There isn’t much in this issue of Five Dials. Sometimes – as long-time readers know – we give over an entire issue to a single writer. The bar is high. Last time we relinquished control, the issue was placed in the capable hands of Orhan Pamuk. This issue features a single essay by one of our favourite writers, Javier Marías, whose latest novel, The Infatuations, is currently being translated by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa. [. . .]

At some point, years ago, Marías read The Leopard and, unlike some of us who
simply wandered down streets in Camden, he wrote an essay on the particular genius of the novel, and the way the book seems heavier than most, weighted with the wisdom of an entire life. I envy any of you Five Dials readers who know nothing of Marías or Lampedusa. From this humble starting point, your journey will hopefully include the following stops on its itinerary: a page from now you’ll get to the Marías essay, which will inevitably lead you towards The Leopard (as well as Marías’s own work), and perhaps The Leopard will lead you to your own dark streets, standing in front of a row of houses, wearing a too-thin coat, feeling the weight of its lessons, aware that it is so much more than a story of crumbling Sicilian aristocracy.

And from the opening of the essay:

There is no such thing as the indispensable book or author, and the world would be exactly the same if Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov and Borges had never existed. It might not be quite the same if none of them had existed, but the non-existence of just one of them would certainly not have affected the whole. That is why it is so tempting – an easy temptation if you like – to think that the representative twentieth-century novel must be the one that very nearly didn’t exist, the one that nobody would have missed (Kafka, after all, did not leave just the one work, and as soon as it was known that there were others, as well as Metamorphosis, any reader was then at liberty to desire or even yearn to read them), the one novel that, in its day, was seen by many almost as an excrescence or an intrusion, as antiquated and completely out of step with the predominant ‘trends’, both in its country of origin, Italy, and in the rest of the world. A superfluous work, anachronistic, one that neither ‘added to’ nor ‘moved things on’, as if the history of literature were something that progressed and was, in that respect, akin to science, whose discoveries are left behind or eliminated as they are overtaken or revealed to be incomplete, inadequate or inexact. But literature functions in quite the opposite way: nothing that one adds to it erases or cancels out what came before; rather, new books sit alongside earlier books and they coexist. Old and new texts breathe in unison, so much so that one wonders sometimes if everything that has ever been written is not simply the same drop of water falling on the same stone, and if, perhaps, the only thing that really changes is the language of each age. The older work still has to ‘breathe’, despite the time that has elapsed since its creation or appearance; and some works – the majority – are erased or cancelled out, but this happens of its own accord, not because something else comes along to take their place or to supplant or eject them; rather, they languish and die because of their own lack of spirit or – more precisely – because they aspired to being ‘modern’ or ‘original’, an aspiration that leads inevitably to an early senescence or, as others might say, they become ‘dated’. ‘It’s very much of its time,’ we tell ourselves when we read these books in a different, later age, because, given the unstoppable and ever-accelerating speed with which the world moves, ‘in a different age’ can sometimes mean a mere decade later. This is the case even with stories written by some of the great modern authors, such as Kafka, Faulkner, Borges on occasions and Joyce almost always. They can sometimes seem slightly old-fashioned or, if you prefer, dated, precisely because they were so innovative, bold, confident, original and ambitious.

The same cannot be said of Isak Dinesen or of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. The latter is not in any way an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel as some critics said at the time, misled perhaps by the century in which the action takes place. It is, without a doubt, a contemporary novel of the kind written by the authors mentioned above, and its author was fully aware of the new techniques and ‘advances’ in the genre, if you can call them that, and was even modest enough to abandon one possibility – that of describing a single day in the life of Prince Fabrizio di Salina – saying: ‘I don’t know how to do a _Ulysses._’ But he did know, for example, how to make masterly use of ellipsis, telling a story in fragmentary fashion, unemphatically, even withholding information and leaving unexplained what the reader need only glimpse or intuit, setting up illuminating connections between disparate and apparently secondary or merely anecdotal elements, adroitly bringing together what the characters say and do with what they think (all of which is much more common in the twentieth-century novel than in the novel of the nineteenth century), and, above all, he observes, reflects, suggests and qualifies.

Check it all out

The latest edition of Five Dials — number 8b — is now available. As you will notice, it is an addendum, but a far better addendum than, say, the one you find at the back of your Self Assessment Tax Return. Your free copy is available

You’ll also notice our latest issue is all about Paris — again. For those subscribers who loathe every mention of Paris, either because they were pickpocketed on the Rue Le Verrier or they’re struggling with the final chapter of a biography of Napoleon — we are sorry. For all the others subscribers, please enjoy a little more from the City of Light, as well as our favourite Maupassant short story. We’re always trying to offer a helping hand to young writers. Please enjoy.

I’m a big fan of Five Dials, and feel a special connection to these two recent issues, especially the first, which came out right before I went to Paris for the first time ever and including a great article by Lauren Elkin on Parisian bookstores and the quirks of French bookselling. What’s cool about this addendum, is that, if you look closely enough at the lower right corner of the first pic from the Five Dials launch party, you’ll see Emma Archer and Todd Zuniga—both of whom were on the same Parisian trip . . .

(Case in point re: the lack of widespread attention: the has a total of 59 (now 60) fans. This seems impossibly small for a Facebook page that’s been operating since May.)

Anyway, the article that really caught my eye in this latest issue is Lauren Elkin’s look at why there are 792 bookshops in Paris. Actually, this is more about the Parisian literary scene and how government regulations, fantastic sounding events, and a general attitude about books (le livre n’est pas un produit comme des autres or “a book is not a commodity like any other”) “keeps it literary” at a time when one out of every four French people claim to have not read a book in the last year.

If only 75% of Americans read a book last year . . . There’s an interesting statistic that Lauren pulls out: France spends 1.5% of its gross interior product on cultural activities, whereas in the U.S. that figure is 0.3%.

And in terms of that vast number of bookstores thing—here’s a bit of perspective:

A search in the Paris yellow pages for “bookstores” yielded 792 results: 101 in the 6th, 100 in the 5th—although these are the traditionally literary neighbourhoods; still there are 63 in the 11th, 28 in the 19th, 36 in the 16th. When you consider that there are only 10 independent bookstores in all of New York city, these figures are astounding.

There are over 3,000 independent bookstores in France, employing approximately 13,000 people. The largest French retailer of books—the Fnac—was founded by communists.

Nevertheless, French indie bookstores face a lot of common challenges—“high rents, low return on investment, high social fees to be paid for their employees”—all of which led to some seriously un-American innovative government interventions:

The Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, introduced a “plan livre“—book plan—at the end of 2007 which aims to help out independent bookstores who fit a certain profile. The label “LIR”—librairie independente de reference—was launched in 2008. In order to qualify, there are a list of requirements, notably: the bookstore must not have access to a centralized warehouse from which their stock is replenished, the stock must contain a majority of books in print for more than one year, and the bookstore’s owner must have total autonomy over the bookstore’s holdings. Once the label has been bestowed, the bookstore becomes eligible for a variety of subsidies from the Centre National du Livre (CNL)—interest-free loans for development projects, funds with which to acquire stock (up to 500,000 euros per year of the CNL’s budget have been earmarked for this purpose), reductions on social fees for employees, tax relief, and funding to sponsor readings, festivals, and other activities. (The funding of the CNL increased in 2008 from 1.3 to 2.5 million euros.)

And this is all in addition to the “fixed book price” policy:

A book is not a product like any other, the French government affirmed when they adopted the Loi Lang, regarding the fixed price of books, in 1981. The law stipulates that the publisher has to print the price of the book on the back cover, and retailers are not allowed to offer more than a 5% discount on that price. It is the reason behind the quality of books published and the abundance of independent bookstores in France; it prevents large retailers like the Fnac or Amazon from putting small bookstores out of business; in theory it is also meant to prevent consumers from going to small bookstores to check out a book and then buying it in discount stores or, now, online.

There’s a lot more to her article than this “business of bookstores” stuff (which, yes, is my hobby horse, I admit), including a cool bit about the various book events in Paris, like Jacques Jouet’s “Attempt to tire out an author,” for which he spent four days writing a novel in the Place Stalingrad, or the Exercises de Style bus, “on which actors read from Queneau’s famous collection of ninety-nine versions of the same story: man gets on a bus.”

As someone who will be going to Paris for the first time later this month (actually as part of a study group to look at the future of publishing in France and America, so, um, that bookstore business obsession is pretty fitting), this issue of Five Dials has me all giddy. Definitely worth checking out . . . and becoming a fan of on Facebook.