SECOND MAN: In terms of atmosphere, absolutely. Cold and impersonal. Uncharming. But still worth visiting and liveable and full of culture, both in the mainstream and at the weirdest fringes, and marked by a high level of education and somehow generally fantastic in the most unobtrusive way. Besides, here’s the thing: When you picture a city, you always think of something in particular. You can’t simply picture a city in the abstract. And the better you know it, the city, the more specific and personal what you visualize is. When I want to think of Berlin, I usually think fairly quickly of the cultural department store with the red carpets.
FIRST MAN: But Berlin is cool, they say. And Dussmann isn’t cool.
SECOND MAN: First of all, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean: cool. And if I’m going to pretend I know what it means, I still don’t know how a city can be cool. And finally, if I’m going to pretend I could have some clear and distinct image of a cool city, I still have to come right out and say that the idea that Berlin is cool is a brilliant promotional claim for the city, but in reality Berlin is impersonal and ugly and yet, above all, pleasant. You find what you need and what interests you—among things and people and places and possible ways of life.
FIRST MAN: Now you’re definitely going to say: like at Dussmann.
SECOND MAN: I am indeed going to say that. Variety and tranquillity, the renunciation of pomp, the objective functionality, and at the same time the widest selection.
FIRST MAN: But that complete absence of atmosphere and charm—
SECOND MAN: Those who want atmosphere should light themselves a candle in their bathroom. And I myself am charming.
FIRST MAN: You think so?
SECOND MAN: Very much so, even. Very charming! And for everything else…
FIRST MAN: Yeah?
SECOND MAN: For everything else, there’s Dussmann.
Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
La Palmaverde
STEFANO BENNI
There’s a hole in a colonnade
in the city of Bologna.
Like hell, it swallows young poets.
A benign devil leads them astray.
They emerge transfigured,
crying their verses to the sun.
If outside there is fog,
by some devilry, from the window
of that bookshop you see blue sky.
Books speak even when they are closed.
Lucky the man who can hear
their persistent murmur.
I wrote these lines many years ago. They are dedicated to the poet and intellectual Roberto Roversi, and his bookshop, La Palmaverde, which was one of the cultural miracles of 1970s Italy.
Roversi was a poet, a friend of Pasolini, Leonetti and many others, but he was above all a great example of the passion for literature. His antiquarian bookshop, an old cellar bursting at the seams with tables and bookcases, was the meeting place for Bologna’s writers and students. Roversi was a “benign devil”, a strange, lively man, loved but also feared for his uncompromising character. Young people approached him with awe and respect, and he dispensed help and advice to all of them. Even though he had offers from many large publishers, he preferred to self-publish his books, either duplicating the copies himself or entrusting them to artisan printers. In the bookshop, apart from all the rare and precious tomes, there were hundreds of slim volumes by poets, from established names to novices. You could often acquire them for a small donation. “There’s no price for poetry,” he would say, “or if there is, it’s not in the money of this world.”
I wasn’t yet thirty and just starting out as a writer when I first entered the dark, mysterious cave of La Palmaverde.
I was overawed. I roamed around in that semi-darkness, which smelled of paper and inks and was warmed only by an electric heater. But after those first encounters, a beautiful friendship was born. Roversi was my friend and teacher. We talked about everything. Not just about great poetry, but about politics, football, cars, songs: he had written lyrics for the singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla, he wasn’t a doctrinaire man of letters, he loved every aspect of life. That was his first lesson: “Whoever said,” he would repeat, “that a man of letters has to talk only about literature? That would be like a chef only talking about mayonnaise.” And when I took him my first book, with a dedication, he gave me in exchange a volume of his, with these words written in it: “To Stefano who’s a writer, a passionate reader, and a good footballer. Continue with all three.”
Roberto Roversi died four years ago in respectable poverty, and the bookshop was closed down, much to the indifference of the municipality of Bologna. I’d like to remember him here, starting with some sayings of his that I’ve never forgotten.
The first saying is: “Books are alive and don’t like to be badly treated.” La Palmaverde was known around the world, and Roversi sent rare books to a large number of universities in Europe, the United States and Japan. And in order to send them without ruining them, he had become, as he put it, “a great packer”. When he had to prepare a parcel of books, he would take hours arranging them one on top of the other, wrapping them first in cardboard, then in high-quality paper, and finally tying the package carefully with string. “It’s almost harder to send books on a journey than it is to write them,” he would sigh. And he would proudly show me the thank-you letter he had got from a Japanese professor: “Dear Mr Roversi, your expertise as a bookseller is beyond reproach, but above all I have never received packages wrapped with such care or skill.” “Can you imagine?” he would say to me with a smile. “A compliment like that from a Japanese! They invented origami!”
The second thing that Roversi often repeated was: “Books choose those who want to buy them.”
Roversi only sold if he liked the customer. If the person struck him as unpleasant, pretentious, not a lover of literature, he would immediately regard him with suspicion. I once saw this demonstrated. A smartly dressed gentleman came in and started moving around among the books, leafed through some grudgingly, then pointed to a very expensive art book. “I’d like that one,” he said. “It’s a present and I want to make a good impression.” “I’m sorry,” Roversi replied with a sardonic smile, “but that one’s already been sold to Professor Nihongi in Tokyo.” And so the customer asked to purchase other books, but each time the desired volume had always been sold to some mysterious character: an English professor called Booker, a French critic named Des Livres, the German bookseller Lohengrin. In the end, the customer left, fuming and empty-handed.
Roberto’s third saying was: “Mice don’t eat books for no reason.”
Among those old and crowded bookshelves, Roversi often had to fight damage from mice and woodworm, and devoted more than one poem to them. “They aren’t enemies,” he would say, “just somewhat intrusive colleagues. When a mouse eats a book, it’s because the paper is of good quality, the mould on it is tasty, or else because the writing is excellent. Beware of books that the mice avoid!”
The last sentence I remember is: “Books are so full of thoughts that some of them have learned to think.” And he recalled the incident involving a precious edition of the Divine Comedy, a heavy tome that mysteriously fell three times from the high shelf where it had been placed. There must be a reason, Roversi said, and he soon discovered it.
“You see,” he told me, “I’d put that Divine Comedy next to a nineteenth-century book celebrating the life of Pope Boniface VIII. And as you know, Dante considered that pontiff his worst enemy, so much so that he consigned him to hell. That’s the reason for those strange falls: that Divine Comedy preferred to jump rather than rub shoulders with a book glorifying its adversary!”
That was La Palmaverde, a place of culture but also of craftsmanship and hard work. Roberto still wrote out the lists and categorization of the books by hand. One day, his wife persuaded him to buy a computer. He looked at it with curiosity then said, “All right, let’s modernize. But only you will use it. Just promise me one thi
ng: that if you want to know where a book is, you’ll ask me, not the computer. I’m jealous.”
The fact is, he had an incredible memory and could find his way through that maze of titles at great speed. He carried an iron stepladder on his shoulder and would climb it to get to the tops of packed shelves that touched the ceiling. He knew where almost all the books were, in which bookcase or in which drawer. And above all, he had his cabinet of favourite books, a hundred beloved titles. Thanks to him, I realized that the passion for literature is an infinite aleph, in which we are dramatically linked to all the stories and books in the world. But then we choose the hapax, our uniqueness as readers and writers.
He wrote his poetry with a pen, or sometimes on a typewriter that rattled like a machine gun. Once he showed me a manuscript of his, so full of marks and crossings-out as to be almost illegible. “You see?” he said. “This is the history of my doubts.” From him I learned that writing is searching, trying again, improving. “We read and reread,” Roversi would say, “but above all we write and rewrite. I don’t trust a writer who does a book in a few months, without thoroughly revising it.”
But when I admitted to him that I was working on a book and had rewritten some pages more than fifty times, he smiled and said, “Maybe you should stop now. There comes a time when your work is over and it starts belonging to other people.”
You didn’t go to La Palmaverde just to talk about high literature. You also went there to enjoy yourself, to play cards, to have a snack of bread and mortadella. Above all, Roversi loved practical jokes, especially if he found some gullible person or fake expert. He would invent imaginary titles, phantom books, improbable writers. We invented a poet, René Nexistepas: a customer heard us talking about him admiringly, fell for it, and ordered all his books. He came back several times to pay for them, and each time Roversi would apologize with comical humility: “It’s a scandal, they haven’t sent us any René Nexistepas this week either, I’m so sorry…”
Roversi paid an exorbitant rent, and made a lot of sacrifices to keep the bookshop going. When he realized that the owner of the building was about to evict him, and that nobody in the city council would help, he devised one last joke.
We started to circulate the rumour that there was an old treasure hidden in La Palmaverde. Somewhere behind the walls of books was a passage that led to a secret room, where something of enormous value was kept.
The owner of the building got to hear about this rumour, and on the pretext of checking the state of the premises, he began paying visits. He would roam around between the bookcases, tap the walls in search of a hollow space, search in every corner. Eventually we left a key in full view on a desk for him to find. With it was a note saying:
Key to the red door. Enter only if absolutely necessary. There you will find the precious marble throne.
The trick worked. The owner of the building found the little red door at the end of a narrow corridor. While we pretended to make conversation, we heard him turn the key in the lock and go in.
He found himself in a little room with a toilet bowl: the bookshop’s lavatory.
He slammed the door as he left.
This was Roversi, and this was his weird and wonderful old bookshop. I loved those dark rooms smelling of mould much more than modern bookshops full of lights and screens.
In the poem with which I opened, I called La Palmaverde “hell”. Because I recall a conversation I had with that magical bookseller.
Literature (and its shrine, the bookshop) is a breeding ground for ideas forged in the flames of creation and the fire of rewriting. Books are about good and evil, and about being condemned, willingly, to descend ever further into the depths of the soul. In heaven, everything is perfect, nothing can be improved, everything is already written in a beautiful hand, without corrections or second thoughts. That’s why the destiny of literature is closer to a hell filled with wonderful torments than a heaven full of satisfaction.
La Palmaverde no longer exists. But its books, its words and its lesson are still out there in the world, and inside my head.
Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
A Bookshop in the Age of Progress
PANKAJ MISHRA
Fact and Fiction Bookshop began life in the early 1980s in a corner of a market in Vasant Vihar in South Delhi. I first visited it one afternoon in September 1989. A morose-looking man in his thirties sat hunched over a tiny desk, surrounded by neat piles of new paperbacks that rose to his waist. He looked up when I came in, and then immediately hung his head again.
I had heard about the shop and its owner, Ajit Vikram Singh, from a friend at my university. Word of his aloof manner had got around; it implied feudal privilege and an education at some elite establishment. I, on the other hand, felt my poverty and isolation acutely in those days, fearing that my clothes betrayed my lack of status. I was glad of his lack of scrutiny as I entered.
It was a small bookshop, no bigger than an average bedroom. But on that first day I was there for hours, barely able to look up from the rows and rows of carefully curated books.
I had spent most of my life in places where the word “bookshop” referred to the place that sold school textbooks and stationery, or to the little bookstall at railway and bus stations: retailers, exclusively, of crime, porn and self-help. Some variety was offered by mobile bookshops, subsidized by the Soviet Union, which toured small towns, offering subscriptions to Soviet magazines and organizing book fairs where you could buy two hardback editions of Russian classics for Rs 5 (at a time when $1 equalled Rs 18).
These bookshops stocked translations of left-wing internationalist writers like Pablo Neruda, Lu Xun, and Nazim Hikmet. Gorky and Mayakovsky—heroes of the revolution—were much preferred, and Soviet pride in the Nobel laureate Sholokhov was expressed through multiple editions of And Quiet Flows the Don. But you wouldn’t have encountered Bulgakov, Mandelstam or Akhmatova.
In the years since my childhood, I had often come across the names of these writers not favoured, and even persecuted, by the Soviet regime. I had read about their life and work; and now here were all their books.
Fact and Fiction was a bookshop—increasingly rare in India—of surprises and discoveries: where the lesser-known Ivan Klíma nestled along with Milan Kundera, and Carlos Fuentes and Maxine Hong Kingston were as well represented as Gabriel García Márquez and Amy Tan. Harvill’s translations of European classics—Leonardo Sciascia, Elio Vittorini—complemented the more conventional fare from Penguin. There were also books from the United States—Vintage and Pantheon editions of Michel Foucault and Edward Said—which were rarely seen in India, part of the British-dominated Commonwealth marketplace of books.
I had just moved that summer of 1989 to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I was registered as a graduate student in English. But unlike my peers who came to the university—one of the best Indian institutions in the humanities—to seek a career in academia or in the civil service, I had little interest in a formal education or a degree.
During a life spent in small towns where nothing happened, I had become addicted to random reading (and a bit of furtive writing). And I was already twenty, long past the age when most Indians start to define their professional trajectories.
I sought at JNU nothing more than some more years of idleness subsidized by my parents (and the Indian government).
The university offered the best facilities in this regard. It had a well-stocked library, with many European classics. The room at the dormitory was bigger and cleaner than any I had known. The food was consistently good and cheap. And then I discovered Fact and Fiction, less than a mile away from JNU.
My inability to afford most non-Soviet books had made me an ardent bibliophile. I pored over publishing catalogues that I picked up at Delhi’s book fair and marvelled at their diverse plenitude of enjoyment and instruction. Now, here were many of those books, suddenly accessible, if not affordable.
I returned often to the booksho
p in the following weeks until I had committed the shelves to memory. The bookseller remained mute and unmoving, enclosed by his mini skyscrapers of books. I didn’t mind. I hoped to move quietly through the world, sticking close to the things that brought me contentment.
The bookshop’s proximity helped me carve out my own little private geography on the large and daunting map of Delhi. As a young man from the provinces I had been immediately impressed by the city. And on the face of it Delhi offered plenty of scope for new adventures, possibilities of growth. There were, in well-protected enclaves, libraries and bookshops; the cultural sections of foreign embassies hosted film festivals and book readings.
But I lacked both the money and confidence to enjoy them more than occasionally—to not feel a small shock after emerging into a humid night from the cool auditorium of the British Council onto the broken pavement with the limbless beggars. The promise of the metropolis’s cultural excitements then felt hollow; it seemed a setting not for pleasure and growth but for work and struggle.
The cosily air-conditioned and usually deserted bookshop in Vasant Vihar seemed to have all I wanted from a metropolis. Little did I know then that it was also a refuge for its owner. After a few weeks of silence, Ajit opened up, offering me coffee, and told me a bit about himself. Privately educated in one of India’s best schools and one of its best colleges, he had joined his family’s agricultural business before realizing it was not for him—a reader and a bibliophile, who felt happiest among books.
Still, opening a bookshop in an office complex in what was then a remote corner of Delhi was a business gamble. He could not depend on indigent students like myself. Visitors to the Priya Cinema opposite the bookshop, which showed soft pornographic films, could not be trusted to walk out without a book tucked in their trousers. His most regular customers were diplomats living in Vasant Vihar.
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