A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

 

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

Algerian fiction

Original title Nos Richesses

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in this year’s Waterstones sale. It caught my eye as it is about a famous bookshop in Algeria. Kaouther moved to France with her family when she was eight. One of her incredible memories is of her father taking her to the library every week( I used to love my library trips as a kid and actually still do, although I don’t use my library as much as I should these last few weeks have been great getting books for the woman in translation month). She took up writing after doing well in a short story contest while at university. This book is set in her homeland; she did go back to the mid-90s to report on what was happening in the country at that time. The book uses the shop as a prism to all that has happened in Alegria in the 20th century.

But you will follow the alleys that lie open to the sun, won’t you?You’ll come at last to Rue Hamani, formerly known as Rue Charras.You’ll look for b: it won’t be easy, because some of the numbers have disappeared. You’ll stand there facing a sign in a window: One who reads is worth two who don’t. Facing History, with a capital H, which changed this world utterly, but also the small-h history of a man, Edmond Charlot, who, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, opened a lending library called Les Vraies Richesses.

In the present its ghost lives on in the library on the same site.

The book drifts from the present, where the shop’s site is now a lending library, so the spirit it had is still living in a way. Then back in time to the glory years of this shop that was opened by Edmond Charlot a free thinker if there ever was one, he imagined Les Varies Richesses as a melting pot of literature, art and friendship a meeting place for those in love with books, not only did he open a shop he also published books from that shop as well. It had been where Camus first saw fame with his first book launched at the shop. It was also used in the war to publish FREE French propaganda. A book is in a number of forms, all different the present is in Alegeria with its problems and Post-independence as we see Ryad clearing the book to sell but is the shop just a shop? What is it soul? We have Charlot’s own journal that sees how he got books out there from Camus and Giono, how the shop managed to just get through the war, and then in the years after the war, we see how Alegeria is moving towards independence so many countries started to after world war two.

May 5, 1936

This will be a library, a bookstore, a publishing house, but above all a place for friends who love the litterature of the Mediterranean. As soon as I took possession, I was overjoyed. I’m starting to meet the neighbors, the storekeepers, the waiters. These new characters in nmy new world. REVOLT IN asturias is on sale. People are saying that e.c stads for EDITIONS camus. They’ll see through the ruse soon enough, but we’re in no hurry to set the record straight, the main thing is, the play is Selling

Camus the man he first publuished and a man thart would sit outside the shop and smoke from timt to time.

This book is clever as its main character is the shop but not the shop. More of the dream of what the shop could be, a place for ideas. The shop and its history is a lens on the country around it as history happened to like those involved in the wars of the period took damage, so did the shop. But its spirit is still there in some way. I loved the parts of Charlot’s journal that harks back to an era when dreamers and free thinkers could have almost changed the world when a bookshop can be so much more a publisher, a melting pot of ideas, a place for thinkers to chat and talk over the world this is a book that reminds you of the power books can have and the freedom even in the present there is the chance to get a book and break free in those words of your present. This is one of those odd books that walks the line between fact and fiction and leads us to a small shop and a man with dreams and one of the greatest writers in the 20th century in Camus, that loved the shop. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score = +B, A tale of a long-gone shop and a place I would have enjoyed, I think !!