Book Review

By Derryll White

Maher, Kerri (2022).  The Paris Bookseller.

“The world as we know it has ended, and it’s time for something entirely innovative.:  – James Joyce.

This is a delightful book of revelations.  The first part, spanning the years 1917 to 1920, recognizes the heavy agony of the First World War and the delightful awakening springing from that darkness.

Kerri Maher is very judicious in both her language and thought. She brings Sylvia Beach into a Paris of letters and learning, and into a country more open about sexual choice than America was.  She also has Sylvia reveal the awakening power of being female in an environment tentatively opening to the legacy of the Suffragettes.  Maher has change feel like the transition from winter into spring.

Those who have read James Joyce’s seminal work ‘Ulysses’ will be familiar with some of this story.  Kerri Maher goes to great lengths examining the conservative forces in the United States that forced the banning of this book 100 years ago, along with Prohibition and the negating of sexual freedom.  You know how many claim history is circular.  The Paris Bookseller suggests that maybe we should pay attention to what is happening in our world today.

Sylvia Beach, the creator of the bookstore and publishing house Shakespeare and Company, was born in Baltimore, Maryland March 14, 1887 and passed away in Paris, France October 5, 1962.  Her story is one of devotion to literature.

She was made a knight of France’s Legion of Honor in 1938 for her work in nurturing writers and publishing great works of literature. Through the store she created, the first English language bookshop in Paris, passed many of the writers who crafted the stories we read today – Hemingway, Pound, Elliot, Stein – all of whom left some imprint.

Historical novels may not be the genre of choice for many readers, but all readers will be enriched by the wonderful story of Sylvia Beach and her struggle to free literature.

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Excerpts from the book:

AMERICA – “There might be many excellent things about my country, but I’m glad to be here instead,” Sylvia replied, her mind going straight to the rise in censorship under the Comstock and Espionage Acts, the long and precarious slog to women’s suffrage, and the outrageous idea of an alcohol prohibition that was spreading like wildfire.  It seemed like ideas that had once seemed fringe, too strange to contemplate as serious, had taken root in America while good, strong ideas that would help the country progress into the new century were languishing away.

LITERARY CLARITY – At the end of the day, she’d light a candle and read on her hard cot.  Portrait, yes, but it was Whitman who sang her to sleep most nights.  Her softened, much-loved volume of Leaves of Grass was like a prayer book that brought her comfort and companionship.  Though his words sometimes made her yearn, too, as when her eyes lingered on the lines in “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers”, “O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless, / Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless than we.”

READING – Though The Paris Bookseller might be about a famous store and famous writers, the daily practice of reading is a humble, deep, and incremental process; reading promotes empahy, helps us relax, shows us the world, educates us.  You are the ones who make this life-changing activity possible.

RULING CLASS – It appeared that the ruling class in America wanted to outlaw anything that offended its sense of decorum, and so a book, play, film, organization, activity, or person that smacked of vice or difference from a life one might find in the comforting illustrations of the Saturday Evening Post was in danger of being silenced.  The irony was that the very suppression created more of what they feared – more anarchism and Marxism and protests and unrest – and it was books like Ulysses that sought to open minds rather than slap them shut.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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