San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘Paris Bookseller’ revisits a literary landmark
Historical novel traces history of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore Shakespeare and Company
Kerri Maher’s third novel, “The Paris Bookseller,” retells the early 20th century story of American entrepreneur Sylvia Beach and her iconic bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. Located in Paris, the shop attracted literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and others, who became patrons, then friends.
“At 15 years old, Sylvia Beach’s life trajectory was changed by a year she spent in Paris with her family,” Maher said.
A crusader at heart, whether she was campaigning for women’s suffrage or volunteering for the Red Cross, she wanted her life to have meaning.
“It was this determination to live a life of purpose that led her to open Shakespeare and Company. Entranced by the gatherings of French intellectuals in Paris, especially at a shop called La Maison des Amis des Livres run by Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia found in her French friends a hunger to read more books in English, which were not widely available. She saw an opening in the market and imagined Shakespeare and Company as a tool of Franco-american relations, which it was — though it also became much, much more to the history of literature in English.”
Maher — who lives in Boston with her daughter — is the founder of YARN, an awardwinning young adult literary journal, and wrote “The Kennedy Debutante” and “The Girl in White Gloves: A Novel of Grace Kelly.” Maher will be at Warwick’s on Thursday, in conversation with Kate Quinn.
Q: Who were the members of the Lost Generation, and why was the bookstore important to them?
A: The label “Lost Generation” was made famous in the epigraph to Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises,” though his once mentor Gertrude Stein originally coined the term. Ever since then, it’s been used to describe the Americans who expatriated to Europe, particularly Paris, in the years after the horrors of the socalled Great War.
Shakespeare and Company was the home away from home of those expats. Not only was Sylvia’s store a place where they could find books in their native tongue, they found each other there — like-minded readers, writers and wanderers — determined not to be lost, determined to remake the world from the ashes of the First World War, on their own progressive terms.
Q: What kind of relationship did Sylvia Beach and James Joyce have?
A: Sylvia and James Joyce had a deep friendship based on a mutual love of language, literature and, of course, Paris. They played word games in the store and at cafes. They bonded together against censorship in the publication of “Ulysses.” Money and business unsettled the relationship and made it difficult for them to see eye to eye. Sylvia maintained a profound admiration for Joyce’s genius throughout her life.
Q: Who was Adrienne Monnier?
A: Adrienne was Sylvia’s romantic partner for the better part of two decades and a lifelong friend. She also inspired Sylvia to open Shakespeare and Company with her French-language bookstore and lending library, La Maison des Amis des Livres. Adrienne was one of the first female bookstore owners in France.
She was a writer, publisher, translator and consummate literary hostess — not to mention quite the gourmet! Her store was the premier meeting place of the bohemian intellectuals in Paris.
Q: How did U.S. laws affect Sylvia’s store in Paris?
A: To the best of my knowledge, U.S. laws did not affect Sylvia in Paris, which is why she was able to publish James Joyce’s “Ulysses” from France even after it had been banned in the U.S. Because American readers living in the U.S. wanted to read the novel, Sylva had to devise ways of smuggling it over the border. There are some great stories associated with the “booklegging” of “Ulysses” that I had fun in recounting — one of which involves the help of a very young journalist named Ernest Hemingway!
Q: How did you re-create the dialogue and scenes between James Joyce and Sylvia Beach?
A: The first thing I had to do was remind myself of Hilary Mantel’s wonderful metaphor that a historical novel is not a photographic replication of times, places and people. Rather, it is more like a painting with the brushstrokes left in. Thus, the James Joyce and Sylvia Beach of “The Paris Bookseller” are my interpretations, my characters, not the actual real-life people. That said, I tried my absolute best to do right by them in the form of reading biographies, letters and, in Sylvia’s case, her own memoir. I tried to place them in locations and events they actually experienced. I asked myself, how might Sylvia have felt in this real-life moment? What might she have said? What might she have not said?