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MY SPANISH CAREER

BOOKS

‘We keep a typewriter at the back for customers to punch out poems’

In this week’s instalment of My Spanish Career, The Local talks to Terry and Charlotte, the couple behind Desperate Literature, Madrid’s newest bibliophile hangout.

'We keep a typewriter at the back for customers to punch out poems'
Terry among the books at Desperate Literature. Photo: Sophia Smith Galer

After working together at the famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris, this Yorkshire poet and glamorous Frenchwoman arrived in Madrid in early summer to run the city's newest international book store.

What is the ethos behind Desperate Literature?

The website line reads, “Desperate Literature strives to be a space where good literature serves as a vehicle for dynamic cultural, linguistic and social exchange between Madrileños, extranjeros and travelers from around the world,” and this might sound like a long shot, but we hope, in our own humble way, to be doing something along these lines. 

What distinguishes you from other bookshops?

Well, we live here, in the back, so that's something a little different, we think.  Because of this, though, we want the bookshop to serve as part of the community, as a literary hub but also a place people can come for a chat or a helping hand, to drop their keys for a friend.  You become part of local life, and we really love this.  

We do lots of little things to encourage this, like inviting people to play chess or get drunk with us, and we also host passing writers and travelling book folks. We'd also like to think that our selection of books sets us apart, especially in English and French.


The international bookstore is on Calle Campomanes near Opera  Photo: Sophia Smith Galer

Tell us more about the boozy shelf?

​This is the brainchild of another of the shop's founders, Craig Walzer, and we think it came about because he got frustrated at not being able to serve any alcohol in his Greece store, Atlantis Books, and so he invented this neat trick.  

You can find Fitzgerald, Donleavy, Algren, Plato, H.S. Thompson, Joyce, and whatever we think passes, really. We're only too ready to be convinced that something qualifies…

How do you think Madrid compares to Paris, when it comes to the literary scene?

Well, we've only been here a short while and we're still settling in, so we'd be hesitant to make any grand claims, but we actually noticed something of a similarity between the two cities.  We immediately felt comfortable, surrounded by all the books and bookshops Madrid has to offer.  

There's something to be said, also, about the change that's happening in the book industry, and how this seems to be reflected in the types of bookshops you can find in both cities.  With the monumental rise of on-line retailing, there's a certain manner of austere bookseller that feels outdated, because no matter how cheaply books can be bought on-line, or how many e-readers circulate, what Amazon and the like can't provide is community, a space. Also, small-scale printing seems to be on the rise in both cities and this is something really wonderful.

How did you two meet and what’s your love story?

​We met at a Kate Bush concert. ​ No, we met in a bookshop, of course.  Ah, something like that: we don't want to give too much away!

What kind of people come to your bookshop?

​Well, we already mentioned our neighbours, but there's a healthy balance of tourists and locals.  Spanish students, students of Spanish, teachers of all languages, slowly perambulating octogenarians, Camino hikers, American bikers, hens on weekends, the rebellious youth. We had a reader from the Fiji Islands just a while ago, who has a bookshop/café on the beach there and bought some stock. ​


Customers are invited to punch out poems on an old typewriter. Photo: Sophia Smith Galer

What’s the deal with the typewriter ?

Well it's partly a little fun but also about taking the time to sit and write, and we think that there's something quietly important about this, about 'taking time', whether it's simply a punctuation mark in the day or hours spent pouring over something. Also, we're very aware that it could become something very kitsch, a bit of literary glitter, and you have to work for this not to happen, to take it seriously and to sit down and write something in good faith. People seem to take it this way, too, and we've already a handsome collection of poems.

Best moment so far since opening four months ago?

​We threw a 'boozy' event for Bloomsday, celebrating James Joyce's Ulysses, and that was really fun. We had friends from all over singing and reading in all languages and lots of folks slept in the bookshop afterwards. Otherwise, just hearing echoes from the wider world come back to us, customers who've had the place recommended or been sent on from one of our sister stores.  

What hopes do you have for the future?

Lots of dreamy thoughts that may or may not actually happen, like a​ literary magazine, film screenings, a Calle Campomanes street party, a cinema in the cellar, a disco-ball, a bookshop ball pool party, a book vending machine in the metro, and lots and lots of partnerships.

Desperate Literature, Calle Campomanes, 13, 28013 Madrid

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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