bookshop

Stefan Zweig

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There’s nothing like a bookshop, I always say, for giving you the opportunity to feel superior to your fellow man. We English-speakers here in Brussels are spoiled in that regard, since the bookshops we have are still occupied with the sale of books, while sundries are limited to cards, books-on-tape, diaries, bookmarks, ex-libris stickers and Moleskine notebooks – all of which are either book-related or at least made out of paper. The last time I visited the land of my fathers you’d have had a hard time finding a book among the CDs, DVDs and Harry Potter merchandise; and if you did succeed it would inevitably be some rubbish by Lynne Truss, or something unspeakable about or by Dan Brown.

The other day I had the chance – not one that comes along often in real life anymore – to look down my nose at someone. I was in one of our city-centre bookshops whose name I’m not allowed to mention, as it might make you think of a kind of silver. There in front of me was a bloke in a corduroy suit chatting up the young woman behind the desk, in itself no reprehensible thing, except not only had he tied his hair into a wispy sort of ponytail, and not only was he boasting of having gone to university with Richard Hill, he’d also come to pick up books by AN Wilson and Alan Bennett.

If you want to make a good impression on a bookseller, I reflected, make sure you’re buying the right kind of books, and nothing says Stud less than either Wilson or Bennett. Psychologists have done the definitive study, and told us what we already knew: books are far more important as accessories than they could ever be as cultural artifacts or, in this electronic age, as repositories of information. What that means is this: you need to be very careful when you’re planning on buying a book, and more careful still if you’re planning on going out in public and pretending to read one. We all know because we did it ourselves when we were young: the fact that I used to swan around Glasgow’s West End carrying Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and smoking St. Moritz fags (the favoured tab of Bryan Ferry) tells you more than you need to know about my youth.

The aforementioned AN Wilson is quite clearly Out, although Alan Bennett could in some cases be In. Other fogeyish authors like George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh are Out, while Henry Green is so obscure as to be perfectly In. Uber-fogey GK Chesterton is Out, therefore so is his modern-day reincarnation, Stephen Fry. Books by anyone on the TV are Out, as a matter of principle.

Old titles are reliable winners, though not if there’s an adaptation about at the time. So for now there’s no harm in being seen around town with a Trollope, though you’ll come a cropper with Dickens and Austen, since you’ll look as if you’ve been watching screen versions of Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice. As is quite likely to be the case, be honest. Foreign books are always a good bet, which is why my copy of Don Quixote (in the Edith Grossman translation, naturellement) would easily have trumped the bloke in front of me in the queue even without the ponytail. It should go without saying that there’s no need to get carried away and read foreign books in the original Foreign.

Which brings me to mention of Nicola’s Bookshop, just opened in the Rue Stassart near Place Stephanie. The shop is tiny, but has quite the most unusual selection of titles I’ve seen anywhere, arranged not by genre but by continent of origin. And the range of foreign titles translated into English is remarkable, with names such as Bohumil Hrabal, Naguib Mahfouz and Ismael Kadare. I took away a small volume from the little-known Pushkin Press consisting of two exquisite stories by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who took British citizenship before moving to end his life in Brazil. I know a match-winner when I see one, and no mistake.