Browse: The World in Bookshops

Abstract

standing behind him, tried to calm him down, but Thomas was yelling as loudly as he could. A vein on his temple appeared and started throbbing. “You pigs!” he yelled. “I saw it first! Find your own house! Piss off!” His tirade of insults became increasingly incomprehensible , and the dog’s barking drowned some of it out. But afterward, Wenzel and I swore on our lives that he had called us “a couple of queer wankers” and that we should be put against a wall. Admittedly, Johnny and Nele were skeptical: they didn’t think that he could be that stupid, as such insults would mean immediate exclusion from the East Berlin squatter scene. Only later, when the story ended so sadly, did everyone, including those who weren’t even present, reaffirm that back then at the Plenary Assembly at No. 6 Mainzer Straße Thomas had threatened to kill us, some even said he threatened to gas us, and that he had hurled all kinds of homophobic and misogynistic insults. His yelling attracted a whole crowd of onlookers, and after a few minutes, the plenum was in session with over twenty members. Thomas calmed down and breathed more slowly; Georg rubbed his neck with his massive paw while his other hand held the dog’s mouth shut. We were now sitting on wooden chairs around the big blackboard, and the only thing that calmed me was that Thomas and Georg, in their badly fitting designer jeans and ridiculous leather slippers (unwittingly financed by large department stores), looked even more out of place than we did. Thomas appeared to suspect that after his raging a further defeat was awaiting him, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He pulled himself together while Georg massaged his back and Thomas told the story as it was from his point of view. Months ago, he explained, he had got together a group of youths from around the Memorial Church, who skateboarded on the World Fountain and tapped tourists for money there. Very few of them had a real home, and they were prepared to go east with him. Pickings from begging were slim in the mornings, so they’d taken the train to Friedrichstraße, crossed the border next to the Palace of Tears, and searched the whole quarter for a home. Until one day, when they were just about to give up and return to their shelter in West Berlin with their heads hanging, they were finally saved. That day was one afternoon last week when they saw a courtyard that they had often just walked past without paying it any attention. A paradise of empty houses opened up in front of them. Even the first, somewhat musty left wing opposite the empty Browse: The World in Bookshops Ed. Henry Hitchings Pushkin Press, 2016 Don’t mistake Browse for a collection of breezy tributes to writers’ favorite bookshops. The essays in this little red book are glimpses into the lives of fifteen international writers. Ali Smith opens the collection going through second-hand books in an Amnesty International shop where she volunteers . Postcards, photographs, receipts: “this seeming detritus” we leave behind in our books becomes part of the story in Smith’s hands. As the essay continues, Smith goes deeper, revealing her mother’s influence on her developing appreciation for books. That going deeper occurs throughout, as writers witness the beginning of a revolution (Alaa Al Aswany), recount “how the bookshops of the former Soviet Union became European-style secondhand bookshops and Ukraine itself became a second-hand country” (Andrey Kurkov; trans. Amanda Love Darragh), and take refuge from an India “whose priority of economic growth and individual aggrandizement did not include, and possibly deliberately excluded, an intellectual and literary culture” (Pankaj Mishra). Dorthe Nors ends her essay rescuing Kristin Lavrandsdatter from a box where she’d “buried it alive,” finally reading the book that a bookseller who “understood that he served as literature’s outstretched hand” placed in her grandmother’s hands decades earlier (trans. Misha Hoekstra). In other essays, booksellers are a dealer providing a fix (Saša Stanišić) and the poet Roberto Roversi, who...