He would not have lasted long on the job if, that same winter, in December, one afternoon during a lull he had not noticed in the bookstore a young woman dressed for town—in fact, a conventional formula like that cannot really describe a style that was anything but—let’s just say she was dressed unusually for Méribel—who stood there reading, more and more enthralled as she progressed, less and less concerned that someone might see her; the book was Rapport aux bêtes, a novel by Noëlle Revaz that Ivan thought very highly of. After an hour and a half, she reached the last page, closed the book, was clearly moved, and put it back in its place on the top quality shelf, and then she saw Ivan watching her, and blushed and said to him, holding his gaze, I don’t have any money. It doesn’t matter, Van reassured her hastily; at least it was still up to him to welcome whom he wanted in his basement. He pointed with his chin to the book she had just put back: Well? he asked. What do you think?
The young woman was still in shock. She had not read anything that powerful for a long time. The contents, the context, the characters, that primate of a mountain farmer and his nameless wife: she was not about to forget them. But the most remarkable thing, in her opinion, was the way the long monologue had been used, the phrasing, the author’s creativity in founding a new language that had no equivalent, a language that was lopsided and clumsy yet totally appropriate for the brute who was speaking, who also had no equal.
“When you finish the book, you realize you’ve never read anything like it, and that this man could only ever speak that language,” said the young woman, dazzled. Ivan came out in front of his counter.
“The author claims that he is totally imaginary.”
“Do you know Noëlle Revaz? What is she like, that she can write so powerfully?”
“I don’t know her personally, but I heard a long program about her on the radio. She’s a Swiss woman in her thirties, a Latin teacher, and this was her first novel.”
A customer was gesturing to Van that he had a question. The young woman seemed to become aware of the place and the time once again.
“Thank you for letting me read,” she said softly.
“Come again whenever you want,” suggested Van, moving aside.
“I don’t know,” said the young woman, her eyes suddenly elsewhere.
But in the meantime, she didn’t move. She was neither tall nor short, pretty nor ugly, thin nor fat. The only adequate epithet to describe her would be exquisite, thought Van, as he was slowly handing change to the customer. That girl was exquisite. The free-spirited way she wore her clothes, wool slacks tucked into brown rubber boots, a gabardine jacket, a child’s red knit scarf, with a poorly folded collapsible umbrella sticking out of her pocket.
Once the customer had left, she told Van that she was in Méribel for the day. She didn’t know how to ski, unlike her fellow students who had brought her along, and whom she had to meet at nightfall by their car. She was studying sociology in Grenoble, had grown up in the country in Belgium, and she even went to the trouble to explain, when Van asked her her name, where the unusual first name, Anis, came from, that it was the abbreviation of a double name that she had always despised.
Three weeks later, that same winter, in mid-January, 2004, one morning when despite a thick fog there were not many customers, Van was sitting behind his cash register, immersed in Les Bottes rouges by Franz Bartelt, an author he had recently discovered and whose novels he had been devouring one after the other, when someone standing in front of him put three books on the counter. Van recognized the three novels by Cormac McCarthy that made up the Border Trilogy. He raised his head. A tall woman was waiting with her eyes on him for him to notice her presence.
She was not a stranger to Van. He had seen her several times in the bookstore. She could hardly go unnoticed, with her height, her beauty, and the veil of sadness that never left her. In his mind Van called her Sylvana Mangano, because she reminded him of the mother of young Tadzio in Visconti’s Death in Venice (he thought the film fell short of the novella). He gave nicknames to all of his customers who kept their names to themselves. One woman who bought classics and wore unfashionable tortoise-shell glasses was Simone Weil; a teenager who seemed to have made a solemn vow never to smile was the young Werther; a rowdy, fat young woman who laughed a lot and always asked loudly for the season’s most over-hyped book was Nana.
The beautiful tall lady was just the opposite. Van had noticed her infallible taste. She only bought novels that were out of the ordinary, rarely recent publications and if, exceptionally, she did buy something that had just come out, it was the only one of that year’s batch that Van found worth reading.
Other times when she had come he had always had a little word to congratulate her. What a book, or, Brilliant—never more, because she didn’t seem to want to talk. But this time, because she had taken from the shelf three novels by the same McCarthy, whom Ivan set above any living author on the planet, he returned her gaze and said, “You’ve just chosen the three finest novels in the store.”
“I’m willing to believe that,” she said with a smile.
She had just read his first two, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, and she was eager to read the third one and then share the trilogy with people around her. She blessed the sky that augured bad weather: by this evening she’d have finished Cities of the Plain. She knew she was about to spend an unforgettable day. That is how she remembered reading the first two volumes, the first during a train trip between Florence and Rome, only a week ago, and the second the very next day in Rome where to the exclusion of everything else she had only one thought on her mind: to find out who this author was and what else he had written.
Van was spellbound.
“You have just confirmed to me that one of the most fortunate purposes of literature is to bring like-minded people together and get them talking.”
In a train that previous month of June, he told her, he had spent an hour talking with a young mother on the other side of the aisle, two rows ahead of him, whom he’d gone to congratulate for three reasons. First of all, she could not take her eyes off the book she was reading and she seemed to be completely indifferent to the fact that her eldest child, who must have been eight or nine, was sucking his thumb, and that the two others, with the regularity of robots, were silently pounding on each other. Secondly, the book that so absorbed her was L’amante senza fissa dimora by Fruttero and Lucentini, whom Van held in great esteem. Finally, her three children were also reading, avidly. And although the two younger ones were squabbling, it was because they were both lost in the same book and, every two pages, the little girl said impatiently to her little brother, Turn the page! to which her brother replied, annoyed but calm, Wait!
Van and the young mother had talked about F. & L., as they are known in Italy, and agreed that they were marvelous prose writers, far more deserving than their reputation in France would seem to indicate, particularly as no French author had succeeded the way they had in reaching millions of readers without making the slightest concession to literary demagogy—with the exception of Echenoz, perhaps.
“Have you read them in Italian?” asked the beautiful lady, who seemed to have forgotten to pay for her McCarthy novels.
“No. But you’ve given me an idea. That’s a reason to learn Italian.”
“Did you like A che punto è la notte?”
“Delightful. As a sociological treatise on modern Italy—very funny.”
The novel Van preferred by the Italian duo, he said, was La donna della domenica. The lady looked happy just on hearing the title.
“‘On that Wednesday in June when he was assassinated, the architect Lamberto Garrone looked at his watch more than once,’” she recited, from memory.
“The perfect opening line,” said Van. “Yet God knows the last thing I like is a tantalizing hook. And do you remember the last line?”
“Not word for word. I just remember that there’s this undercurrent throughout the entire book of the classical springboard question of two centuries of the European novel: will they, or will they not end up in each other’s arms? And that you get the answer in the last few lines.”
“Precisely. The last two or three pages consist of a dialogue between the book’s lovely heroine and the likeable police chief whom she’s been finding quite attractive over the last three hundred pages. The conversation is about the crime committed in chapter one. The police chief has the key to the mystery, in the end. You find out who the murderer is and why he did it. And the novel finishes like this, just these words about where the conversation took place: ‘—Poor old me, Santa Madonna! said Anna Carla with a laugh. —How late it is. She jumped lightly to her feet from the bed, and hurriedly began to dress.’ The French translation is by Philippe Jaccottet, the poet, had you noticed?”
“And when I think there are people around me who complain they can’t find anything good to read. What nonsense.”
“It’s a pity. Whereas every month you and I discover a masterpiece. The problem is that 90 percent of the novels published are ‘books not worth bothering with,’ as Paulhan used to call them. Critics should only write about the other kind, but they’re lazy and frivolous.”
“They don’t really care about the truth. There are only two laws that apply: your clan and your network. In a word, they’re corrupt.”
“I didn’t quite dare say as much. They heap praise on books that are nothing but fluff, and in the rush they overlook real jewels. By definition, confusion is beneficial to mediocrity.”
“And booksellers have no time left to read, and they promote such rubbish! It’s amazing, you should hear them. So I add, in bursts, in a monotonous tone of voice—A truffle, Read it right away, Absolute genius. They look at me and wonder if I’m making fun of them and then they see that I am.”
She grew thoughtful.
“You know, I could see what was going on here, how you tried to resist, and the way they put an end to it. I asked your boss about it. He replied exactly what I would have wagered he’d say, that you were going to make his business go under. And he was probably right. All that got me thinking. I think that your intuition was right, but your mistake was to think that the ideal bookstore could be profitable in a place the size of Méribel. The perfect bookstore, the kind where you’d sell nothing but good novels, could only be viable in a big city with a strong cultural tradition, like London or Paris. I’m willing to bet that in a city of that size there are five or ten thousand people like us who are passionate about fiction and are tired of having to go to bookstores jam-packed with books to place their orders for masterpieces they never have in stock.”
“I’d be willing to bet as much myself,” said Van, moved.
“I know what you’d call such a bookstore,” said the lady. “You’d call it The Good Novel. I have what it would take to start it up. All I need is the bookseller.”
Van slowly got to his feet.