![]() ![]() Takako gradually comes to appreciate her Uncle Satoru, whom she at first characterizes as "the exact opposite of anyone's idea of a dignified man." Disheveled but kind, her uncle urges her to consider his bookshop as her harbor, and tells her about his own peripatetic youth before he took over his father's business. And I know, without a doubt, that if not for those days, the rest of my life would have been bland, monotonous, and lonely." About the time she spent at the Morisaki Bookshop, she says, "That's where my real life began. The unadorned simplicity of Takako's voice is anything but subtle, but it's somehow winning in its guilelessness. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa Readers will have fun finding themselves in these pages. Carl divides readers into hares, who race through books fish, who allow books to carry them along on their current curious lapwings, who jump ahead to see the ending first and tortoises, who fall asleep each night after a single page and take months to get through a book, necessitating flipping back repeatedly to check what they've forgotten. The Door-to-Door Bookstore is also sprinkled with amusing observations. ![]() We gradually come to know these townsfolk: the abused wife the aspiring writer with the mellifluous voice who is paid to read classics to cigar factory workers the retired schoolteacher who gets her kicks from spotting suggestive typos like, "At the sight of her, he could barely contain his arbor." Longstocking, The Reader - to help him keep them straight. Carl, who is terrible with names, assigns a literary character to each customer - Mr. Chapter titles allude to classics: A Man for All Seasons, The Stranger, The Red and the Black, Great Expectations. Like Carl's backpack, Henn manages to fill his novel with books without weighing it down. She decides Carl is not actually giving his customers what they really need, and hatches a plot to correct this. Trouble ensues when a preternaturally wise (and cloying) motherless 9-year-old girl tags along with him on his rounds. The selections are dictated by their stated preferences - for happy endings, tragedy, philosophical works and so on. The highlight of Carl's narrowly circumscribed life is to deliver books every evening to a handful of shut-in customers. (Bill Nighy, who was so stellar in the 2017 movie of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, would be perfect in the role.) But his raison d'être is threatened when his longtime boss' hard-nosed daughter takes over the family business, determined to push out her father's star employee and dear friend. This charmer, translated from the German by Melody Shaw, is an unabashedly sentimental, determinedly uplifting novel about friendships forged through books.Ĭarl Kollhoff, a 72-year-old bookseller in southern Germany, is beloved among his customers for finding just the right books for them. Other scenarios involve the growing threat of big bad business or declining book sales and literacy in the digital age of smartphones, social media and video games - and the passionate readers who band together to save their beleaguered local shop. In a frequent plotline, the luckiest among them connect with a soulmate through a shared fondness for a specific bookstore or book. ![]() These novels are populated by outsiders or loners who often immerse themselves in literature at the expense of living. Many have been made into movies, like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (1978), Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop (2013) and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Most are heartwarming paeans to the salubrious bonds forged among readers. It's no surprise that novels set in them abound. Safe havens for diverse minds, the best transmit a sense of possibility and community. There's something inherently hopeful about bookshops. For some of us, it's hard to walk by one without swerving to check out the window display, at the very least. Readers and writers are drawn to bookstores like mountain climbers to views. Booksellers in Japan and Germany are at the heart of two new translated novels. ![]()
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