I was glad to have finished this book; it was really beginning to irritate me! I wanted to like it, I really did – Books, Paris, what’s not to love? What a shame then that what started off as a very promising look into Paris’s most famous of bookstores quickly descended into one of the most self-indulgent memoirs I have ever read.
Jeremy Mercer is a Canadain journalist who after printing the name of someone he promised he wouldn’t name, did a runner one Christmas to Paris and ended up spending the next 9 months of his life living in the famous Shakespeare & Company bookshop. What did interest me was the fact that the shops owner, 86 year old George Whitman (an American) let anyone (usually with the claim of being a struggling writer) sleep in one of the many beds dotted around the shop, indefinitely. The backstory of how George came to be in Paris and how he came to set up the shop in the first place was intruiging (for about 50 pages). What confused me too was the fact that Mercer kept saying what a wonderful person George was, yet the way he portrayed him was as a rude, grumpy old man who perved after young girls 65 years younger than him! He also repeatedly talked about Georges wish for communism and how the world had it all wrong, yet he also seemed proud of the fact that the two of them would go to church sales to buy books for a few pence and then sell them on for a massive profit in his store. Infact, when one of the priests cottoned on to what they were doing, George had a physical fight with the priest over a book. Nice!
I am left feeling deflated and somewhat irritated by this book. Given the subject, I expected to fall in love with Paris over again through the book. While there were frequent references to getting drunk and telling stories by the river Seine, there was never a point where I felt that this was a magical city. The narrative was flat, it didn’t make me feel like I was there (which is always a sign of a well written book, in my opinion), in fact I didn’t even feel like Paris was somewhere I would want to revisit on the back of this book.
A self-indulgent, poorly executed excuse for a mediocre writer to cash in on his time spent living in a famous bookshop.
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