by Linda Grant
In the autumn of 2010, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast I stayed in for one night showed me her Kindle. It weighed almost nothing in the hand. The contrast was considerably better than the Sony. I bought one. I was the first person I knew to own a Kindle, as my parents were the first family they knew to own a TV. We are Modernists. We like the idea of the future.
When I said, ‘I’ve bought a Kindle’, everyone retorted, ‘Ah, but it’s not a book’, fact, end of. A book is a tactile object. It smells of paper. It has a defined typeface you cannot alter. It has a cover. So, no, I replied. It is not a book and particularly not in the sense that you do not have to spend all day lugging around in your handbag, for example, the 900 pages of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
The first book I read on my Kindle was Damon Galgut’s Booker-shortlisted In a Strange Room. When I, or Galgut, write a novel, we do not type it into a bound book with cover and frontispiece. We used to write on typewriters – now we write on screens. A few writers still compose longhand, but I don’t know any; mostly we’re staring at the empty space of Word for Mac or that convoluted writers’ software, Scrivener. So when we are writing, as I’m doing now, a screen is the medium, and what matters is not paper or the cover or the binding or the smell of ink, but the words. The ‘real’ book that I write is 12-point Arial at 150 per cent zoom, with the page set in draft view so that it fills the screen. Double spaced, margins justified.
I think many writers are notoriously conservative and superstitious about their work methods, with rituals and incantations and other rubbish we won’t mention, apart, obviously, from the enormous amount of time spent staring out of the window. I can’t write in Times New Roman because it looks as though it’s already printed. This comes from starting to write in the Palaeolithic era, on an Olivetti portable typewriter with finger-darkening ribbon-changing, a bottle of Tippex for corrections and carbon paper to make copies. I must use a font that is provisional, resembles typing and so is susceptible to savage editing, then printing out and scribbling and printing out and scribbling until you are sick of the sight of the thing and can’t believe anyone else would want to read it, by which time your editor is sending armed men to retrieve the MS from you by force.
Once surrendered, everything is out of your hands. The published font is nothing to do with me; even the cover only allows me power of veto. I don’t design it. On my brand-new Kindle, Galgut’s words were identical in their meaning to the ones that appeared in the paper product. As a work of literature, it was the same act of imagination as when he had originally typed it. The cover, paper, binding and font were extraneous. I had the peculiar sensation on my Kindle of mainlining directly into Galgut’s brain, without the intervening medium of the book’s aesthetics.
As I began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder that I could carry around a library in my pocket. It is a library, arranged alphabetically or, if I like, in order of buying, and nothing shelved in the wrong place. The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. Wherever I am, there is always something to read.
Then, on a four-hour flight home from Moscow two months later, we ascended bumpily through the December clouds, the fasten-seatbelt sign went off, I turned on my Kindle, and it was irretrievably stuck. Nothing would open it. The only thing I had to read was the British Airways in-flight magazine.
Amazon replaced it. How kind. But the argument against the electronic device had been strengthened. An electronic device could let you down in the way that its critics had warned. The advantages to the Kindle – its portability, the quick ease of buying a book and reading it moments later, the mutable font size – evaporate when you are holding in your hand a dormant or dead piece of flat grey plastic.
I had not stopped buying physical books, but I noticed I was buying fewer of them. In its heyday, Prospero’s, my local bookshop, was managed by a woman called Mary who had worked at the original Penguin bookshop in Kensington. She had a delightful side-kick called Stephen, a doleful young man who would glare at books he thought customers should not buy. Once, returning from a few months abroad, I began to pick up from the pile on the counter a copy of Schott’s Miscellany, a publishing sensation in my absence, when he said with a loud sigh, ‘Oh, don’t.’
When I read a long review by Margaret Drabble in the Guardian of the Collected Stories of the murdered Soviet writer Isaac Babel, I put down the paper, walked to the shop and asked if they had a copy of this £25 hardback.
‘Mary ordered two,’ Stephen said. ‘She said, Linda Grant will buy one and someone else will buy the other.’ And he took ‘my’ copy from behind the counter and handed it to me.
But Mary retired and young Stephen left to train to be a teacher. The new staff failed to build the relationships with their customers that the old regime had sustained for so long. And then, of course, they never discounted. You had to pay full price. Still, it seemed that our bookshop was part of our built environment; it was us, it defined the kind of place where we lived, one in which there were few high-street chains but lots of slightly quirky independents, some of many decades’ standing. And our bookshop had a prominent position directly opposite a closed-down Woolworths which was about to become a branch of the upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose.
We knew it had been struggling. We knew the owners had put it up for sale but so far there were no buyers. Then on Christmas Eve, a couple of months after I bought my first Kindle, it finally closed down.
The reasons were entirely economic. It was a victim of high commercial rents and business rates, and non-customers coming in to browse stock and then go and order online.
The closure of Prospero’s Books was a catastrophe for the neighbourhood. For years we had worried that a branch of Waterstones would open and annihilate our small independent, but no Waterstones ever arrived. Instead, we got a remainder bookshop and an Oxfam bookshop selling second-hand books. Neither of these deliver any royalties to authors. The lease for Prospero’s was taken over by a man who had bailed out of the City and opened an ice-cream parlour.
The loss of our bookshop (there were two when I first moved there in 1994) was a major blow to the idea of what kind of neighbourhood we were. Prospero’s had been in a prime location. We were a north London community of smart middle-class shops that couldn’t even support a bookstore. We had become a territory of cafés and estate agents, but the life of the mind had no physical presence on the high street. And the place is stuffed full of writers! Not just me, but Andrea Levy and Romesh Gunesekera and Caitlin Moran.
The transformations in the world of books, from the ending of the Net Book Agreement in the nineties which allowed bookshops to sell at any price they liked, to online shopping, and finally to the arrival of the ereader, was a process I was aware of. But this particular battle was being fought inside me. The writer and the reader were at war with each other.
The lower the price at which the book was sold, the smaller the royalty the author receives. Without either a bestseller or a literary prize, the writer’s income is depressed. Readers ask why an ebook, with no printing costs, should cost not a great deal less than the paper version. Readers have begun to expect that a book should be priced more cheaply than a cup of coffee.
And I have found myself torn in two by this argument. Without a bookshop five minutes’ walk away, I began to buy fewer paper books; those I did purchase I tended to order online instead of getting the bus up the hill to the next neighbourhood, where there still stands a ramshackle bookshop whose continuing survival seems in doubt.
Then it reached the point at which, in my demand for instant gratification, if a book wasn’t available to download at once, I didn’t buy it at all.
During this period, I wouldn’t say I felt any guilt, though perhaps I felt some shame. I experienced the sense that I was making my library partly invisible. Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly ins
ubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs.
I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.
What happened next was a tragic transfer, from the old reality to the new, harsh one.
The hundreds of books I had bought from Prospero’s in the two decades since I had moved into my flat came down from the shelves and were picked up by Chris, the manager of the Oxfam bookshop, in three carloads.
This act, this murder, had its accomplices – my nephew and his wife, who ferried the rejects from the various floors down to the hall.
They don’t read. They don’t read books. They have no books.
My nephew’s wife took a suitcase full of the fashion monographs, but nothing else tempted them. The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. The next generation don’t want old books – they don’t seem to want books at all.
This is very painful to me.
Something came over me then, a rage of dismissal, because what began as the careful consideration of the question of literary merit at the top of a set of library steps ended in a kind of conflagration, but without the fire. I pruned ruthlessly and remorselessly. I began an orgy of getting-rid-of. I became the book-dealer in the Tel Aviv apartment, flinging to the floor.
Once all the donated books had gone, and there was some comfort in the thought that they would begin life again in someone else’s hands, I looked around at my bookcases in shock. There were massive gaps, whole empty rows.
When the removal company came round to give me an estimate, we discussed the matter of the books, and of the bookcases. I had decided to take four of the latter with me. ‘Are they built in?’ Yes, they are built in. ‘Then you’ll have to get someone to come and unattach them from the walls because I can’t see how they are fixed.’
I got in a handyman called Paul. It cost me £110 for him to work out how Crispin had built in the shelves and unscrew them. Then they wouldn’t move because they were screwed to each other and bound further together by paint.
On the day I moved, the Polish removal men wrenched the bookcases from the walls, where they released with an ominous cracking sound. They were so old-school they had been built from plywood, not modern MDF. The ones I wasn’t taking with me were moved outside for collection by the bin men.
Looking at my study, I saw the patterns of the old paint pre-Crispin. I saw the sagging old telephone cable that had been threaded around the back, I saw terrible amounts of dirt and dust. The room was completely filthy.
Then I shut the door for the last time and took the keys to the estate agent, collected the next set of keys, and began another life.
***
The flat I moved to has a second bedroom 12 feet by six feet, a sort of corridor, occupied by a child’s cot when I came to view. This would be my office.
This flat has no landings – just a narrow entrance hall, which its previous owners used to house their only bookcase, filling the single space where there is room for one. The building is on a ridge in north London looking down on the city. Through this study window, in a gap between two sinister mansion blocks opposite – the repository (I hope) of several novels’ worth of speculative daydreaming – the sharp pyramid of the Shard is framed, and at the back the kitchen overlooks a row of gardens. Like James Stewart in Rear Window, his leg raised in a cast, here I sit, hopeful that the mansion blocks will sooner or later yield a murder. So far all I’ve seen are people washing up and people staring at the screen of a computer. No-one is playing the piano or conducting an affair. But I will sit and wait it out until they do.
A sense of light and space and other people’s lives to feed my voyeurism is terribly important to me; spending so much time at home, I must have something to look at out of the window. That’s why I bought the place. I didn’t think about my books, my soon-to-be dead children, my murdered soul-mates for which there would not be enough room.
The two bookcases in the office had to stay in the middle of the 12-foot-by-six-foot room for several days until the electrician came to install two new power sockets under the desk by the window, using the socket from the other side of the room as a spur.
Two bookcases went into the living room, to the left of the fireplace alcove. The third took up its place in the hall where the previous owners’ single bookcase had stood.
The books could not be unpacked for several weeks. First, a fifties monstrosity of a fireplace made out of shiny liver-coloured tiles had to be taken out, exuding suffocating concrete dust, then a new floor was laid over the gappy boards, and finally redecoration was undertaken. The boxes of books moved around from one place to another, stubborn in their massiveness and heaviness and inconvenience. Here, there, all about and everywhere, the boxes of books were the last remaining items to be unpacked.
It dawned on me at this stage that I should have paid to put them in storage until the work was finished. At one point, while the hall floor was being laid, the books were piled around my bed, under the dressing table and in front of most of the wardrobe. They triumphantly limited even what I could wear. You could see it as an unusual form of library installation, but a bedroom, the site of rest and retreat, is not the place to surround yourself with dust and heavy things.
All this time, my Kindle lay on the bedside table, serenely containing its own library. It said nothing, but it didn’t have to. It sometimes sighed, whispered, died and came to life again when it was connected to the charger. Then I lost the charger. (I found it yesterday.)
When the last paintbrush had been put away and the books finally came to rest on the newly painted shelves (not in any order at all, that is for later), there was something immediately wrong.
In my fear of not having enough room in my new flat for my books, I had got rid of far too many. The truth was, I now had empty shelves. Fewer books than space for them. The shame.
I am a person who does not have enough books.
My library is denuded. It doesn’t seem like a library. It feels … like the house of a person who reads, but not the house of a person for whom books have been everything.
For the tension is that I no longer want books to do all the furnishing of my rooms. I want décor. I could have had bookcases on either side of the wall that formerly held the fireplace, but it seemed to me, after looking at so many properties – er – cluttered. Oppressive.
I’m not going to re-read these books before I die. I am just bequeathing my nephew and his wife the heavy task of removing them at a later date. They will not call in the antiquarian book-dealer. The books will go straight to …
It is death that we’re talking about. Death is the subject.
The death of the book, but also my death. Because I am kidding myself if I think that I am going to re-read a fraction of the books I have brought with me, or finish a fraction of those I have never got round to reading.
In my youth, I imagined old age and retirement as the time when one sat back, relaxed, and read. There would be all the time in the world for reading. 60 was so far away, and 80 stretching out so far into a future not imaginable that you might as well be talking about living forever.
Now time gobbles up my life. I don’t need even the fraction of books on my shelves – those pitifully empty shelves.
When the Israeli novelist Amos Oz was a child, the son of a librarian, living in a home choked with thousands of books, his ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. ‘People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either.’ (Isaac Babel was murdered in 1940 in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, begging for a stay of execution so he could finish his novel. The Soviets didn’t murder Vasily Grossman, they ‘arrested’ his book, Life and Fate, and he did not live long enough to see
it smuggled to the West and translated.)
But you can’t kill books, Oz writes – this is page 22 of the UK edition of A Tale of Love and Darkness, published by Chatto, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase to the right of my desk in my corridor study, randomly filed between two Philip Roths, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America; filed, actually, by size for the moment, until I have a few days to order the whole, diminished collection:
However systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
I’m afraid to ask Chris, the manager of the Oxfam shop, what happened to my books. I think some of them went to be pulped. It’s like the child’s story of the old dog sent to live on a farm. Buried on a farm.
The whole business of this move has made me massively insecure, blindsided everywhere. I’m not writing a book at the moment; I don’t have the concentration – that’s why I’m writing this. Everything is wrong, abnormal. Three quarters of the way into my life, I’ve had the ground taken from under my feet. I have damaged my connection to the little girl frightened of her Struwwelpeter book.
When I began to write on a computer, when I abandoned the typewriter, I didn’t look back. I don’t miss my turntable or my cassette player. I’m not a Luddite, I’m a Modernist. But the books seem not to be – not even the Modernists themselves, not James Joyce or Jean Rhys. A part of the cliff has fallen into the sea. There are not enough books here. The sight of the bare shelves shames me. What have I done?
