Posts

The Bibliophile: The Notebook by Roland Allen

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

During the 2023 London Book Fair I made what has become one of my favourite pilgrimages: to Hampstead Heath to meet the publishers of Sort of Books, Mark Ellingham and Nat Jansz. I became acquainted with Mark in 2019, when we took Canadian rights for Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, a book about global warming that Mark had acquired for Profile Books. When acquiring books, one also often acquires friends along the way: Mark and Nat rank among the best of these.

Before becoming an acquiring editor of nonfiction for Profile and starting up Sort of Books with Nat, Mark had been the creator and publisher of the Rough Guide series of travel and cultural books. Growing increasingly anxious about the environmental costs of rampant tourism and his company’s own contribution to the same, Mark sold the company and used the profits to devote himself to a different type of publishing program. That 2019 afternoon when we first met had been grey and threatening, the tall grass his dog led us through soaking the only pair of shoes I had with me, the dampness later rising up my legs as the Booker Prize ceremony that had brought me to London progressed, so that by the time the winner was announced, I was rather feverish. But the hours I spent with Mark wandering the heath, and then eating lunch at the Wells Tavern, were more than worth it, and, during the long days and weeks and months of the pandemic, took on an especially golden resonance.

The April day in 2023 when we next met was quite beautiful, and after another walk with the dog, and another lunch, we finished up with coffee in the front room of Nat’s and Mark’s house, which doubles as Sort of’s centre of operations. One of the pleasures of these fairs is talking with other people who understand the particular challenges and pitfalls of independent publishing, as well as its equally particular pleasures, which include the discovery of new books. At one point Mark put down his coffee and motioned me over to his computer: “Come take a look at this.” And he proceeded to tell me about Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.

There is, at least for me, a covetous aspect to being a publisher: you learn of a book and feel an immediate quickening, a desire to have it for your list, or to be part of it in some fashion. This feeling overwhelmed me on first learning of The Notebook. Here, Mark told me, was the first book of its kind, a history of the notebook and the radical ways it has changed how we relate to both the world and to ourselves through a wide range of disciplines, from accounting and art to exploration, medical care, policing, and science. In the parlance of the antiquarian trade, I love BABs, or books about books, and here was a BAB quite unlike any other. Reading it transformed my own understanding of the role of this humble invention—but just as importantly, it’s changed how I use my own notebooks on a daily basis.

And judging from the response to the book since we first published it in September, I’m not alone. The Notebook has received rave reviews in the likes of Kirkus, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker; Ryan Holiday has sung its praises; and it’s been quite easily our best-selling book of the season.

There are so many wonderful stories within these pages, but one of my favourites concerns the zibaldone, an invention that changed our relationship, before the printing press, to literature, making it possible, in the world before print, for work by the likes of Dante and Boccaccio to travel far beyond the communities for which they wrote. Since reading this, I have begun to keep my own zibaldone as a notebook distinct from my others; perhaps some of you, once you finish reading this, will do the same.

Dan Wells
Publisher

Photo: The Notebook by Roland Allen, with a cover designed by Louis Gabaldoni.

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Ricordi, ricordanzi, zibaldoni

Notebooks in the home, Florence 1300–1500

No-one knows exactly when the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone appeared, or what it originally meant. The earliest record of the word, in the mid-fourteenth century, refers to it as Florentine slang, without further definition, and we can only infer from context that it means something like ‘mess’ or ‘jumble’. The fifteenth-century merchant and art patron Giovanni Rucellai referred to his own zibaldone as ‘una insalata di più herbe’, a salad of many herbs, which gives an impression of something variegated and wholesome. But by then it had also become firmly attached to the notebook in one of its most enduring applications. For this informal culinary term came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany.

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian. Some better-off writers, such as the author Boccaccio (the son of a Bardi banker), had zibaldoni made of expensive parchment, and paid professional scribes to do the writing for them. Many users illustrated them, or commissioned elaborate initial capitals to open every new excerpt: surviving examples often have gaps where their owners never got round to completing that task.

Mostly they were kept by men, but not all were, and we can assume that many wives, sisters and daughters would have had access to the books kept by the men of the house. For zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over. You could sell a full zibaldone, or hand it down to your heirs, and in many examples one can see where the father stopped writing and the son took over.

Some even caused family disputes. ‘This book was written by Piero di Ser Nicholo di Ser Verdiano, for his own contemplation, and that of his family, etc. in the year of Our Lord 1458’ reads an inscription at the beginning of one notebook, before writing that Piero intends the book to go to Girolamo di Piero Arighi, presumably his son. Beneath this is a crossing-out, and under that another hand writes ‘Note that you are lying through your teeth like the scoundrel you are, and you are a crazy windbag.’ Was that inserted by Girolamo’s brother, Bartolomeo, who elsewhere in the zibaldone claims ownership?

The son of a banker, Boccaccio could afford to pay scribes to compile his zibaldoni. This playful layout has extracts from the Roman poet Flacco.

What did people write in their zibaldoni? In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists, you name it. Lisa Kaborycha, who has studied them extensively, points to one fifteenth-century example which, entirely typically, contains material as various as ‘remedies and recipes, interpretations of dreams, astrological predictions, advice on the best times for planting, Pseudo-Saint Bernard’s Epistle to Raymond, prayers, poems, ballads and a number of sonnets by Coluccio Salutati, Antonio Pucci, and Dante.’ Armando Petrucci, another expert, celebrated the zibaldone for preserving ‘gate tolls and currency exchange rates . . . alongside medical recipes, devotional tracts, lauds, and love lyrics’.

Rucellai compiled his zibaldone with his sons in mind: for their benefit, it contained moral precepts, advice on business and civic duties. In his, the sculptor Ghiberti collected translations of Vitruvius and Pliny, drawings of Roman architecture, a history of Florentine and Sienese art, and his own memoirs. Through these he interlaced his own theoretical ideas—on optics, proportion, anatomy—clearly intending the collection to form the basis of a humanist art education. His grandson Bonaccorso, who inherited them along with the family business, left his own notebooks, which quote from his grandfather’s and add numerous diagrams of bells, cannon, cranes and hoists. So no two zibaldoni are the same.

***

Florentines loved their new hobby. Looking at the zibaldoni in the archives, researchers can track how the notebooks grew in popularity over time, peaking in the fifteenth century as Florence enjoyed its second heyday as the hub of Europe’s intellectual life. Books had now become everyday items, and this had profound effects on how ordinary people enjoyed the written word. Literature, previously only available in monasteries, universities, courts and a few other privileged locations, now moved into the home: the kitchen table and shop counter joined the tilted desk of the scriptorium as a place where a book could be read, or written. People read in a new way in these new locations too. They enjoyed a wave of authors writing in their local tongue—not just Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, but a host of other writers forgotten today—and, unlike a student or a cleric in an institution’s library, they could read privately, even in bed.

We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.

How did this new habit relate to the continuing work of traditional scribes? Historian Ross King has described a thriving culture of high-end manuscript production in Florence, where professional scribes and notaries—and the secretaries of some rich men—produced formal manuscript copies, nearly always on parchment, to order. Such copies could be extremely beautiful, and the booksellers who commissioned them for their wealthy clients took great care about their texts. King relates, for instance, how the great bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–98) would compare multiple extant copies of an ancient book—for instance, Pliny’s Natural History—in order to make sure that his new version was as faithful as possible to its author’s intentions. Scribes moved their pens differently, dropping the baffling vertical strokes of traditional gothic script and adopting the beautifully lucid ‘antique’ or humanist style, recommended by Vespasiano’s contemporary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in its place.

Bonaccorso Ghiberti recorded many of the machines that Brunelleschi developed for the construction of the dome of Florence cathedral.

Funded by wealthy patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici,* and scouring Europe’s monasteries for rare Dark Age survivals of classical texts, Vespasiano, Poggio and their peers kept up a steady supply of beautiful manuscripts filled with fresh translations, rediscoveries and new literary works. The presence of the papal court in Florence for several years also drew scholars to the city, and stimulated a rich intellectual life centred on the new libraries and bookshops where bookworms met to discuss their reading. This high-end literacy undoubtedly had a profound impact on European culture, giving the Renaissance its intellectual heft, and King celebrates its heroes, such as the legendary fourteenth-century scribe who produced one hundred copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose sales contributed to his many daughters’ dowries.

But such painstaking efforts in expensive parchment codices could only ever find an elite audience. For Dante to become widely read, universally celebrated and the foundation of a new literature—in short, for Dante to become Dante—scribal reproduction would not alone suffice. His writings were transmitted to a much larger, more diverse, audience, by thousands of ordinary people copying favourite texts from zibaldone to zibaldone, reading and re-reading them at home, and sharing them with friends and family. And they copied not in the formal gothic or antique scripts that took years to master, but the rapid cursive scripts used by merchants and notaries; people who had to write accurately, but also quickly.

***

So notebooks democratised literature by giving readers another way to read; but they also gave writers another way to write. Petrarch (1304–74), another favourite of zibaldone keepers, adopted the habits and materials of notaries, the legal professionals who formed a crucial part of the mercantile ecosystem, and today’s scholars can trace his ideas as they progress from notes on loose leaves of paper to rough copies in paper notebooks and finally to completed books in a definitive version on prestigious parchment.* The intermediate stage, in the notebook, was creatively the most important and could last a while: Petrarch worked on the verses in Il Canzoniere for forty years (this was an age before publishers’ deadlines). Such labours definitely paid for themselves: by the time of his death, the poet had been crowned poet laureate in Rome.

In the zibaldoni of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio (1313–75), we can see how the notebook helped writers in other ways, giving them a place to collect influences for future reference and quotation. As a young man, Boccaccio endured a miserable commercial apprenticeship at the Bardi bank, where his father was a partner, before breaking away to write full-time. He left no fewer than three zibaldoni, two written by scribes on parchment, and one rough notebook, known as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, that he kept himself. Scholars have pored over them to discern his influences and their impact on his work, including the Decameron, and they betray an impressive depth of reading: a life of Mohammed, Euripides, Pliny, letters to and from Petrarch, and so on. In turn, his own work would feature in many zibaldoni, juxtaposed with—thrown into dialogue with – classical authors like Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca.*

***

Was Florence unique in all this? Yes and no. Notebook-keepers across Europe also made their own informal personal anthologies: examples survive from Scotland to Poland, and a vast majority of such books must have been lost or pulped many centuries ago. In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna—‘modern devotion’—movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ—a hugely popular book—started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle. Most rapiaria remained private, though, and were often buried with their owners, and the practice died out within a century.

But the people of Florence (and its environs) grasped the possibilities faster and more fully than anywhere else. Enriching their lives by ensuring that their favourite literature was always near at hand, they made it possible for a new writer to quickly find a wide audience. Most households had a book or two on a shelf and book-copying and production here outstripped that of every other city in Europe. One study of the period by the scholar Christian Bec shows that in the posthumous inventories of 582 deceased Renaissance Florentines, no fewer than 10,574 books were listed: an average of eighteen each.

Small wonder that Florence made a congenial home for the scholars, who would turn rediscovered classical texts into the keys of Renaissance humanism. In the city’s yeasty literary culture they could find a receptive readership, confident in their vernacular, ready for the translations, glosses and new works that humanists created, for they had already been enjoying the ancients for generations, ‘and knew the value of their wisdom’. Here too, new literary practice developed: authors could easily collect models and inspirations for their own work, could adapt the techniques of lawyers and merchants to help them hone it, and then rapidly find a wide audience in a well-read population that shared ‘content’ that we would today call viral.

Ricordi, ricordanzi and zibaldoni arrived in the thirteenth century as Florence established its commercial pre-eminence, grew in popularity over the course of the fourteenth as the city’s first great writers and painters made their impact, and peaked in the fifteenth, as the Renaissance flowered. In all three genres, and in the innumerable hybrid notebooks that refused to fit neatly into any category, Tuscans rich and poor recorded their place in society and celebrated a burgeoning culture of which they were justly proud.*

Footnotes:

  1. By 1444, when Cosimo opened the new library of San Marco, filling it with manuscripts he also donated, the tribulations that his predecessor Foligno had detailed were far behind.
  2. It is striking to note that notaries were trained to strike through phrases as they transferred them from their working draft (bastardello) to the final version, just as bookkeepers struck through transactions which had been reconciled to debit and credit. Petrarch’s father and grandfather had both been notaries.
  3. There’s more to literature than poetry, of course. Just ten years before Dante started work on the Divine Comedy, Marco Polo was coming up with Europe’s first international narrative non-fiction bestseller. Locked up in a Genoese jail with his amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa, Polo wrote his autobiographical Travels in around 1298. Sadly, we have no autograph manuscript and know nothing of how they composed the work.
  4. Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to prove, but there is strong evidence that they were higher in Florence than nearly everywhere else. Eight out of ten 1427 tax returns, for instance, were written by the taxpayer responsible, indicating a high rate of writing skill among property-holders. The historian Ronald Witt concluded that the city enjoyed rates of literacy ‘not seen again in Europe for another three or four centuries’.

Photo: Author Roland Allen signing copies of The Notebook at the Windsor book launch in Biblioasis Bookshop, September 30.

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: “I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.”

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

If you’re not yet acquainted with GauZ’, the Franco-Ivorian novelist and author of International Booker-shortlisted Standing Heavy, you are in for an early Halloween treat. And if you are: you’re likely anticipating a trick or two, GauZ’ being a writer in no short supply thereof.

I first encountered GauZ’s work late last fall, when Dan passed along a PDF of the debut that would in March make its way onto the shortlist. It’s a slim novel, 180ish pages, and I read it over the course of a Friday evening and Saturday morning, pausing only when I had to wrestle unbound pages back from my partner, whose eye kept catching on the titled vignettes that make up some of the sections of this kaleidoscopic story of three Ivorians working as security guards in Paris. With titles ranging from “Babies” and “The Moustache Theory” to “Right Buttocks” (followed, of course, by “Left Buttocks”), I couldn’t blame him: written from the perspectives of the guards themselves, these passages are brief observations of the curious behaviours of Western shoppers, and together comprise a shrewd, deeply funny, always unexpected ethnography, compiled by our intrepid discoverers, of the strange land in which they’ve found themselves. No surprise: GauZ’ is also editor-in-chief of News & Co, the satirical economic newspaper.

Photo: Standing Heavy (2023) and Comrade Papa (2024) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Both covers designed by Nathan Burton.

Comrade Papa is the second of GauZ’s novels to find English publication, also in brilliant translation by the inimitable Frank Wynne—truly this pair, perfectly matched as they are in intelligence and linguistic wit, should be known as one of the great duos in translated literature. In this sophomore glow-up, GauZ’ doubles down on satire and turns his canny anthropological eye in part to the past. Comrade Papa is both an unexpectedly slapstick historical novel and a charmingly comic, contemporary coming-of-age story, alternating between the perspectives of a young 19th-century Frenchman who joins a colonial expedition to the as-yet-untouched Ivory Coast and a young Black boy born to Communist parents in contemporary Amsterdam. He writes neither story as one might expect: the colonial narrative is vividly voiced and politically complex as our hero navigates between factions who disagree on everything (except their shared hatred of the British), while the child narrator of the contemporary sections, whose monologue is rife with comic malapropisms (“the yolk of capitalism” and “the lumpy proletariat” are two of my favourites), demonstrates how the long arc of the colonization finds its expression in surprising ways, and with unexpected ends. This intertwining of narrative styles and fact with folktale, writes Nadifa Mohamed for the New York Times, comprise a “gleaming mosaic,” and for the Guardian, John Self calls the narrative “funny, ebullient, often chaotic,” and even better than Standing Heavy. For TLS, Lara Pawson writes: “Only a bold writer in command of their talent could take on such a perilous and vast subject and come out, with laughter and love, on top . . . If you are foolish enough to open this book with a set of assumptions about where it will go, prepare to be wrong-footed . . . Expect to see GauZ’ back on the shortlists with this superlative work of fiction.”

We certainly agree, and we hope—now that you’re duly prepared for mischief—you’ll treat yourself to Comrade Papa’s pair of unexpected adventures. In the meantime, we thought you might enjoy our exclusive interview with the man himself.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

***

Photo: Franco-Ivorian author GauZ’

A Biblioasis Interview with GauZ’

Hey GauZ’, would you like to start by telling us a bit about yourself?

Anyway, my name is GauZ’, and I’m a Franco-Ivorian writer. Ivoiro-French. I can say both. And for almost ten years, I’ve been writing books that are a total proclamation of style. I make people think. This is what matters most in the world. What matters most in literature is style: it’s style that appeals to the reader’s intelligence, it’s style that appeals to the reader’s empathy, it’s style that reminds the reader that the cause you’re defending implicates them too. I believe that what makes me an author is this style that I have to offer: the capacity to marvel, to write dialogue that sparks, to capture the beauty of gestures, things like that.

Comrade Papa is your second novel with Biblioasis, what inspired you to write a historical novel?

I started from a very simple question, in fact. Who are the people who came to colonize us 150 years ago? And I realized that, in fact, they’re people who are a lot like us. By us, I mean Africans. In other words, they were peasants who, in the middle of France in the nineteenth century, were also under the heel of the French bourgeoisie. Colonial domination as it expanded across the globe was still a project of the European upper class. So when does the peasant who goes to Africa become “civilized,” or become a member of the bourgeoisie? And that’s how I came up with the story of this young man who leaves the backwaters of rural France to make his fortune in Africa. Just as today, Africans come to Europe to pursue their destiny, there was a time when the idea of immigration was European, in the sense that it was something lower class people could do to make something of themselves. I also wanted to weave the story of the young man Dabilly, who goes to the colony that would become Côte d’Ivoire, with the story of a child in Europe today, because childhood represents the present and also the future, going to Côte d’Ivoire more than a century later. I wanted the novel to have the geographical trajectory of the immigrant to Africa and also to follow the human trajectory from childhood to youth to adulthood, which is universal.

The great novels of colonial exploration by Joseph Conrad, among others, inspired the hyper-literary style of your novel, Comrade Papa, even if the events of the plot bring no glory to the central character (young Dabilly suffers from diarrhea, stupidity, heat, etc.). Can you tell us about your choice to write a historical novel in a style that evokes the early twentieth century, and your almost satirical way of doing it?

First off, I wanted to write something no one would expect after Standing Heavy. And two, in each of my novels the style follows from the story—the novel imposes its style on the author. Comrade Papa imposed its style right away. I wanted to give the sense that the novel was like a letter the main character Dabilly was actually writing at the time. I read a lot of correspondence, in particular the letters of former colonial administrators. They had two writing styles, when they wrote the big administrative reports, they were writing in a grandiose nineteenth century style. And when they wrote to their buddies their style was different: more touching, more direct, and without circumlocutions. There was the official speech of triumphant France. Where they would report, we secured victory over this Black chief in such and such a village, it cost so many lives to pacify people in such a region, we have brought honor to the Republic. But when they would write to their buddy, they might say, I’m heartbroken. I met an incredible girl. The others like her too. She’s a bit easy, a bit loose, and it kills me because I’m falling in love. I couldn’t believe when I was reading these letters that men had traveled on a ship to another continent and couldn’t understand the difference in sexual mores between the society they’d left and the one in this new place. In their letters, they confided to their friends about their confusion, their loneliness, their feelings. Some of them even wrote about their children, when officially, they weren’t supposed to have any. I read a heartbreaking letter from an otherwise repulsive guy. The guy’s racism was totally disgusting, but when his twelve-year-old kid died, bitten by a snake, you know I almost cried. This time spent in the archives helped me discover the novel’s style. When Dabilly is still in France, first in the country, where his parents are millers suffering from pneumonia from breathing in flour for twenty years, and then when he works in the factory in Châtellerault, the writing is reminiscent of Zola, of the way his writing makes the reader see how mechanization creates working class conditions. Then when you get on the boat it’s like Conrad: first you meet the motley crew, and then you start to understand that Dabilly’s mission is deep in the bush. The problem with Conrad, and he’s a brilliant writer, is that the Africans are stock characters. So as Dabilly begins to penetrate into the interior of Côte d’Ivoire, and the reader understands how observant the character is, the style becomes more ethnographic. Many ethnographic texts from that time are hyper-racist but it’s in these descriptions that you get the best sense of the men, both the colonizers and the peoples they were interacting with and their traditions. So that’s how the novel progresses stylistically.

To write the child narrator, all I had to do was think about what I was like as a kid. He’s got a problem. Not with knowledge, but with language. He speaks as his parents speak in rigidly Marxist terms. He’s seven, he’s missing his mother, who’s like some kind of ghost in the story. And they’re in Holland, which is the country that invented the African slave trade. Slavery and colonization are purely capitalist enterprises, and racism against Africans was invented to justify the practice of slavery. To excuse the fact of turning men into beasts of burden. So that’s why the kid leaves his home in Holland to make the journey backwards towards his own culture. A child who only hears Marxist speeches from his parents. So he speaks like that. I went through a period like that, when I couldn’t speak anything other than Marxist phrases, so it was easy for me to find the humor in that.

Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective.

The novel tells the story of a mixed-race European boy who discovers Africa in this contemporary moment, and a white European (his ancestor) who discovers Africa as part of the French conquest of the Ivory Coast—these are two characters who make journeys that will change their lives forever, and who discover the African landscape and peoples after thinking about and investing in African mythologies in their own personal ways. Can you tell us a little about the structure of your novel and these parallel journeys? 

In fact, what writers often neglect to do is to allow the reader a way to gain a kind of historical perspective on the story being told. I’ve read a lot of novels, a lot of good, good books. Take War and Peace. There’s not a lot of historical perspective in War and Peace. And in a lot of travel and adventure novels, there’s none at all, you enter the story and then stay there. In fact, because you’re so deep inside the story you can’t draw any conclusions about history and about what it all means. Books that allow their reader to feel the way history is acting on the characters and the story are rare, you know? And so I wanted to write something that I missed when I read the big books set in faraway lands: a sense of historical perspective. So that’s why I put this little kid and his story in the novel. I wove the two stories knowing full well that they were going to have to link up in the end and in that connection between the two stories the reader would feel the weight of history. Because history is alive. It lives on in us: whether European, African, or American. No matter your race. A White American lives in the shadow of their violent history as much as a Black American. But it’s rare that a writer will allow that personal history the reader carries with them to resonate with the novel. I wanted this hyper-personal thing to link these two characters who are diametrically opposed from the start. There’s nothing to make you think that this child of Marxist parents in Holland is a mixed race kid. And there’s nothing to make you think this White guy in the nineteenth century who gets on a boat to Africa is going to stay there and have a family. This book is full of surprises. The colonial history of Côte d’Ivoire, it’s not a nice story, but I wanted to give the reader a nice dramatic surprise.

The main character is one of the guys who came to Africa from France as part of the famous “mission civilisatrice” that justified the colonial project. The character of Dabilly is not a commander, he’s poor, ordinary, an economic migrant, who makes a bet like those who go to Europe or the United States at that time. Did you conceive the character of Dabilly before you started writing the novel, or after you’d started? How did you get into his point of view and sensibility?

It was super easy. It’s weird how easy it was to imagine myself in the shoes of a twenty-year-old kid who wanted to go and try his luck somewhere else. Dabilly did exactly what I did when I got my master’s degree in Abidjan. I said to myself, this place is too small for me. So there you have it. And in fact, that’s why people say that I’ve removed the colour from this character, but all I had to do was think of him as a working class guy, a young guy, who’s on the move. Who wants to build a future. It’s like all young people in Africa. All I had to do was look at myself and my friends. And to push the empathy further, I had to find a place of origin for him. I looked at the map of France and I wanted him to come from a hard knock place: there were three very hard places at that time: Brittany, Corsica, and Loire. I remembered I had a buddy who lived in a town called Abilly. So I called my character Dabilly. I went there, walked around, went to the town hall and read the registers from the nineteenth century. The peasants did not have it easy. The mill where the character’s parents work—the ruins still exist. I could imagine the suffering of the millers and their families when they died from pneumonia after twenty years of inhaling flour dust. I followed the route Dabilly would take after they died. It’s funny, in Europe, every time someone wants to change their destiny, they head west. And on the way west, there was Châtellerault where he works in a factory and first heard of Africa, then La Rochelle. And it just so happens that La Rochelle is the colonial town that founded the Ivory Coast. So the story was all lined up. He leaves from La Rochelle by ship and arrives in Grand Bassam. My hometown. The book starts with the waves, because the break posed a real problem to explorers. France colonized the Ivory Coast territories late because of the power of those waves. To write the book all I had to do was put myself in the guy’s shoes, there, in front of my house, on the beach, to see how difficult it was going to be for him to come to Grand Bassam. So I wanted to both reckon with the power of those waves that have drowned many people and at the same time I wanted to make his arrival a bit ridiculous, as the arrival of the White people in their wool uniforms must have been. They’re the ones who wrote the books, so they always have heroic arrivals, but really, it’s quite ridiculous to arrive wet in the sand, in stockings, short pants, and a feathered hat.

The Kroumens, the Agnis and other peoples of the land that became Côte d’Ivoire have different languages, economies, traditions and jokes, and in your novel they trade with the colonizers, often in very advantageous ways—so the fiction of the civilizing mission is belied a little, and in a rather funny way. It’s very well done. The fiction of colonization runs the risk of characterizing Africa as a single country. Was it important for you that the novel be panoramic in terms of places and characters to resist this narrative?

I like the term panoramic. The novel could only be panoramic because in Africa our countries are very diverse. Take Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, everyone’s the same, really. Even the forest is the same as the men who live in the forest, both are unfathomable: characterized by darkness, danger, fear, and languor. I like Conrad, but you can see that he didn’t couldn’t see the difference between people. Whereas I grew up going to school with people there were fifteen ethnic groups. The question of difference doesn’t even arise—it’s a part of life. By the age of six or seven, I’d already heard a dozen languages. So that’s why the child narrator who comes from Holland to Côte d’Ivoire, that’s why he adapts so well, because he’s learned to hear different languages, so he knows how to work with the language. Because of all these differences, naturally, we learn, we learn to converse with people who aren’t like us, to find what brings us together rather than what makes us different. And that’s why Africa is always negotiating. Negotiation is a civilizational value across the African continent because of its panoramic diversity. And so I had to write this novel in a way that would show the differences between the people of Côte d’Ivoire.

Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love.

You did a lot of archival research in preparing to write your novel. How did this research inform your thinking on colonial history and the question of how this history is received today? Did you think about how your European, African, and now American readers would perceive this history and how you could play on these perceptions?

The plan for this book was to tell the story of colonization as the people experiencing it when the colonizer’s first arrived perceived it. This is a narrative told on a human scale. I wanted to avoid getting into grand theories, in fact, by writing about human adventures that everyone can understand. Because you quickly understand what it’s like to be lost. You quickly understand what it’s like to feel emptiness and to feel love. The French people that were sent over as part of the so-called “mission civilisatrice.” They weren’t civilized. They were poor country bumpkins. Just a group of clueless people who had incredible power in their hands and who used and abused it. All in the name of the capitalist economic model. But the leaders of these improvised colonial forces didn’t belong to any other civilization beyond the one they were inventing on the soil they claimed as their own. Well, that’s not true, they also belonged to the civilization of greed. Which followed logically (laughs). And that’s where all my research led me. I had to take on the heaviness of colonial history to be able to make light and to tell human stories in a colonial context. It was important that the colonial context be well defined in the novel: that the reader understands what’s going on, that they imagine the places, that they truly see the men for the first time. That there’s empathy for both the colonizer and the colonized: because these are merely the men. And that the reader also sees everything that is exchanged between them and that the importance of everything that was exchanged becomes clear. The story of contact is a story of exchange. Many of the Africans the colonizers were trading with believed these white men were passing through and that it was good to talk to them and to trade with them. That’s what an economy is: the ability to exchange tangible and intangible goods. And Africans had thriving economies that existed without the context of systematic domination. In fact, the Africans realized too late that the person with whom they believed they were trading with on an equal footing had come for a different reason entirely. So in a way it’s simple. The story of contact is a story of exchange but what’s more, is that in order to fully understand the subtleties of that period, it’s not enough to study African colonization, you also have to study the civilizational context of Europe in the nineteenth century, going back to the Napoleonic Wars. They should give me a doctorate in history, I’m being a smartass, but it’s true.

Love and family are the ties that bind the two narratives (one contemporary, the other historical) in this novel, so while the story is often funny, it’s tenderness that carries the reader to the conclusion. We always talk about wars as the events that determine history. What role does love play in the history of France and Côte d’Ivoire, and in your novel, Comrade Papa?

The great lesson is love. The love this young man has for a woman: his wife, his lover, who becomes a mother. I didn’t want to add violence on top of violence. I think the reader knows the horror of the colonial situation and sees the violence described in the book. To get them through the novel, I wanted to give them the tenderness of family and of love because it’s so universal. We don’t call on love enough! We don’t call on empathy enough! We don’t call on tenderness enough! Literary writers today seem to be plagued by a kind of cynicism. They’ve understood everything. They don’t hope or believe in anything. But in fact, amidst the violent acts that one civilization has perpetrated on another it’s true that there are people who have forged bonds of love. This is what can allow us to think about colonization and contact as something that happened to people like you and me. I wanted the child narrator to discover his love for his mother, and his grandmother’s love as well. He pieces together one hundred years of unsuspected family history and it’s very touching. When I finished writing the last chapter, I cried. I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears in my eyes when I finished my story. It allowed me to see how sincere I was. I believe sincerity is a form of intelligence.

Finally, what are you reading now?

Right now, I’m reading poetry and philosophy. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract. It’s a bit hard going and yet it’s brilliant. I’m also reading the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of the Négritude movement with Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. I’m committing poems to memory for the first time and it’s really worth doing. His first collection Pigments and his last collection Black Label, are just pure genius.

***

In good publicity news:

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen was reviewed in the New Yorker: “Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Guardian: “This quirky blend of psychological thriller and smalltown life is both thought-provoking and entirely convincing.”
  • May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) was featured in Lavender Magazine: “Worth the ride.”
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was featured in Scout Magazine: “A collection of unique, entertaining and multi-layered stories.”

The Bibliophile: Honouring the Reading

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly newsletter here!

***

A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.
—Caroline Adderson

Facebook is, as I said last week, a useful tool for a flagellant, but it’s also useful at alerting us on occasion to what we’ve forgotten. So even though I knew our twentieth anniversary or birthday or whatever you want to call it was quickly upon us, what I was no longer sure of was the exact date. I remember that the day that the boxes of Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were wheeled through the door of our first bookshop at 1519 Ouellette Ave. by the Canpar delivery man was only a day or two before Thanksgiving, 2004. I remember the moment that we carefully cut through the packing tape and pulled back the flaps, to be awed by the unvarnished beauty of all of those straight razors looking back up at us. I remember closing the shop for the rest of the day to celebrate, and heading out with Dennis Priebe, my production manager, fellow bookseller, and friend, and Sal to celebrate. And I remember carrying that book with me all Thanksgiving weekend, from family function to family function, so proud I was (and remain) of this first publication.

Photo: Straight Razor by Salvatore Ala, the first book of many to come from Biblioasis. In paperback and a limited edition hardcover.

What I didn’t remember was the date. But Facebook is indeed very good at that, and this week popped up with a memory telling me that it was October 7. So, now, it seems, we are officially twenty! Not as old as those geezers at ECW, who will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this fall at a party with musical performances by Dave Bidini, Rik Emmett, and others: Allied Forces! Now that makes me feel old! (There’s a great profile of ECW here, for those interested in reading more.) But old enough. Twenty years, I’ve joked perhaps once too often, is the equivalent of a life sentence; I’m not sure if or when I’ll ever get paroled, but what I am certain of is that I don’t have another thirty in me. The longer I do this, the more amazed I am by those who’ve done it far longer.

Our next books after publishing Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and Other Poems were a series of limited edition short fiction chapbooks, the first three of which were by Leon Rooke, Clark Blaise, and Caroline Adderson. Caroline’s contribution, published in January, 2005, was a short story called Mr Justice, which was later gathered in her second collection, Pleased to Meet You. I’ve already written in an earlier installment of The Bibliophile about my discovery and love of Caroline’s work, but she’s also one of the writers we’ve been associated with longest. I still don’t quite understand how it is that she’s not among our most celebrated writers. But the great thing about that is that her work is still there, waiting to be discovered. So, please, on this Thanksgiving weekend, do so: trust me when I say it’s one of the easiest ways you can make yourself happy.

Photo: Mr Justice by Caroline Adderson, in a limited edition paperback and hardcover. No. 4 in the Biblioasis Short Fiction Series, readied for the press by John Metcalf.

Last week, I was able to spend a couple of days with Caroline as she toured down the 401, launching her new collection, A Way to Be Happy, alongside Richard Kelly Kemick’s Hello, Horse in Windsor and Toronto before she headed off to Ottawa and Montreal. The interview I recorded with Caroline and Richard was excellent, and, if I ever find the time to transcribe it, might make a future installment of this newsletter: the conversation ranged widely, from writing across genres, to what people get wrong about short fiction, to where their ideas come from, to the role of humour in both authors’ work, to what they each wish they’d known when they started writing. In the meantime, I thought I’d include an earlier interview we did with Caroline, in anticipation of the launch of A Way to Be Happy.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

***

An Interview with Caroline Adderson

Photo: Caroline Adderson, reading from A Way to Be Happy at Biblioasis on October 2, 2024.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

I’m a writer of all kinds of things, predominantly fiction for adults, both novels and short stories. I also write for children and have published one non-fiction book. But my real love is short stories.

As I read A Way to Be Happy, I was reminded of some great writers, including Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Claire Keegan, and was excited by your literary allusions to Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, and more. Can you talk about some of your literary influences, and the role they play in your work, particularly in A Way to Be Happy?

I sometimes feel like I’m moving against the current. The trend today seems to be autofiction and writing from one’s lived experience. But I’ve never really done that. To me, writing is an act of empathy. I’m interested in trying to feel what it is to be someone entirely different from me. As I’ve gone along in my career, I’ve felt the need to do this even on a sentence level, to move past my own words and incorporate, or riff on, other texts. I wouldn’t say that the writers that are referenced in A Way to Be Happy have influenced my prose style per se. But since you mentioned Alice Munro, she definitely has. Whenever I’m faced with a technical problem, I turn to Munro.

When I read, I read with a pencil, underlining the sentences I admire, then transcribing these random sentences in a notebook. I often turn to this list for inspiration. I’m always encouraging students to do this too, so that they might pay more attention to the words they use and feel what style is from the inside, which is what happens when you copy something out.

Most of the stories in A Way to Be Happy contain an element of inter-textual experimentation. Sometimes it’s a little puzzle. Sometimes it’s the title, such as “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.” It’s not like Robbie Burns inspired the story, but the reference, I hope, sets up an ironic and even melodic line that runs through it. If the reader happens to recognize a reference, then the implications of that text are imported into the story. It’s really something I’m doing for myself, to keep growing in my craft, to keep learning, and to be part of “literature” in general. A writer is never really writing alone. You learn from everything you read and this is a way of honouring that reading.

The empathy for your characters is tangible, which is a unique feat given how varied your work is, and how many of your characters are ones that aren’t always visible—or focalizers—in literature. Can you tell me about the experience of inhabiting perspectives, voices, and experiences other than your own, and your approach to finding empathy for such a wide cast of characters?

I don’t find it very hard. I’m one of those people who weeps at the news and lies awake at night worrying about people I have no personal connection to. Part of being a decent human being is caring about others. And when you care about other people, you’re curious about them, curious about how they live, and how they think and feel. The pandemic was, among other things, great for practicing this. I found myself challenged by opinions I found repellant and divisive, and had to remind myself that I had these writerly skills. What if I opened my heart? What if I tried to understand why they think that way? What happened that put them in that position? That’s what I’m trying to do on the page, which is easier than in real life!

You’ve mentioned in a previous interview (with The Artisanal Writer, 2021) that for you, the most pleasurable aspect of writing is the visitation of the idea and the second is revision. When writing A Way to Be Happy, were there any stories inspired by a particularly memorable idea? Any first drafts you especially enjoyed revising?

Spoiler alert! The story “Charity” was one. It was, in a way, a gift. A friend of mine had a bone marrow transplant then, several years later, met his donor, a lawyer in New York City. Of course, he asked his donor why he’d signed up. It turned out that he didn’t even remember doing it. He went to a Jewish high school; as part of their religious education, they had to do a mitzvah. He was completely surprised when the call came so long after the fact. I thought the forgetting was pretty interesting. The idea of charity is, too, because the person who performs a charitable act definitely gets something from the transaction. Eventually I started thinking about a character whose forgotten good deed is actually the very thing that saves his life. So that was “the idea”. Then I had to figure out who this person was and what his background was like. I thought of Quoyle in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, the first page of which I teach in a class on beginnings. He’s this hapless guy who Proulx intricately describes without ever actually saying what he looks like. I named Robbie after him. But as I was writing, Proulx began to unconsciously morph into Prufrock. At first it was just the sound of the two names, but then I realized there were other similarities despite Prufrock being at the end of his life and Robbie at the beginning. At that point I began to use the poem more deliberately to influence the prose. In earlier drafts of the story, I wove whole lines throughout it. I thought it was really clever until I gave it to friends to read and they said it was annoying and distracting. In subsequent drafts, I excised, and excised, and excised. There’s a lot still there but it’s embedded so deeply now its effect is mainly in the rhythm of the sentences. I love working like this, moving the words around and playing with the language, trying to get it to do something beyond just tell the story.

In various stories, you make reference to distinctly Canadian stores like Winners and La Vie en Rose, which allows some readers to place the characters in Canada immediately. At the same time, a reader unfamiliar with these brands can piece why they are mentioned. When crafting a story, do you consider how your reader experiences piecing together the details? And perhaps more broadly, what bearing does the idea of an anticipated reader have on your work?

Unfortunately, not very often. I think I’d be a more successful writer if I actually considered who in the world would want to read about these people. I’m writing for the characters. I feel it’s my duty as a writer to tell, as truthfully and accurately as possible, what happened to this person who does not, in fact, exist. What a reader will make of it, I only think about it after the fact. As in: What?! You’re repelled?

Lastly, what are you reading now?

I’ve decided that I only want to write novels that are two hundred pages or less, so this year I’m only reading novels that are two hundred pages or less. I’m discovering and rediscovering all these wonderful books based on this rather arbitrary criterion. The Vegetarian, by Han Kang. Fantastic. I reread Elke Schmitter’s Mrs Sartoris. I met her at a festival years ago. Nadine Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World. Penelope Fitzgerald. I’ve read everything by her and am working my way through her oeuvre for the third time now. Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Oh, I loved Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, which Biblioasis published. Mary Robinson’s Ha!. I’d never read her. It was just a scream, and I love punctuation in titles. Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. There’s a very interesting Spanish book by Andrés Barba, called Such Small Hands, about murderous girls in a convent orphanage. James Welch’s Winter in the Blood was wonderful. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. It’s told in second person plural from the point of view of Japanese picture brides. Mrs Caliban was fun. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. A brilliant, brilliant book. I reread The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald. I could go on and on . . .

***

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: What A Publisher Does

/in , /by

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly newsletter here!

***

Over the years, whenever I’ve been asked what it is exactly a publisher does, I’ve had a range of answers, depending on how I’m thinking about my role and function at the time. Of late, I’ve described myself as a professional enthusiast. Enthusiasm is probably the state that most links publishing and bookselling for me: finding that book that I can get behind and trumpet into the hands of readers as loudly and as confidently and generously as I can. I take immense pleasure in the discovery of a new (or new-to-me) writer, and in the ability to engender in others that same anticipation and pleasure.

It’s perhaps for this reason that I listen so much to booksellers, and trust them more than I do academics and critics: they still read as I do, or at least as I try to do: for pleasure, excitement, the feeling of quickening when something unexpectedly connects or opens with the turn of the page. I listen to them about what I should be reading (if I could ever get out from under the manuscript pile), but also, just as much, what we should be thinking about publishing. Booksellers have turned me on to several of my favourite Biblioasis authors, and I’m grateful for it.

Photo: May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kev Lambert.

It was in 2018 or 2019, at the Salon des Livres that one such bookseller urged me to look at the work of Kev Lambert. It bothers me that I can’t remember his name at this time, nor even the bookstore he worked at: it was a French language bookstore in Quebec City, and he was there working the Salon for a couple of publishers. During a break he took me by the arm and guided me to a couple of publisher’s booths, including Heliotrope’s, picking up Kev’s just-released Tu aimeras ce que tu a tué. Kev, he told me, was the most original and fearless author to come out of Quebec in at least a generation, and that if this book was anything to go by was a writer we should commit to early. His enthusiasm was contagious, so I sent it immediately to my most trusted reader, who sent me one of the most enthusiastic (and strangest) reader reports I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. Below: a short excerpt:

Well, I’m rather glad you don’t have to run books by a corporate publishing committee, because I have no idea how to explain this book cogently, let alone come up with a one-line pitch, but I one hundred per cent think you should buy it. Essentially it’s a gay coming-of-age in which the narrator may or may not be a ghost, and lots of children die, who may or may not come back as ghosts. And it’s the funniest, weirdest thing I’ve read for a long time…..It’s The Returned [if that French TV series about dead children coming back to their village made Canadian shores; it became a cult hit in Britain] meets Clerks meets… [hmmm, this is nothing like Houellebecq but it would definitely appeal to people who love Houellebecq]. It’s so weird I’m struggling to come up with book comparisons, it often reads like a film. … And, bloody hell, this guy has written, at 25, one of the most original things I’ve read for quite a while.

***

Translation is, for me, as a monoglot (my kids so regularly tell me that I speak country French that I now no longer try to speak it at all), an act of faith, especially faith in the readers and publishers I’ve come to trust. So we took a leap and published Kevin’s first book, and when I read it in Donald Winkler’s excellent translation (You Will Love What You Have Killed) I had to agree both with my bookseller guide and first reader: this was one of the most strangely original things I’d read. It was like the revenge of the Gashlycrumb Tinies (A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears). This was a violent, comic, tragic, and lyrical world quite unlike any other. Their next novel, Querelle of Roberval, upped the ante: a novel of a labour strike in a Quebec milltown, it read like a Greek tragedy, ending with infanticide and the striking workers quite literally preparing to eat their rich bosses. It caused a furor in France where it won the de Sade Prize and was shortlisted for the Medici, and in English the Writer’s Trust prize, again in Donald Winkler’s inestimable translation.

This brings me to their third novel May Our Joy Endure, which was published earlier this month, and defies every expectation set by their first couple, beyond, that is, its breathtaking originality. The French version was a sensation, was a Goncourt finalist, and won the Médici and a range of other key awards. Kev has told me that they consider this exploration of the lives of the ultrarich their most violent novel to date, but it is a much more nuanced violence, and because of that so much more unsettling. “Writing Querelle left me with this big question about bosses and the rich,” Lambert told Steven Beattie in an interview for Quill & Quire. “My idea was to try and see the people who were invisible in Querelle. It made sense for me in a social way, because really rich people don’t want to be seen. They don’t want us to see how they live, where they live, what their day-to-day lives can look like.” But he also chose to approach these characters and their situations with as much empathy as possible. “I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit,” Lambert told Beattie. “We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea.”

This is only one of the things that makes May Our Joy Endure such an important book, and in the words of another reviewer, André Forget in The Walrus, “reveals Lambert to be one of our most subtle and perceptive novelists.” Calling the book “gorgeous, lyrical, and tender—a ballet performed in an abattoir,” Forget explains as well as anyone why Kev Lambert is so essential, and so refreshing in this hyper-politicized literary moment: they eschew playing it safe, pat answers and solutions, which also explains why it is that Biblioasis will continue to follow them anywhere.

Dan Wells
Publisher

***

Keep up with us!