I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the way the shape of the city can change one’s experience of it. When I first lived in Paris in 1957 when I was twenty, I knew no one, met no one, was very lonely, and the hotel I stayed in became my refuge and my sanctuary. When I went out, it was as though a string was attached to me, so my solitary wanderings through the streets, my quick visits to American Express to pick up my (usually nonexistent) mail, my trips to somewhere in the thirteenth to buy francs on the black market, were always brief excursions, never real voyages.
In the fifty years or so since then, I’ve lived in many neighborhoods in the city, and with each move the center of the city would shift, the shape of the whole alter, my access to it enlarge. There would always be various loci, the swimming pools where I exercised, the cafés I frequented, the museums I most often visited, and for the longest period in those years—this is the point I’ve been getting to—the Village Voice, and Odile.
This is what most struck me when I heard the sad news about the closing of our great bookstore, because when I left Paris with Catherine to move to the country, Paris had one single center for me—the Voice. When I come to the city now, it’s almost always the first place I go; when I’m to meet someone, it’s at the Voice; when literary friends who don’t know Paris arrive, I tell them about the Voice, so that they, too, will have a firm center to their experience of the city.
I don’t want this keepsake for Odile to be too much of a lament, though I suppose it will at least partly have to be that. So many years now since the day I wandered into what at first seemed as much a tearoom as a bookstore, and became part of a lively and growing community of resident readers and of visitors, of writers who live in the city, and writers passing through, who, as the Voice evolved into the singular bookstore it became, would read from their work in that wonderfully intimate upstairs room, in which each person in the audience seems a close friend. I’ve heard so many great writers up there, from Ray Carver, to Grace Paley, to Michael Ondaatje, to Mavis Gallant . . . on and on.
We each have our memories of those splendid evenings, so I think I should stop here, because this has surely now become a lament, not so much for the past as for the sad future which will have this benevolent home place missing from it.
Instead, I’ll offer warm thanks to Odile, for all the years we did have of a bookstore, the brilliant and passionate selection of books which matched any I’ve known anywhere, and forever welcoming, ever warm, ever enthusiastic presence . . .
—c. k. williams
Farewell Day
Paris, June 16, 2012