“Calm down. Just calm down. It will all be fixed tomorrow. Change the brake light and touch up the paint, it won’t take all day.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 31, 2011)

Very early in the morning of August 31 1997, Princess Diana was killed when her car crashed at high speed into a pillar in a road tunnel near the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. Evidence at the crash site suggested that the driver of the car might have lost control after side-swiping a slower-moving car, a white Fiat Uno, near the tunnel entrance. It was not until 2006 that the driver of this car was identified as a young man of Vietnamese origin, but at the time that Laurence Cossé published this novel in 2003, the Fiat still posed a mystery, leaving the author to imagine a story of her own. Clearly wanting to follow the astounding success of Cossé’s A Novel Bookstore, Europa Press has commissioned a translation of this earlier book, produced with Europa’s trademark elegance. But this is a less relaxed, more edgy book that will appeal to quite a different audience.

Conspiracy theories aside, the driver of the Fiat was clearly not directly to blame for the crash, so the big stumbling block is to find a convincing reason for his or her not going immediately to the police. The driver in the real situation might have had many reasons: momentary panic, fear of involvement, then fear of being blamed for not coming forward earlier; the details do not really matter so long as the driver is just a name in a newspaper. But once we get to know the driver as a real person, once we get into her heart and her head as the protagonist of a novel, the reasons had better be good ones. Cossé uses her feminine empathy (yes, Laurence is a female name in France) to imagine a young woman, Lou Origan, a 25-year-old cook at a Paris restaurant, returning home to the suburbs. Her initial reactions are entirely credible; the huge black Mercedes bearing down on her at more than double her speed, knocking into her not once but twice, then bursting into flames; no wonder she drives home in shock.

It is only when Lou wakes up and listens to the radio that Cossé really runs into problems. No doubt wanting to plunge into the story at breakneck speed, she has not had time to establish Lou as a fully-dimensioned character; her relationships with her live-in boyfriend Yvon (an aficionado of fast motorbikes and sleek sailboats) and her co-workers at the restaurant are sketched in only later. So all we have of Lou is her panic. Cossé’s empathy produces only the kind of girly helplessness that I thought had more or less vanished from serious fiction. Lou’s attempts to take control of the situation are generally negated by fecklessness in carrying them through. Before long, she feels herself hunted and in fear of her life, running around in circles despite her determination to make a clean break. But to a large extent, these problems are inherent in Cossé’s choice of subject. A Novel Bookstore contained elements of suspense and detection also, but it was held together by the author’s deep love of books and appreciation for the people who write, read, and sell them. This, by contrast, is a book about a woman falling apart.

The novel does pick up half-way through when another character enters the story, a man who knows Lou’s secret. Now Lou has another person to contend with, a situation which brings out reserves of courage, endurance, and (in the one climactic scene) inspiration that she had not the opportunity to show before. But despite this one addition to the cast, we are still basically trapped inside Lou’s mind, and the feeling of going around in circles continues. Unfortunately, too, the climax comes too early, so the last section of the novel just runs out of steam — though Cossé springs a nice ironic twist as a final flourish.

Readers who enjoy the woman-in-peril genre may find themselves biting a few nails in delicious anguish, and there is always the interest of the Di-and-Dodi crash (since Cossé stays very close to the facts). But these are unlikely to be the same readers who so enjoyed A Novel Bookstore.  (Translated by Alison Anderson.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Laurence Cossé
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Novel Bookstore

Partial Bibliography (translated books only):

• A Corner of the Veil (1996)
• A Novel Bookstore (2010 in US)
• An Accident in August (2011 in US)
• Bitter Almonds (April 2013 in US)

“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.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (AUG 31, 2010)

A few months ago, someone told me he’d just finished one of the most amazing books he’d ever read. He was visibly shaken by the idea that he’d found the book by accident and could so easily have missed the book altogether. “What if I went through life without reading this novel,” he mused, and this was followed by another thought, “how many other novels as good as this am I missing?” From this point, the conversation moved on to the observation that readers are saturated by publicity for some books while others are quietly published and subsequently sink and disappear without a trace. This conversation came back to me when I read A Novel Bookstore, a book written by Laurence Cossé and translated by Alison Anderson. On the surface level, this is a mystery, but on a meta-level, A Novel Bookstore is an indictment of the cannibalizing publishing industry, the mass marketing of “taste,” and a subtle examination of fascism. All this in just around 400 pages. A Novel Bookstore plays out just like an excellent French film–great entertainment on a surface level, but yet some deep philosophical statements resonate in the background.

The novel begins with some rather mysterious incidents or “accidents” in which one man is intimidated and two people are almost killed. The connection between these three people gradually becomes clear. They are members of a secret committee of eight writers who select books for the new Paris book shop–The Good Novel. The bookshop is the brainchild of former itinerant bookseller Van and the wealthy, lonely, married Francesca, a woman who “wants to do something worthwhile” with her life. They meet over books, discuss their mutual passion and their belief in the ability of books to transform lives, and then Francesca offers Van, a man whose life “has been mainly characterized by mediocrity, drifting, flabbiness” a job managing the bookshop they will plan together. Both Francesca and Van are frustrated with the publishing industry and the way in which current trashy books are drowning out older titles that are dying in obscurity. They envision an ideal bookshop that will promote books for their merit alone, and this means going against the trend of selling the latest blockbusters. Together they devise a scheme to sell only “good” books, and then they wisely decide that they should have input from various sources to include a range of tastes. This leads them to invite several writers–mostly underappreciated and under-read–to serve on the secret committee. Each committee member must provide a list of six hundred books; these lists are then cross-matched and the book shop is stocked with the books from the final master list.

At first, the bookshop is an incredible success. Avid readers enthusiastically flock to the shop and sales soar, and for a moment it seems entirely possible that the bookshop may influence and alter the way books are presented and sold. But as the bookshop becomes successful, things gradually start to go wrong, and life for Van and Francesca takes a very ugly turn….

The novel is structured, for the most part, around Van and Francesca’s story which is told to a sympathetic and well-read policeman. There’s also a slow-brewing, anemic romance between Van and a young woman called Anis, and this side tale ranges from a distraction to an annoyance. I wanted to dump the smoochy bits and go back and hang out at the bookshop.

The novel dips into readers’ images of an ideal bookshop lined with wonderful titles they’d never heard of; one of the shop’s slogans is “All the books no one is talking about,”–a sentence that resonates with every reader who’s ever wondered how many masterpieces slip away unnoticed. Those of us who don’t leave home without at least one book (or two in case of emergencies) will be intrigued with the idea of such a wonderful bookshop, the salvaging of remarkable forgotten titles, and the skullduggery unleashed to destroy this independence. Here’s one scene from Francesca’s viewpoint that captures the experience of lingering inside this Aladdin’s cave of books:

“Every time she went by The Good Novel, the bookstore was full, and corresponded almost exactly to the vision she had had in her most confident moments, with its contemplative readers, capable of remaining motionless for an entire half a day , immersed in their reading, next to each other in silence, often standing–out of choice, since everything at The Good Novel had been arranged so that people could sit down, unless they had merely become distracted–and only the touch of madness in their eyes, characteristic of their addiction, betrayed their euphoria when, as it came time to leave, their gaze met that of one of the attendant priests, whether their arms were full of books or their hands quite empty, and they could hardly keep from dancing the moment they went out the door.”

Cossé’s entertaining novel skewers the publishing industry’s dictation of taste and control of choice and at the same time taps into the bibliophile’s deepest fears and greatest secret desires. I winced a bit at the idea of Van and Francesca deciding what was and what wasn’t “good” (which extrapolates into what is and isn’t sold) as I have problems with those who set themselves up as the “guardians” or “gatekeepers” of culture. There’s quite enough of that as it is, thank you very much, so I felt relieved when Van and Francesca decided that their tastes and opinions were not enough for stock selection, and so they subsequently and wisely added the secret committee to the mix. I was annoyed when the shelves of the bookshop were stacked with every book ever written by Cormac McCarthy and secretly wondered how many Simenon novels they planned to offer. By this time, you should get the idea that I was swept up in the story, so much so that in many ways it stopped being fiction and became the literary embodiment of all the frustration I’ve felt at having the latest blockbuster shoved down my throat for the umpteenth time on any given day.

I’ll admit that I found the underlying questions about the ethics of the publishing industry, the personalities of the authors on the committee, the statements regarding the difference books made to the lives of the various characters, and the bruised egos of rejected authors even more intriguing than the mystery of just who wanted to destroy the bookshop. I wanted to get back to those bookshelves, and even more importantly, I wanted a copy of that master list! I contented myself, however, with taking notes of every title mentioned. A Novel Bookstore is one of the many gems brought to readers from the small independent publisher, one of my very favourites, Europa Editions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reprint edition (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Laurence Cossé
EXTRAS:	The official website for A Novel Bookstore More thoughts from Guy Savage on this book and topic Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel about the publishing industry: The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer More Europa Editions favorites: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth The Homecoming Party by Carmine Abate The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery Another by Laurence Cossé: An Accident in August

Partial Bibliography (translated books only):

• A Corner of the Veil (1996)
• A Novel Bookstore (2010 in US)
• An Accident in August (2011 in US)
• Bitter Almonds (April 2013 in US)