I mentioned A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé in my last post. I am finally about finished with it. It is a terrific read. It's about a bookstore called The Good Novel, and part of the plot is figuring out who their detractors are. At one point the owner writes a letter to a newspaper describing why there should be good novels. It is worth sharing. Her name is Francesca, and you should know that she had a little daughter who was killed in an accident. Here is the piece:
For as long as literature has existed, suffering, joy, horror, grace, and everything that is great in humankind has produced great novels. These exceptional books are often not very well known, and are in constant danger of being forgotten, and in today’s world, where the number of books being published is considerable, the power of marketing and the cynicism of business have joined forces to keep those extraordinary books indistinguishable form millions of insignificant, not to say pointless, books.
But those masterful novels are life-giving. They enchant us. They help us to live. They teach us. It has become necessary to come to their defense and promote them relentlessly, because it is an illusion to think that they have the power to radiate it all by themselves. That alone is our ambition.
We want necessary books, books we can read the day after a funeral, when we have no tears left for all our crying, when we can hardly stand the pain; books that will be there like loves ones when we have tidied a dead child’s room and copied out her secret notes to have them with us, always, and breathed in her clothes hanging in the wardrobe a thousand time, and there is nothing left to do; books for those nights when no matter how exhausted we are we cannot sleep, and all we want is to tear ourselves away from obsessive visions; books that have heft and do not let us down when all we can hear, over and over, is the policeman saying gently, You will not ever see your daughter alive; we you can no longer stand looking all over the house, all over the garden, in a mad frenzy for little John, when fifteen times a night you find him again in the little pond lying on his stomach in ten inches of water; books you can take to your friend whose son hanged himself in his room, two months ago, two months that seem like an hour; books you can take to a brother who is so sick you no longer recognize him.
Every day, Adrien opens his veins, Maria gets drunk, Anand is knocked down by a truck, a twelve-year old Chechen or Turkoman or Darfurian is raped. Every day, Véronique dries the eyes of a condemned man, an old woman holds the hand of a horribly disfigured dying man, a man takes in his arms a dazed little child from among the corpses.
We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are here to please.
We have no time for those sloppy, hurried books of the “Go on, I need it for July, and in September we’ll give you a proper launch and sell one hundred thousand copies, it’s in the bag” variety.
We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer’s block, the author’s panic that he might be lost, his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure he has taken.
We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep up there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it always will be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels.
We want books that leave nothing out: neither human tragedy nor everyday wonders, books that bring fresh air into our lungs.
From A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé, pp. 278-280
In a similar vein, see Richard Powers' (The Time of Our Singing) fiction piece in the October 18 New Yorker.
Re-read a favorite novel!
Re-read a favorite novel!
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