( and I use the term ‘extraordinary’ to represent both the good and the god-awful) but the people who are attracted to bookshops are themselves a special breed. Not least of these are the authors or want-to-be authors who seem to find the existence of a bookshop something akin to a literary welfare system that is there to provide sustenance of all kinds – from moral support to a place to sleep,

One of the stand-out messages in this book is that real differences exist between the notions of the bookshop in the West and in the East – or more accurately in the context of this book, the Occident and the Orient. Carrión is at pains to point out the deeply seated colonial cultural assumptions and inherent Orientalism of his attitudes to what he finds in places like China, India and North Africa. I’ve never travelled to these parts of the world and so much of this is new territory for me and raises a set of interesting issues. It seems to me true that our Western default position is to see writers, publishers and booksellers from these parts of the world primarily in relationship to notions of the Western literary canon and the contribution they made to the life story of Western writers. He also has some interesting observations about the role bookshops and bookselling has to play in politically febrile areas of the world like Eastern Europe, South America and Cuba where stores can become locations associated with revolution or counter-revolution.

As you can tell from these brief musings, this is a book rammed with important ideas and it has a structure that rather encourages the writer to make links and to meander – something he does with evident glee. There are few solid boundaries in any of the chapters here – admittedly they are all bound together by some core ideas but you are very likely to find yourself whisked across the globe from one country to another if there’s a point that needs to be made or effectively illustrated. It did take me a little while to adjust to this loose essay style and on a couple of occasions just as I was settling into a more extended visit to a particular shop, off we’d go somewhere else in pursuit of an idea. It is something you adjust to though and by the end I was wanting more of it.

There are several books about books or bookshops that are structured to follow a particular line of argument – they establish just how wonderful, important and unique bookshops are and then proceed to tell you that despite this some looming new technology or change in cultural norms means that books as physical objects and the people who sell them are effectively going to become history. By the time we’ve finished the only comfort to be drawn from our reading is the knowledge that we are on the side of the angels and that we’ll be able to raise a wry smile as we’re overtaken and trampled underfoot by the barbarian hordes. For quite a large part of this book I thought we were probably heading in that same direction but ultimately that turned out to be not quite the case here. Carrión is keen to ensure he’s not seen as a Luddite or technology-denier and he’s upfront about his admiration for Amazon and is happy to confess that he’s an inveterate web-browser, seeking out a surrogate bookshop experience on-line. However, and I think the latest statistics showing a downturn in E-readers and an upturn in physical book sales supports this, there is clearly space and a need for both to sit side by side in the world of the reader and they can do so without contradiction and without damaging the existence of the other – which is, I think, the positive message this book ends with.

 

Terry Potter

October 2016