Libraires Sans Frontières

From the closure of Borders and Angus and Robertson stores across the country, to Nick Sherry's prediction that bookstores won't exist within five years (What's he the minister for again? Oh, he's the Minister for Small Business. Good to know we've got his support!), you could be forgiven for thinking that the entire book industry is entering its end times.

  

Which, given that I work in a bookstore and would like to continue to do so, is an issue that strikes close to my heart.

But before we write the obituary, let's get a few things straight.

Borders didn't fail because of online trading, or e-books, or anything new-fangled like that. It failed because it was a bad bookstore. I used to work there, so I feel I can say this with perfect impunity: Borders was fucking shit.

If one day some Borders supremo had decided that they should stop selling books and start selling ... say, whitegoods, or clothes, or Volkswagens, nothing about the way the business ran would change. The fact that they sold books meant nothing to the people running the company. They would argue, I'm sure, that a business is a business, and then they'd point to pie-charts to explain why books should be treated like any other commodity. But book retail is (almost) unique, and can't be treated like you're running an 'anything' store. Why not? Because --- and this is probably the most un-cynical, high-falutin', philosophical-type thing I'll ever say on this blog --- books are important. Reading is important. Learning, and growing, and discovering are all important. Books are important.

In a good bookstore there will be a surfeit of knowledgeable staff who are enthusiastic about matching the right book to a customer's needs. At Borders there was a bunch of surly kids who didn't know a damn thing. Okay, this is an exaggeration, there were many good staff at both Borders I worked at ... but it's a slighter exaggeration than it should be. I worked alongside too many people who just didn't read, and had no interest in books at all.

And there were far too few of those surly kids anyway. Even if you did want to ask a question, good luck finding somebody to ask. When looking at ways to maximise revenue, Borders would always, always think first of cutting staff. Eventually their stores (vast expanses, all) were being run by skeleton crews. There weren't enough staff to help the customers, and there weren't enough staff to keep the store neat and tidy. That's not just my anal retentive side coming out, Borders un-alphabetised shelves were a massive problem: how can you sell somebody a book you can't find? Not once, in all my time at Borders, did any manager suggest that the state of the store might be having adverse effects on the bottom line, yet it was perfectly obvious to every member of the floor-staff. A manager did, at one point, suggest that if the computer showed we had one copy of something we should tell the customer we were sold out, to save us the time of searching for a book we'd never find. Can a store that contemptuous of its customers ever survive?

So then, if you're selling fewer books, how to make up the shortfall? Immediately after they were taken over by the REDGroup (hacks and morons, I guarantee), Borders went through their entire backlist, marking up prices to RRP +10%. With the exception of the discounted new releases that they stacked up the front, every single book, CD and DVD in their stores was more expensive than it should have been. They hoped, I'm sure, that people simply wouldn't notice. Which I guess is another pretty neat illustration of the utter contempt with which they treated their customers.

As the bills mounted up, Borders stopped paying the distributors, who stopped sending books to Borders stores. Major releases were simply skipped by the entire company. Long before they officially closed, I wandered into the Borders on Lygon Street to wile away a bit of time before seeing a movie at the Nova. Dave Eggers' book Zeitoun had just come out: a major new work by a major writer. Borders didn't have it. Across the road, Readings had a pile the size of an elephant. I knew Borders was dead that day, and that was nearly two years ago. Since then, it's just been the carcass twitching.

And former colleagues of mine, take heart, it wasn't your fault. The company simply didn't have any interest in letting you be booksellers, rather than check-out chicks.

I used to work at Borders. Now I work at a bookstore. End rant. (And check it out, now I'm punning bilingually!)

Cheers, JC.

currently reading: The March by E.L. Doctorow

books to go: 103

To Have and Have Not (#104)

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway


What I said then:

I inherited a Hemingway box-set from my sister, and this is one of the ones I've got left.

What I say now:

After I finished To Have and Have Not I did a little bit of research, looking up online reviews and stuff. And I was quite relieved to discover that this is generally considered Hemingway's weakest novel ... so I wasn't imagining things! Apparently Hemingway himself said it was written in a rush to fulfil contractual obligations with his publisher, and called it 'a pile of trash.' I don't know if I'd go so far as him, but he's in the ballpark.

During the Great Depression, Harry Morgan has for years made a living running contraband between Cuba and Florida. Now he's settling down, putting his criminal past behind him and trying to eke out a living taking rich arseholes out sport-fishing. When one of his customers stiffs him on a thousand dollar tab and leaves him penniless, Morgan agrees to take on that old cliche and do one last job.

At this point, it's pretty entertaining. Hemingway does a good, economical job of introducing us to Morgan, a man who's fed up and out of his depth, and forcing him to plunge back into a life of crime. It could be the start of a decent little thriller. But, after agreeing to ferry a dozen Chinese from Cuba to the U.S., Morgan turns from a hapless dupe into a stone-cold psycho. He throttles the leader of the Chinese, dumps the rest overboard, and steals their money. For no reason. It runs absolutely counter to the character we've been introduced to, and makes me lose any interest whatsoever in Morgan's fate. This being a Hemingway novel, he eventually gets what's coming to him, but from throttling-Mr-Sing on, it is absolutely impossible to invest any emotion in Harry Morgan, or anything that happens to him. I was reading it to finish it, not for any pleasure.

Hemingway also does something bizarre with the last third of the book: suddenly, after Morgan and Morgan alone has been the focus for the first two-thirds, Hemingway starts tossing in secondary, and tertiary, and quaternary (look it up!) characters by the armful. He's the literary equivalent of Bernard Black making wine, only not nearly as much fun. We're suddenly introduced to a whole new set of rich arseholes (the equivalent, I suppose, of the rich arsehole who screwed over Morgan at the beginning) and asked to care about their insipid affairs, decaying marriages and inevitable suicides. It's really strange, and utterly pointless.

The writing itself is quite good (though I could have done without the random swinging between first and third person), but it can't make up for a plot composed almost entirely of holes. I've still got For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises to come; I hope they're better than this.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The March by E.L. Doctorow
books to go: 103

The Light of Day (#105)

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

What I said then: 

An incredibly dreary looking book about an inmate in a women’s prison.

What I say now:

I had it wrong. Sarah, the inmate in the women's prison is barely in the book at all; she is actually more of a MacGuffin. I wasn't wrong about the dreariness, though ...

The Light of Day is the story of George, a private detective who, over the course of a day in which he briefly visits Sarah in prison (she's a former client), thinks back over his life. The structural similarities to Cat's Eye are very marked, and it's possibly because I loved Atwood's novel so much that Swift's left me a bit cold.

George, our narrator, tells his story in an incredibly roundabout fashion which, for the first fifty or a hundred pages, often left me confused as to what was going on, and to whom. Swift, via George, tells multiple strands of his story all at once, interweaving them --- which would be fine, except he often jumps between them with no warning and doesn't give the reader any way of figuring out where we're at now. Sometimes he'd only spend a single paragraph in whatever time and place he was writing about, and sometimes it was only a sentence!

If you're going to faff about with confused timelines, then you've got to give the reader a bit of a hand keeping up. Swift refuses, so I was often forced to backtrack and re-read because the 'she' I thought he was writing about turned out to be a different 'she' altogether. Also not helping was the fact that the four major women in George's life all have incredibly dull, ordinary names: Helen; Sarah; Rachel and Rita. Their boring names, coupled with the fickle jumping about in time, meant I was well into the book before I could remember which was his ex, which was his daughter, which was his former lover and secretary, and which was his former client who murdered her husband who he's now in love with, who's in prison. Based on those descriptions I just gave, it really shouldn't have been tough to remember who was who!

Given the way it was structured, I thought that the George of the novel's present would, through thinking about his past, come to some realisation about himself, or figure something out, or learn something. But he never did. George narrates his whole story, but the telling of it doesn't change him in any way; he's already got everything straight in his own mind. How he is at the start of the book, is exactly how he is at the book's close, which made the novel feel kind of insubstantial. Why is George telling the story of his life, if it's not going to change him? Why write about a character who has all the answers?

One thing I did enjoy about the book was the way that it used the crime/thriller genre to subvert my expectations. Because George is a private detective and because one of the strands of the narrative details how Sarah came to be in prison, you're led to expect some kind of revelation or twist. Swift pulls a swifty by satisfying that expectation in a completely unexpected, un-genre-y way. Saying any more, of course, would be to spoil it, but it was the one moment while reading the book that I thought I was feeling what the author wanted me to (unless he actually wanted me to be swinging between bored and frustrated for most of it ... which I doubt).

Cheers, JC.

about to read: To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

books to go: 104

Norwegian Wood (#106)

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

What I said then: 

A Japanese writer and a book named for  a Beatles song? How could I resist?

What I say now:

Norwegian Wood is a book I'm having a bit of difficulty writing about. I suspect this will be an extremely unsatisfying blog post ... or at least, more unsatisfying than usual.

Because ... because ... well, because I absolutely loved Norwegian Wood but I'm not really sure why. There's nothing about it that stands out as being particularly brilliant, but it was brilliant. I can't point to anything in the plot, or the themes, or the style that vaults it above other books ... but it is better than other books. 

Murakami is usually a bit insane; his other books include flying elephants, Johnnie Walker and Ronald McDonald appearing as a characters, men who can talk to cats, and other wacko things like that. This novel, being strictly realist, is very unusual within his fiction. In his thirties, Toru Watanabe hears a bad muzak version of the titular Beatles song and is immediately reminded of the first couple of years he spent at university in Tokyo in 1969 and 1970, and of the two women (girls, really) who fell into, out of, and back into his life. His romantic fumblings take place before a backdrop of political unrest and student activism, and is soundtracked by the music of its time. A Norwegian Wood playlist would make for fantastic listening.

I suppose the real genius of this novel is the way that Murakami is able to capture the confused moods of his protagonist. Watanabe doesn't know what he wants, or even who he really is, and I think most of us have, at some point, felt something similar. I won't go so far as to say that it's a universal experience, but during our teenage years, didn't most of us have moments when we felt that childhood had fallen away, but had no idea yet what the hell kind of adults we were going to turn into? I think most people can empathise with that, and Murakami absolutely nails it. There are aspects of Watanabe that are completely alien to me, but then there'll be one sentence that perfectly expresses a feeling I've had for ages but never been able to put into words. The hopeless way he falls in love and can't, for all his trying, express what he's feeling, is as familiar to me as I guess it will be to anybody who's lived and breathed.

There isn't really that much more that I can say, I'm afraid. At different moments it's funny, and tender, and beautiful, and ridiculous, and sad. But at every moment it's fucking great.

Cheers, JC.

about to read: The Light of Day by Graham Swift

books to go: 105

Gomorrah (#107)

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano

What I said then:

An expose of the Camorra, rivals to the Mafia as Italy’s most dangerous network of murderers and thieves.

What I say now:

Gomorrah was absolutely dreadful, to the point that it was painful to read. For the first time since I began this challenge I was tempted to chuck a book in the bin and cross it off the list that way. Not even Jane Eyre got my goat to this extent.

Saviano is a native of Naples, a city which has been effectively taken over by the Camorra (the local equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia) at every single level of its bureaucracy. And when he's writing about the Camorra, about things that they are doing or things that they have done, then the book is fascinating. Unfortunately, most of the book is not about the Camorra, but about Roberto Saviano's reaction to living in a Camorra-infested city. Saviano obviously believes himself part-poet, part-prophet, part-philosopher, and the majority of the book is taken up with self-important, pseudo-psychological blather about the meaning of what's being described. It's completely insufferable.

Let me give an example of what I mean. After a chapter detailing a war between rival Camorra clans (a chapter that consists almost entirely of a massive list of dead men's names, with no context given ... but that's another complaint), Saviano writes this: "It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it's still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can't get rid of it. And not because --- like the sweat of a rapist --- it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realise it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something inside your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation."

A couple of things about this passage (and seriously, there are hundreds just like it scattered throughout the book): the observant among you might have noticed that it's not about anything! The whole passage is a metaphor (it starts "It was as if I had...") with not one, but two similes ("like the smell that permeates your clothing" and "like the sweat of a rapist") contained inside the metaphor! That's just horrendous writing, confusing as hell ... and worse, it's completely devoid of content. What does the Camorra have to do with the above passage? Not a god-damn thing. And that's not even mentioning the bizarrely melodramatic language, which goes past 'so bad it's good' and ends up back at 'dreadful' again. "Like the sweat of a rapist [...] it has penetrated your flesh." Seriously, Roberto? SERIOUSLY?!?!?

The shame of it is, that when Saviano actually has something to say, it's worth listening to. The best moments of the book are the moments of actual reportage, when he's simply telling a tale, rather than commenting on it. There's the enthusiastic Camorrista who uses his connections to travel to Russia for an audience with his hero Mikhael Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47. Or the teenage kids who drive trucks of toxic waste to illegal dumpsites because ordinary truckers won't go near them, then boast of their bravery. Or the junkie girl who revives her overdosing boyfriend by laying a handkerchief across his face and urinating on it (don't ask me how that worked ... but apparently it did). If Saviano had reported the facts, rather than insisting on intruding on them, he could have written a hell of a book. As is, unfortunately, you have to slog through endless BS to get to the good stuff.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
books to go: 106