{Photograph} by Jacqueline Feldman.
“With a diving swimsuit and helmet,” mentioned Yannick Poirier, the proprietor of Tschann bookstore on the boulevard Montparnasse, the place he has labored for thirty-five years, “and with darkish glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s private, however I hate sport, and I’ve a horror of circus video games, and, the right way to put this. You’re American? So Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a buddy, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Client Society, like Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Video games—for me they go away me neither scorching nor chilly. They go away me completely detached.”
“There are books about sport,” supplied a bookseller at Le Style urbain, “however they’re very distant disciplines, all the identical.”
“If there are any,” they mentioned at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and if they’re good, we have now them.” This clerk, like their counterpart at Le Style urbain, was “towards” the Olympics (“in a private capability,” they added at Le Style urbain). Each bookstores, singled out for questioning out of town’s tons of, are within the twentieth arrondissement.
“We’ll in fact have a couple of books,” they mentioned at Les Traversées, “however in a nook.”
“We’re not going to brighten the bookstore,” mentioned Anne-Sophie Hanich, managing Les Nouveautés.
“The Olympic Video games,” mentioned Gildas, his first identify, at Les Traversées, which is half-buried within the hill of the rue Mouffetard (“I detest my household identify”), “are usually not crucial factor.”
“We now have different issues to consider,” they mentioned at Le Merle moqueur, rue de Bagnolet. “We now have different issues proper now.”
“Literature, initially,” Gildas went on. “After which, nicely. Thought, creativeness, reflection, magnificence, love.”
“The issue of getting purchasers to return in. Social issues.” At Le Merle moqueur, the clerk wrapped a ebook for gifting.
“You suppose an impartial bookstore isn’t a enterprise like some other?” Olivier Delautre at La Cartouche, the place his personal commerce has been, for sixteen years, in vintage and used books, was leaning again in a low chair, letting it tilt. As a bouquiniste, Delautre units himself other than peddlers of latest books, whom he sees as profit-minded. “These are small folks,” he mentioned, “who’re there to hold packing containers.” His colleagues who promote out of iconic packing containers alongside the Seine have mobilized towards a prefectural injunction to take away themselves forward of subsequent yr’s opening ceremony (for the rationale, the prefecture instructed them, of “terrorism” threat). “I promote principally outdated books,” Delautre mentioned, “printed at a time when sports activities didn’t exist.”
On the Librairie des Abbesses, Marie-Rose Guarniéri, described to me at Les Traversées because the grand dame of the Parisian bookstore, instructed me to return again in fifteen minutes and, by the point I did, was in a fury. I had been anticipating her to talk to me of her personal métier with out making an appointment, she accused. “You need to make an appointment,” she repeated. “I’m not some button you possibly can simply push,” she mentioned.
“In the intervening time it’s nonetheless somewhat early,” mentioned Chafik Bakiri, the proprietor of Equinoxe, the place “eighty p.c” of inventory is secondhand books. “At the moment I don’t have any concepts.”
“I do know that through the Olympic Video games we are going to do strictly nothing apart from what we’ve been doing for ninety years,” mentioned Poirier.
“Nothing,” Gildas mentioned. “And so it’s easy.”
“Previous posters,” Bakiri mused. “Objects, medals, I don’t know.”
“Perhaps we’ll do one window about sports activities,” mentioned Hanich. “Perhaps some French flags.”
“I reside in Saint-Denis,” they mentioned at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and we’ll be significantly affected.” The suburb simply north of Paris, its identify—just like the identify of the poorest division in mainland France, the 93, the place it’s located—is in broad use as a metonym for institutional neglect and the struggling of complete communities; the nationwide stadium, situated there, will likely be one of many principal websites for the 2024 Summer season Olympics (“the largest occasion ever organised in France,” in accordance with official messaging). Leaving Le Monte-en-l’air, I noticed the window was lined by copies of On ne dissout pas un soulèvement, Seuil’s new launch by forty authors writing in help of Soulèvements de la Terre, a group of teams in France organized round native environmental causes. Within the 93 in Aubervilliers, native activists have been partially profitable in defending neighborhood gardens towards their demolition to make approach for, amongst different issues, a Paris Olympic Aquatic Centre.
“Now we all know,” mentioned Xavier Capodano, after making me a espresso, espresso, in an workplace at Le Style urbain, which he based. (“Loosen up,” he mentioned as we went again there. “I’m not good, however I’m not going to eat you.”) “Thirty or forty years in the past, we didn’t know the place we have been going.”
Capodano was referring explicitly to the hyperlink between runaway development and “the planet’s high quality of life.” It was a summer time of, as soon as once more, excessive temperatures in all places (with the notable exception of Paris, the place it has rained nearly day by day); of service outages alongside the Paris metro for deliberate work (“The Line 5 is closed,” I complained to a buddy, “between Gare du Nord and the remainder of the world”); and of, on this metropolis definingly, the dying of Nahel Merzouk, seventeen, shot within the chest by a Paris-region policeman throughout a visitors cease. “I’m not satisfied,” I heard, “of the ebook’s function within the revolution.” This was from a employee at a bookstore within the east of Paris who requested me to determine it in that approach solely. That they had the sense, they mentioned, that their “function in society,” their half in its duties of care, had been higher after they have been on unemployment. That they had time then to take part in a neighborhood group like a soup kitchen, organized horizontally (in order that “there wasn’t any distinction” between volunteer and beneficiary). Not anymore. “We’re a enterprise,” they mentioned of the bookstore, “earlier than anything.” And so the shop retained a sure “expressive house” in having the ability to, say, “do a little bit of publicity for Soulèvements de la Terre,” however to the employee this didn’t appear, always, sufficient. We spoke in a courtyard of contemporary, unfancy development, unplanted. “The moments of radical transformation of society I’ve had the possibility to see have been extra in its insurrectional phases,” they mentioned, “and I haven’t essentially seen insurrectional phases opened up instantly from studying books…”
“Within the summary,” mentioned Anne, “literature can do something it likes.” A retired sociology professor, she was volunteering at Quilombo, a “bookstore of the intense left, anarchist in truth.”
“It’s not my place to guage what literature ought to or shouldn’t do,” mentioned Capodano. “Literature does what it desires. It lives its life.”
“For me,” mentioned Poirier, as if demonstrating a final, necessary capability of literature, “it’s as if the Olympic Video games didn’t exist.”
Jacqueline Feldman is a author residing in Massachusetts. Precarious Lease, her ebook about Paris, will likely be printed by Rescue Press.
