The six remaining lists arrived throughout the month of April. Ivan and Francesca met the six electors one after the other. They saw Larry de Winter and Gilles évohé —whom Van had met in February—in Paris, as well as Marie Noir. Paul Néant, Armel Le Gall, and Ida Messmer preferred to have them come out to them en province.
Larry de Winter was tall, thin, and gracious; you could have sworn he was an aging dancer. He had been a diplomat and knew literature from all over the world, with a preference for the least known.
“Maybe I’ll win the prize for the most unexpected list,” he said. “Let me beg you in advance to forgive me for the trouble you’re bound to have tracking down some of the titles—Indonesian or Nigerian, for example. I must confess, however, that to my astonishment I put far more French authors on the list than I thought I would when I started out. I’m not being biased, believe me. But there are some young French authors who are extremely gifted.”
He had suggested to Francesca and Van that they come to his house, on the rue de Beaune. In his little apartment, everything was just as he was, on first glance classical, but in fact, unexpected, so they told me later on, with his 1950s furniture, his books with Art Deco bindings, his enigmatic curios, his English-style full-length portrait of a gentleman in a park, who resembled him in every feature.
When de Winter saw that Van had noticed the resemblance, he spread his hands, the way one does to show that one has nothing.
“A few mementoes I’ve inherited from my mother. She had incredible taste, and money from her banker family. She was deported in 1943. I was nine. I had already been in boarding school in Switzerland for two years.”
He spoke the way he wrote, a very precious French, precious in the sense that a fine jeweler might use—extreme rigor in the choice of materials, color, shine, the interplay of shapes and juxtapositions, extreme precision in the cut, intense dislike of ostentation. Van and Francesca could have listened to him for hours. He alluded to the print runs of his books that remained poor because his publisher simply expected correspondingly poor sales.
“But we don’t care about that, do we?” declared Francesca eagerly.
Winter gave her a lovely smile.
“I have never dreamt of either success or money. I don’t think about it. It is elegance that interests me. I mean elegance in the broadest sense—intellectual, moral, physical, elegance in one’s relations with other people . . . I was sixteen years old when I heard a quote on the radio by the painter Martini, a quote that left its mark on me for life. Simone Martini said that his aim was to attain ‘perfect elegance’—or was it the commentator who said that Martini was aiming for ‘perfect elegance’? Either way, the two words went straight to my soul. They expressed exactly what I aspired to, without knowing how to describe it. I too wanted to aim for perfect elegance, in life and, of course, if possible, in art. With such a purpose in life, the goals of success and money, obviously, become relative: they belong, rather, to the things one must avoid.”
He poured out a new round of aged, golden whiskey.
“Still on the subject of greed,” he said, “a sort of degradation of literary morality is under way. It could well be that your project, in itself, simply by the light it will cast on the arena of literature, will show how pathetic this drift is. What I’m referring to is the way that authors, nowadays, live for rivalry, going so far, I am told, as to write with the sole purpose of crushing their rivals. Literary prizes bear a large part of responsibility in this respect. Writing solely to outdo another writer—what a paltry ambition. Cultural creativity is beautiful and special because it offers a place to everyone. And to think there are people who would like to restrict it! They’ve made a covered market of literature, where a few best sellers take up all the room. By ‘they’ I mean the major publishers, the journalists who act like sheep, the wholesale distributors of culture. Ah, I much prefer the world of those who care for literature—mind, I did not say the old world, or the little world.”
He had placed his list in a little cardboard binder, closed with a ribbon.
“A pseudonym?” He raised one eyebrow higher than the other. “I forgot to think of one. Choose what you like, apart from Summer, a nickname that spoiled my high school years.”
“Balanchine?” suggested Ivan.
“I’d prefer the opposite, a name that might make you think of Brezhnev, or Francis Blanche. What about Magot? Call me Le Magot. It’s an Intelligence Service sort of name, it will remind me of my years at the Quai d’Orsay.”
Gilles évohé got around by bike. “Whatever the weather, thanks to my diving suit,” he said, after climbing off his bike in front of Francesca, who was sitting on a bench by the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, where he had suggested they meet. While talking, he was pulling off a sort of bronze-green overall.
“Actually—” He stood stock still. “I actually had no idea for a pseudonym, but that’s just given me one. Scaph.”
“Very good,” said Ivan and Francesca.
“With a ph or an f?” asked Francesca.
“With an f,” amended évohé. “That’s better, Scaf it is.”
Short, brown-haired, nervous, he looked like Michel Rocard. His short stories and novels, on the other hand, were like those of Alexandre Vialatte. évohé was his real name. He had worked for forty years at the CNRS as a researcher in mathematics. His specialty: corner variables, he said. Very amusing stuff. He hadn’t come up with much, he added, with a note of forced cheerfulness.
He was very enthusiastic about the idea of The Good Novel. Did he have a cell phone? He did, yes, why? Really? If he had something to say, he would prefer to stop off at the bookstore. It wasn’t far by bike. No? That wasn’t a good idea?
Van and Francesca walked by his side for over an hour, along the Canal Saint-Martin, from République to the Place de Stalingrad and back. When they left him, they had been won over by his vitality, full of hope. Francesca did not understand what suddenly came over Ivan at that moment, for he turned around and ran after Scaf, who was already on his bicycle. She saw him come back waving in his hand a yellow and red plastic bag with the name “Nicolas” visible from far away. The list, he explained. He forgot to give it to us.
Marie Noir was a soft, round woman who, visibly, had remained faithful to the clothing style of her twenties, concluded Ivan, identifying the hand-woven alpaca poncho, the natural leather sandals burnished by age, the Indian cotton shoulder bag, and the braid down her back, now salt-and-pepper: he recognized them with a certain emotion, and a feeling of complicity. Like Francesca, he knew that Marie Noir was an authority on a pre-Columbian art, and he listened with amazement as she spoke, her eyes shining, about fair-trade jam and the incomparable vegetables you could find thanks to the Association for the Support of Peasant Farming. For Marie Noir’s novels, while they had their moments of pure splendor, were dark as stone, filled with a cynicism that nothing tempered, not even the childish figure of an angel, silently present in a different form at the end of each of her novels, where they were invariably sacrificed.
“A pseudonym? Quinoa,” she said.
“That’s nice,” ventured Francesca, unsure if it was a type of prehistoric kitchen knife or a funerary musical instrument.
“Above all it’s good, and healthy,” said Marie, “and no more difficult to prepare than rice. One of my favorite books is a little masterpiece from the sixties entitled A Thousand Types of Rice, a Thousand Recipes with Rice. In a manner of speaking, a thousand. You learn that rice comes in all shapes and colors, and there is an infinite variety of ways to prepare it. In a Bengalese novel that I love, The Night on the Shore, the author devotes twelve pages to a description of the preparation of a traditional rice dish for weddings. It’s an unforgettable passage.”
By the looks of it, this woman maintained no hierarchy of pleasures. Perhaps she did not even make any distinctions among them. The rules of the game imposed on the committee members seemed to amuse her—clandestinity, secrets, dispossession.
“And what about new books?” she asked. “All the books that come out in the future? Who will select them?”
Van explained the option they had chosen with Francesca: complete indifference to the fact whether a novel was new or not.
“We’ll leave the new books to other bookstores,” he said. “In this respect at least, our competitors should look upon us kindly. After the fact, of course, we will include the new novels that seem to deserve it. I think I already told you, our electors will be asked to add to their initial selection every year. At the time of the yearly addition we can include recent books, ones that are almost new.”
Marie Noir did not agree: “Imagine some wonderful book comes out in the fall and goes unnoticed. It happens every year: one or two or sometimes three remarkable novels are buried in silence and go to the bottom of the pile. Maybe you think that doesn’t matter and it’s enough to go and get them from the bottom of the pile eighteen months later. I think it would be better, for the book and for the author, and for the reader, if you had these books in stock as soon as they came out.”
“Who could make the selection that quickly?”
“You two. That selection is the job of the bookstore, after all. I would even go so far as to say that, in line with your intuition, it is at the heart of the bookseller’s profession. And if you really want to, you could always have your additional choices approved by the committee.”
Van and Francesca talked about the issue for a long time. Francesca would have liked, to a greater or lesser degree, for the public image of the store to be: at The Good Novel, you don’t go looking for the books that everyone is talking about. She would not have been opposed to a fairly strict principle, something like: none of the novels in our shop are less than a year old. “I grew up loving books,” she said, “guided by a passionate reader. But in his house, and in my own, I don’t recall ever seeing any new titles.”
Van, on the contrary, could see Marie Noir’s point. The idea that they might miss out on a worthy book, and fail to support it, bothered him.
“Particularly nowadays, where the fate of a book is decided in the space of the few weeks following its publication. And when you know that a bookseller who really loves a novel can sell five hundred or a thousand copies.”
But he knew better than Francesca the price to pay.
“If we plan to choose books from among all the new ones as they come out in the fall, practically speaking that means we have to tell the publishers in May or June that we are going to open in September; we will have to hide our decision to refuse their automatic shipment of new books, we will have to get all their fall catalogues, and a maximum number of ARCs or uncorrected proofs, and read all summer long. That is what I did in Méribel for years: read five or six hundred books, and in the end keep only ten of them.”
“There are two of us,” said Francesca. “We could each read three hundred books.”
“Let’s be honest, we can make a serious selection without relying on all the books from A to Z. For 80 percent of them, reading the first twenty pages will suffice. Regular book browsers know it well: what else are they doing, when they’re browsing? The remaining 20 percent will have to be read carefully. That leaves only one hundred and twenty titles to be shared. Francesca, you just referred to the love of books that was handed down to you. Were you referring to your grandfather? You were going to tell me more about him.”
“My grandfather Aldo-Valbelli is the man who has counted the most in my life. I would have preferred it if someone else could have taken his place. But that’s the way things are. My love for him is boundless, and he made me who I am.
“Certain reputations don’t cross borders, even between countries as close as Italy and France: that was the case for him. In Italy, he had a great deal of prestige, both as an intellectual and as a militant. He was a famous historian to begin with, one of those people who are erudite in a way people were in ancient times, of the sort you find only in Italy nowadays, as eminent in philosophy as they are in letters and science. His work as a historian is what made him known. But for me, and I am not alone, his novels are just as remarkable. But his prestige as a great man is something he owes to his involvement with his time. He was one of the first opponents of Fascism, one of the most courageous. And he paid the price. He was persecuted, really persecuted, and his academic career was threatened. He ran an entire clandestine network during the war. When peace returned, almost in spite of himself he was granted great moral authority as a senator, and he served several times as a minister—in short he was one of the founders of modern Italy. When he resigned from all his political mandates in order to return to his work as an intellectual he was still young, and he embarked on a third chapter of his life that was long, since he lived to the age of eighty-seven.”
“Were you close to him?”
“I was twenty when he died. Yes, we were close, the two of us. We did not live together, but we weren’t far away, he was on the second floor, and my parents and I were on the third in the same house in Rome. My parents did nothing but travel. He was working like mad. At the end of his life, when I was a teenager, he no longer left his office.
“He had a remarkable library—not huge, he was not a bibliophile, and I can still hear him saying, There are not so many brilliant books in the end, don’t believe everything you hear. That must have had something to do with the genesis of The Good Novel.
“He gave me novels, sometimes just after he had discovered them himself (he wasn’t the type to hide the fact that, despite his age, he had just read for the first time books as well-known as La Duchesse de Langeais or Jean Santeuil), a lot of foreign novels, all the classics, but also some novels that no one reads. I liked to talk with him about our reading. He let me take the initiative. He would never say: Well, what did you think of that book? If he happened to leave Rome, then he would write me long letters, exactly as if he were writing to a cultured friend his own age.
“He left me his entire library in an article in his will; I learned after his death that he had decided this on the day I turned ten. Nothing was removed from the collection. I created a foundation. The palazzo, with the library, is now a little research center.
“My grandfather left me a great deal more—a passion for literature, and something additional, fundamental: the conviction that literature is important. He talked about it often. Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it’s not only that. It must not be dissociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he’d say, that I’m talking about novels? Novels don’t contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It’s a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who will say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature informs, instructs, it prepares you for life.”
Francesca fell silent. She was moved.
“You told me one day that your grandfather had spoken to you . . . from the beyond,” said Ivan softly.
She nodded.
“He pulled me out of my depression, five years ago. And brought a soft golden rain down upon me.”
Upon the death of her daughter, she had desperately invoked the old man, suffering from his absence even more than she had ten years earlier, when he had passed away. She sought by every means possible to speak with him, to get help from him, to hold tight to his strong, old hand as she went through hell.
The simplest way turned out to be also the only activity that might possibly ease her suffering: she decided to read the manuscripts her grandfather had left to her. Shyness, modesty, anxiety: until then she had never opened the cardboard boxes, carefully filed and put away for her. She discovered notes, projects for books that her grandfather had abandoned—he explained why—drafts, thousands of letters, and a journal consisting of one hundred and eleven notebooks of identical format.
The journal covered sixty-three years, from 1914 to 1977. It was characterized by such precision and depth that it constituted an extraordinary history of the period in Italy. The notebooks for the period 1939 to 1945 in particular could be read like a great novel—the maquis, the campaign for Italy, the end of Fascism.
Francesca herself transcribed the entire journal. The Milanese publisher to whom she sent a thousand pages or more published them enthusiastically.
“That was nearly four years ago,” said Francesca. “It was quite a success. They sold over a million copies. There were slews of articles. It has already been translated into twenty languages.”
There had been talk of it in France, Van remembered now.
For the first time in her life, Francesca had money. Van asked her to repeat what she had just said.
“I had never had any income of my own,” she explained. “It’s one thing to have two or three houses, another to be married to a man who makes a good living, and yet another, very different thing, to suddenly earn a lot of money yourself.
“I suddenly had an idea that would not leave me: do something with that money. An obsession: do something worthwhile. I’m repeating myself, forgive me, I have no other words for it. I had that big space on the rue Dupuytren, so I converted it into the gallery. You remember the rest. Death interfered with the project.”
She looked at Ivan: “A bookstore is better. It’s more in keeping with the man himself and his life as a patron of the arts.”
She pointed to the heavens.