The Paris Bookseller
by Keri Maher
(New York: Berkley, 2022)
What she’s carried in her heart when her family had to return to the United States, was the sense that the French capital was brighter than any other city she’d been in or could ever be in.
Page 3.
Sylvia believed with all her heart that this was the purpose of art - to be new, to make change, to alter minds.
Page 10.
Cyprian was more willing to attach herself to a man than Sylvia, who’d entirely sworn off the idea of marriage, even a marriage of convenience that could provide her with some camouflage when she needed it.
Page 11.
Why did the French have the best words for attraction?
Page 13.
“I live more among books than people.”
Page 17.
She was thirty years old. She needed a purpose. She couldn’t just assist in Adrienne’s shop, unpaid, forever.
Page 20.
No sooner had she begun to despair about her aimlessness than an idea began to take shape in Sylvia’s mind.
A bookshop of her own.
Page 21.
The idea that work could be a life’s great fulfillment took hold of her.
Page 24.
A. Monnier had shown her that a life for and among books was not just possible but worthy.
Page 24.
By the time she lay in bed her first night in London, she knew the perfect name of her shop: Shakespeare and Company.
After all, Old Bill had never, as far as she knew, gone out of style.
Page 34.
“Sometimes a world has to end before a new one can begin.”
Page 41.
Falling in love with Adrienne even changed the way Sylvia read. Instead of awe and ache when she read passages about love and the cravings of the body, she felt herself part of that world, anointed into it by Adrienne.
Page 52.
Describing Stephen’s and Leopold’s every word, thought, and movement in minute detail as they went about living a single day - June 16, 1904 - in the Irish capital, Joyce’s new novel seemed to want to explode every protective surface of modern life as surely as grenades had blown up cities and trenches all over Europe. whether his characters were sitting in an outhouse or discussing Hamlet, Joyce spared no detail, leveling the vulgar with the sublime. Here was a book that brooked no compromises, and was unwavering in its clear-eyed portrayal of Stephen’s and Leopold’s minds and bodies.
Page 53.
Readers needed two wake up to the book’s shocking honesty as much as to the boldness of its prose, for in the book’s very challenges lay its greatest truth: the world as we knew it has ended, and it’s time for something entirely innovative. Joyce hadn’t just done away with quotation marks, he sometimes flouted the conventions of sentencing and paragraphing altogether, in order to tunnel as deeply as possible into the minds of his characters - where, after all, grammar doesn’t exist.
Page 53.
It appeared that the ruling class in America wanted to outlaw anything that offended its sense of decorum, and so a book, play, film, organization, activity, or person that smacked of vice or difference from a life one might find in the comforting illustrations of the Saturday Evening Post was in danger of being silenced.
Page 55.
I’ll do my best to promote all the writers in this modern project of honest writing.
Page 55.
Sylvia had noticed that references among women to the city’s nightlife very often described the scene that one could find on the Edgar-Quintet, or in the Pigalle and Montmartre neighborhoods.
Page 58.
Opening Shakespeare and Company had all but banished her youthful wish that she herself become a writer.
Page 58.
Much as she loved putting the exact right novel into the hands of a visiting stranger and then having that same person become a friend who returned for more books, it was a special pleasure to be the English-language reading concierge of Paris, as Ezra Pound had deemed her recently.
Page 63.
She felt seen.
Page 66.
There was Joyce, miraculously in the library, preternaturally still in a wooden chair. His long legs were crossed, and his large hands drooped from arms d raped on the chair. Sylvia wondered if he’d ever played piano with those fingers, two of which had rings on them, on both hands. His head was almost perfectly egg shaped, and he was looking out the window at a leafy tree with two twittering goldfinches as if they contained the meaning of life.
Page 70.
She talked so fast, people often asked her to slow down.
Page 74.
As enlightened as Ezra was about many matters, he wasn’t much of a feminist.
Page 80.
If there was one thing she’d learned campaigning for suffrage, it was that sometimes it was as important to shut up as it was to speak up.
Page 80.
This is one of the points of the new literature: saying things that had gone unsaid too long.
Page 81.
An invitation to 27 rue de Fleurus was like being called to tea by Marie Antoinette, except that Gertrude and Alice resided not in a grand palais but in an unassuming Haussmann-era building made of the same limestone as Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s shops and their apartment, as well as the homes of pretty much everyone else they knew. No, it was the inside of Stein’s apartment that made it a veritable bohemian Versailles. Her drawing room had a unique bifurcated quality: from about the height of a guest’s chin to the wood floor was a darkly painted room populated by thick wooden antiques that served to anchor the flight of art above. Above one’s head on the soaring white walls hung paintings that would one day glory in the most important museums of the world.
Page 87.
She sometimes thought he came to the shop just for the warmth, like many of the other struggling students and aspirating artists who found their way to Shakespeare and La Maison and looked around for hours, making humble apologies for not purchasing anything. Sylvia had adopted Adrienne’s generous stance on them.
Page 98.
The fate of Joyce’s book became a daily topic of conversation in Shakespeare and company; her store was rapidly becoming the hub of all information.
Page 103.
It was easy not to think about her parents when she was away from them. But visiting with one of them made her miss them terribly, and also see them differently.
Page 106.
It was as if every conversation, every book she’d ever read or shelved or lent, every framed page by Whitman and Blake, every conversation she’d had with Adrienne about Cahiers, every encouragement of her parents, had been pushing James Joyce’s masterpiece to this very destination. Paris. Her door. It’s very own Ithaca.
Page 108.
“Any place presided over by Shakespeare and Whitman is meant for greatness.”
Page 119.
“Ernest didn’t come to Shakespeare by chance. He came because of the experience you provided American writers in Paris. He’d heard of you. The more experiences you provide, the more interesting people you’ll attract.”
Page 122.
Joyce lived for the opera. He was as familiar with Mozart and Rosetti as he was with Homer and Tennyson.
Page 127.
Some of the gest breaks from Ulysses came in the form of Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, both of whom stopped by Shakespeare and Company regularly.
Page 131.
Her store was rapidly becoming the Latin Quarter’s vault of secrets and ambitions, hopes and fears.
Page 132.
“It’s more important that it be right than we be rich.”
Page 151.
Not only was there the book business and library, but Shakespeare and Company had become the central hub of all tourist and expat information on Paris for the hundreds of Americans visiting for any length of time, from a week to a year of more. Every day, her friends brought more friends, and strangers arrived with letters of introduction or her address scribbled on a napkin or scrap of paper. They came for everything from mail services and accommodation requests to information on the opera, ballet, and museums.
Page 159.
“You put your whole heart into this, as did monsieur Joyce. We do not always have control over our hearts.”
Page 168.
Shakespeare and Company would remain a bookstore first, and a publisher of James Joyce second. Those were more than enough.
Page 171.
Whether they were single aspiring writers or young families eager to make a fresh start, they came to Shakespeare and Company as soon as they disembarked, smelling of excitement, nerves, and lunch on the train.
Page 186.
Much as Sylvia loved her Stratford-on-Odéon, it didn’t seem to have the same effect on marriage that it did on art.
Page 189.
“There has always been plenty of room in literature for both the avant-garde and the commercial. It doesn’t have to be a competition.”
Page 210.
She seriously considered not even telling her sisters the truth. Suicide was a deeply private decision, and the letter her mother had written had bene addressed only to her.
Page 229.
“All tragedies contain a gift.”
Page 230.
Writers and tourists alike were either proud to be thought lost, or offended to be accused of it.
Page 237.
It struck her that her mother had indeed been lost; she was always trying to get back to her dream of Paris, and unable to get there to stay; and it was more than Paris as a city, it was Paris as a concept of the bright, beautiful life she’d always wanted to lead, and felt she had led for a brief moment thirty years before.
Page 238.
It scared her that she recognized in her own weariness an echo of her mother's complaints.
Page 243.
In aging, habits and thoughts that once were small become large.
Page 246.
Joyce had been in London for months, at last marrying Nora in the Kensington registry Office to secure his line of inheritance for his children.
Page 254.
What Adrienne’s body needed seemed to have changed, and Sylvia didn’t know how to please her any longer; she had the sense that Adrienne might want to try new things, but Sylvia didn’t have the energy or inclination.
Page 273.
“Not everything that’s popular is a sellout.”
Page 280.
“Everything we love moves on.”
Page 281.
Hearing jaded Gertrude Stein speak with such naked enthusiasm about the fast western sky, the skyscrapers piercing the blue above New York, and the storm clouds hanging over Washington had given Sylvia the first hankering she’d felt in ages to see the country of her birth.
Page 302.
When we read historical novels, we are interpreting the author’s interpretation - so together writer and reader venture even further away from any actual “truth” of what happened.
Page 313.