Book Review: The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon (Translated by Ollie Brock, Thomas Bunstead, Lisa Dillman, Daniel Hahn, and Anne McLean)

There is a passage in The Polish Boxer in which the narrator, a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon, tells a musician he has just met about his take on revolutions. I am, he says, ‘fascinated by internal rather than external revolutions…how and why someone is pushed toward a revolution of the spirit, whether it be artistic or social or whatever, strikes me as a far more honest search than all of the spectacle that follows. Because everything after that…is pure spectacle. Everything. Painting a canvas? Spectacle. Writing a novel? Spectacle.’

The Polish Boxer traces the lines of internal revolutions and the journeys of mind and body that inspire, ferment, and resolve them. Part novel, part collection of linked stories, Halfon takes the reader from his homeland of Guatamala, through a Mark Twain conference in the US, and onto an impossible search in snowy Serbia. At its heart lies a game of hide-and-seek as to whether the narrator and author – each named Eduardo Halfon – are one and the same. There’s also a grandfather who claims the numbers tattooed on his forearm are to ensure he never forgets his telephone number, and a classical pianist who disappears in search of the gypsy music he loves. How do our origins shape who we are? And what about our desire to construct identities: the stories we tell that can become more real than the truth? The Polish Boxer plays an elaborate and enjoyable game with all these ideas and remains fun and readable throughout.

Jazz music suffuses the prose. Eduardo is a big fan of the improvisations of Thelonious Monk and the narration works hard to create an impression of improvisation. You can here echoes of other writers throughout, dropped in here and there like indiscernible illusions. A considerable amount of action takes place in dark jazz bars, where smoke billows and twists in the air and conversations are had over lots of drinks. In some ways, the book is best summed up by the image on the jacket: wispy white smoke drifting against a black background, like bones on an x-ray. Unpindownable. Transient. Enigmatic. Descriptions are thrown out then modulated, everything is fluid, seemingly spontaneous. The ‘molasses eyes’ that Eduardo observes in a student one page become something else upon further viewing: ‘the only thing molasses about them was a mistaken memory.’

The Polish Boxer is a fun book to review. Halfon plays games with the reader, poses big questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, manages to be witty, profound, literarily aware, and accessible all at the same time, and then changes his mind on everything. I have a sense as I write that ‘there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.’

What’s more, its overall narrative is somewhat unreliable. This English translation takes a format that exists
nowhere else in the world. It is a combination of several works by Eduardo Halfon that are brought together into one new book; its plot and themes are therefore as much a creation of translation as of authorship. Indeed translation is the quiet miracle of this book: five translators worked together on bringing it to English, yet it doesn’t feel in the least disjointed. I am yet to encounter a reader who can discern a seam in the writing. And the translation is elegant as well as thought provoking, though one wonders why – despite four of the translators being English – they opted for Americanised spelling.

The Polish Boxer is a veritable feast of discussion points and thought provoking ideas, none answered, all which leave me with a smile on my face, feeling inspired and enthused. But then I love this sort of unspecific atmosphere. The Polish Boxer reminds me of Alexandar Hemon and Jonathan Safran Foer, not just in the experiences of immigration and journeys to eastern Europe, but in the mundanity of them, the drifting, the internal revolutions and the lack of focus. And like Everything is Illuminated, there is a sense that humour is used both as a way to effectively tell a sad story, and to shrink from truths too terrible to mention.

Dichotomies. Grey areas. Nothing is certain. Internal revolutions are quiet and frequently reversed. ‘There’s always more than one truth to everything’ says Halfon at one point. Or often, there is no truth at all. Merely memory and perspective. This is metafiction about the necessity of fiction to describe and interpret reality. But can we trust narratives? Can we trust stories? Can we trust literature? Halfon is drawn to the idea that stories are tools through which reality is made bearable and intelligible. Yet he is equally aware that this romantic notion is incomplete and that coherence and narrative are inventions of literature that have little in common with everyday life. ‘Literature is no more than a good trick a magician or a witch might perform, making reality appear whole, creating the illusion that reality is a single unified thing.’

The Polish Boxer is both self parody and a serious discussion of these issues. It begins in a classroom where students debate the merits of classic literature, particularly works where ‘nothing happens’ or the characters are dislikeable. Implicit comparisons are made with Mark Twain – that twisting, unpindownable clown -  and they are somehow worthwhile. I’m not sure how Halfon manages not to make all this sound incredibly pretentious. Perhaps it is because he is far more overt in his humour and one doesn’t fully believe he is serious about anything. This isn’t a J.M. Coetzee play on fiction and biography where the wit hides in between words. At times it drifts into being slightly too self-referential, and Eduardo’s girlfriend Lia – a scientist who draws graphs of her own orgasms – is one of the few dud notes of the novel.

However, overall, The Polish Boxer is a thrilling experience. If you like it, try The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy, for they share many similar themes. Just don’t take anything Halfon writes too seriously. Despite what the narrator argues in chapter one, there is no ‘correct way to read a story.’ However, his advice might be worth heeding in reading this book: ‘[let] yourself be dragged along in the author’s wake. It matters not whether the waters are calm or stormy. What counts is having the courage and confidence to dive in headfirst…A story is nothing but a lie. An illusion. And that illusion only works if we trust in it…Plato wrote that literature is a deceit in which he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who allows himself to be deceived is wiser than he who does not.’

Dive in! Enjoy the experience. The Polish Boxer is the first introduction English readers have had to a major South American novelist. I distinctly hope there is more to come soon.

The Polish Boxer is published by Pushkin Press (2012). ISBN: 9781408830383, 186pp  

www.summerreads.org.uk

For an extract from The Polish Boxer click here

For audio visual content of Eduardo Halfon discussing his work, click here

The Theory of Clouds - Stephane Audeguy

Since the dawn of time writers have been drawn to the sea, to its solitude and its silent power. From Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch to Homer and William Shakespeare, the sea has existed as both a very real living presence, and a metaphorical idea on which novels, poems and plays have floated…and occasionally sunk. Yet despite their equally transient nature, moodiness, and deceptive depth, clouds have been largely overlooked in the annuls of literature. Suddenly, having read The Theory of Clouds this strikes me as a remarkable oversight.

“All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time. The light starts to change. Soon they will have to head home, and to behave, and to pretend.”

From this sumptuous first paragraph, The Theory of Clouds takes you on a journey across the skies and into lives, quietly, gradually, sparsely building a tapestry of interlocking narratives, stories of life, and obsession; and clouds. Stephane Audeguy’s debut novel, already the recipient of the Grand Prize of the French Academy, reveals a rare and delightfully fresh new literary talent.

Legendary couturier Akira Kumo has built his whole life for himself: never questioning the holes in his memory: the absence of a childhood, or family, or a vast, earth-shattering explosion. Now, in retirement, he has devoted himself to amassing the world’s largest collection of books on clouds and meteorology. Requiring someone to catalogue this vast library, he hires Virginie Latour and begins to teach her about the history of clouds, and those who have watched them.

So begins this most gently beautiful of books. As Kumo takes Virginie on a historical tour of clouds, we meet prominent men whose lives have been attracted to those deceptively heavy clouds which float so lightly across the skies.

“You have to be single-minded, Kumo said to Virginie, and single-minded in a particularly wilful sort of way, to take an interest in clouds.”

We meet Luke Howard a devout Quaker who, in 1821 gave clouds the names by which they have been known ever since, Cirrus, Cummulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. And so the nomenclature of clouds was born. Then there is Lewis Fry Richardson, a devout pacifist and mathematician who devised the means of modern weather forecasting years before the technology existed make it a reality. But when his work on weather patterns was used for more effective dissemination of poison gas is World War One, he changed track and spent the rest of his life attempting to create a mathematical model for why people wage war on each other, work which has, sadly, never been followed up.

But, Kumo continues to explain, “like all things so simple and sublime, clouds pose dangers.” Who could forget the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and the vast cloud of ash and debris which spread across the entire world, altering global temperature for years to come. And cloud watching itself also poses problems for those drawn to it. Not all relationships between people and clouds have happy endings.

“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.

And this infinity, this capricious refusal to be defined can send people mad. For example, Carmichael, the English painter, whose obsession with painting the true nature of clouds drove him mad. And then there is Kumo’s past, and the cloud which lurks there, raining black dust on all he has become.

But it is the story of Richard Abercrombie, noted cloud watcher and all round English gentlemen, which holds the key, not only to Kumo’s collection, but to his past, and Virginie’s future.

“All great collections tend to orbit around a missing piece, a central absence that acts like a hub around which revolve, indefinitely, the collector’s desires…In the case of Kumo’s collection, the missing piece bore a name, a name celebrated in meteorological circles, The Abercrombie Protocol."

So when it appears The Abercrombie Protocol becomes available, Kumo dispatches Virginie on a mission to London to see if she can lay her hands on the fabled document. Her journey takes her into the heart of the very history Kumo has been teaching her, its locale and its characters, and soon she returns with fresh stories, stories which run to the heart of that most difficult of relationships, between clouds, and the people who watch them.

And devoid of the companionship Virginie offered him, Kumo is beginning to remember things about his own past and the great cloud that overshadows everything in it.

The Theory of Clouds is a novel about clouds, both literal and metaphorical, all the different sorts and the people who look at them, sometimes with intrigue, sometimes wonder. It is about the interconnectedness of nature and humanity, the first in a planned trilogy investigating the relationship between humanity, the natural world and technology. And it is a phenomenal beginning.

Without a single line of dialogue Audegey builds a novel which is both illuminating and beautiful, understated and yet intensely profound. Just a look at the cover offers an insight into its fabulously, carefully constructed plot. The ying and yang of clouds, darkness and light, that depth and deception which lead people to stare in wonder and sometimes lose themselves forever in their midst. The narratives verge from the fictional to the literal, each story merging together, reflecting its predecessors in some way or other, be it geographically, emotionally, intellectually or in the events of life and death. And slowly but surely the lives of Kumo and Virginie are merging with their forebears, being written into this future history of clouds.

There are touches of Kazuo Ishiguro here, in the Japanese history and the sparse prose, the ability to let events and stories speak for themselves. Subtly, ever so quietly, this novel will creep up upon you until you find yourself thoroughly engrossed, hungry to read at all hours of the day. Such sparsity requires incredibly confidence and ability, and Audeguy pulls it off consummately. There is also something of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in the multiple narratives, all taking place together under an ever changing sky.

And as it draws to a close the various plots begin to come together, the interconnectedness of lives and clouds, each reflecting the others simplicity, constantly evolving, ever apt to be caught by a strong breeze and whisked off somewhere completely new. Or else destroyed.

“Only the ocean may be more fascinating to watch than clouds, and equally dangerous, for nothing is more useless and more deceptive and generally more stupefying that watching something that is ever changing and ever self-renewing. Yearning to describe or understand, or even control it can cost you everything. What Virginie first perceived as a long and sweetly amorous procession of clouds now contained an element of despair, unrequited love, and dreary solitude.”

Reading this simple tale of clouds is so much more and less than that. It is like watching the clouds pass overhead, like looking at life itself, head on for once. Infinity, infinitely recurring, always changing, never definable. And the clouds are both literal in the history and science behind them, and a metaphor for the transience of thought, of life, and of expectations.

Audeguy is a prestigious talent. I cannot wait for Autumn 2008 and the publication of the second in the trilogy, The Only Son, which has already been published in France. I almost want to learn French fluently just to read it. I finished The Theory of Clouds on a Friday afternoon and started re-reading it immediately. I have never done that before and it was as good the second time as it was the first. I can offer no greater recommendation than this.

10 out of 10

Influential Authors

Tough one, this.

I take the idea from Shelf Life. Which authors have influenced my thoughts on books, or writing. They are not necessarily my favourite writers, or those I most admire, but those who have influenced me in some way or another.

Over the years many authors have moulded and shaped my mind as a reader, and often radically transformed what I think about when I think about writing (haha, see what I did there?) Here are just a few of them.

1. Russell Hoban - Taught me that the only limit to writing is the extent of our imagination.
2. Haruki Murakami - Demonstrated how Magical Realism, well done, can express emotional upheaval through metaphor far more effectively than any amount of weeping realism ever has.
   He has also become my 'go-to' writer. Whenever I have become stuck with a book and struggled or not enjoyed finishing it, I go back to a Murakami novel and remember exactly why I love fiction.
3. Milan Kundera - Offered my first foray into fearsomely intelligent, intellectual writing. Enlivened my mind to the possibilities of what a novel can do.
4. Roald Dahl - Helped my fall in love with storybooks. I remember staying up late at night, huddled under the covers, when I was only about 7, desperately scrabbling through Matilda, totally unable to put it down.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings was the first adult book I read to myself, when I was 10 years old. I started off reading it with my Dad but got bored of waiting for our evening reading so decided to read it on my own and from then on I never looked back.
6. J.M. Coetzee - Demonstrated that great writing does not have to be complex or fancy, that what is most important is creating an atmosphere and telling a story and that the simpler you do that the better. Also demonstrates how unappetising sex scenes can be in fiction.
7. Charles Palliser - Reminded me that for all the great ideas you have, the story will always be paramount. If a reader cannot put a book down then that is the greatest achievement you can ever hope for.
8. Don Delillo - Offers a masterclass in the simplicity of good dialogue.
9. Toni Morrison - Taught me that you cannot judge a writer by their agent! No matter how infuriating, rude, or disrespectful an agent/publicist might be bears no correlation with how charming, and amusing the writer will be.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro - Showed me that writing is best when an author has the confidence to let their characters and events speak for themselves. That authorial commentary is best left to an absolute minimum.
11. Olga Grushin - HER STYLE IS DECEPTIVELY LIKE MINE! Gave me a sense that perhaps I can be a good writer.
12. Iris Murdoch - Ah, the unreliable narrator. Showed just how much you can do in the first person even if the narrator is delusional, confused and utterly unreliable.
13. Salman Rushdie - Where to begin? Inspires with every sentence. Demonstrates how mythology can bring a novel alive and create a colour palate of vivid imagination which works in counterpoint to the main plot. His lively, jumpy, excitable prose is an absolute pleasure to read. And he ties together ancient mythology with contemporary culture in a way few authors can.
14. Stephane Audeguy - Merges biography with fiction and fiction with biography in a way I have not seen done by anyone else.
15. Michelle De Kretser, Martin Amis and many others. How unbelievably unreadable and turgid some work can be. This is a very good lesson to learn.
16. Charlotte Bronte - The power of the narrator to carry a plot on their shoulders alone. If you have a great narrative, then I will read on forever, no matter what is happening in the plot.
17. G.K. Chesterton - The king of witty thoughts on writing. Argues that the simpler the prose is, the more you can convey. Less is definitely more.

The Only Son - Stephane Audeguy

7 out of 10
“Heirs and disciples can be terrible, vindictive little creatures. That the work of inspired inventors can be both brought to its apogee and utterly wiped out, simultaneously, by followers who are very different from them fascinates and disturbs me.”
Stephane Audeguy in an interview with French Book News, 2006.

Stephane Audeguy’s second novel is both a grand picaresque tour of Eighteenth Century France, and a thoughtful reflection upon Rousseaist thought, as conceived and fulfilled by the French Revolution. The Only Son is narrated by Francois Rousseau, the lost older brother of Jean-Jacques, about whom nothing is known bar a paragraph in The Confessions:

“My brother, who was seven years older than myself, was brought up to my father's profession. The extraordinary affection they lavished on me might be the reason he was too much neglected: this certainly was a fault which cannot be justified. His education and morals suffered by this neglect, and he acquired the habits of a libertine before he arrived at an age to be really one. My father tried what effect placing him with a master would produce, but he still persisted in the same ill conduct. Though I saw him so seldom that it could hardly be said we were acquainted, I loved him tenderly, and believe he had as strong an affection for me as a youth of his dissipated turn of mind could be supposed capable of…In the end, my brother's conduct became so bad that he suddenly disappeared, and we learned some time after that he was in Germany, but he never wrote to us, and from that day we heard no news of him: thus I became an only son.”

From these humble words is Francois Rousseau resurrected. But far from portraying him as lazy and unreliable, Audeguy conceives him as resilient, interesting, and venturesome. He is a capricious libertine, adaptable to whatever life throws at him, and inspired to seek out life in all its guises. The novel is written as a long address from Francois to Jean-Jacques, with the former using history to act as a critique of his brother’s ideas. The plot itself begins with Francois attending the re-burial of his esteemed brother, whose final resting place is being moved to Paris, where the other heroes of the Revolution dwell. Francois, although holding tender memories of his brother, is moved to anger by this absurd aggrandisement: “Why should I hesitate to invoke your ghost, when everyone in the street feels entitled to do so, calling upon you as the Christ of the Revolution? For many years, people have been naming their children after you. . . . Of course, no one reads your work anymore.” The tone is set, the impending revolution may be many years away, but history looms over the entire novel.

So we return to childhood in Geneva. Francois has a happy beginning, raised in an effeminate house, surrounded by adoring and indulgent women. But then his father returns, Jean-Jacques is born, and their mother dies in childbirth, and from then on Francois is a reject within the house. So he begins to walk the streets. He adopts a surrogate father in Maximin de Saint-Fonds, a free-thinking homosexual who opens Francois mind to the possibilities of the world. Under Maximin’s tutelage, Francois becomes interested in uncovering the secrets of human anatomy, and of closing the gap between the divine and impenetrable perfection of the body, and the imperfection of human scientific understanding. He is apprenticed in his father’s profession of watch-making, but having been involved in a confrontation over a women in which his assailant is severely injured, he flees Geneva. A few years later he arrives in Paris, where he finds a home for his libertine ways, first working in a bordello, and then setting up as an eighteenth century sex toy manufacturer. In this role that he is employed by a wealthy asexual philanthropist to outdo a mechanical duck that defecates by engineering a mechanical lover which ejaculates. After many years of effort, Francois accepts defeat but, refusing to be beaten, the two plan a hoax which involves slight of hand, hidden compartments, and a dwarf with a huge penis.

Sadly, such escapades cannot last forever!, and soon Francois has been arrested and sent to the Bastille. There he is afforded privileged treatment, even so far as to be allowed out to roam the local streets. But the same cannot be said for one of his more famous inmates, the Marquis de Sade, who is undergoing a campaign of psychological warfare at the hands of an overzealous attendant. But de Sade will not be broken, and goes to extraordinary lengths to write. Since de Sade’s paper is rationed, and the output checked, he rips thin strips off the bottom of each sheet, upon which he scrawls in minute lettering the scandalous tales bursting from him. But the Marquis is not a strong enough character, in a novel of brash, interesting characters, he is too small and broken to live up to his reputation. The pot slows, it becomes a little disjointed. There is even time for a little joke: “Would you believe it, Jean-Jacques? The Marquis de Sade was your most devoted reader, and he deemed himself your best disciple.” Or perhaps this is Audeguy presenting his own conception of Rousseauist thought. For, come the end, when all else has happened, Francois concludes, “Today, I believe in Sade’s infinite gentleness, in his sadness, and I say that had we only read him, deeply and entirely read him, we might have taken the road that leads to the end of all fear.”

But history does not work backwards. And so behind the thick walls of the Bastille, the years drift away. Eventually, Francois smells Revolution upon the wind, and soon the Bastille has been stormed and he is thrust into what he terms the “strange theatre” of history. We are afforded a privileged viewpoint to see the disappointment of the ramshackle bunch of revolutionaries when they realise that the Bastille has no torture chambers. But, thankfully, their disappointment is assuaged when they find some bones in the basement and choose to see them as remnants of barbarism, rather than what they actually are: the remnants of lunch.

And so the revolution comes and for a while, the spirit of change wafts through the streets of Paris. Francois meets with an entrepreneur and together, they dismantle and sell the Bastille piece by piece, taking advantage of the sentimentality of those who wish to own a piece of history. But Francois is now and old man, and so he settles down once more, in another bordello where he shacks up with a strong, independent woman who is fighting the tides to defend feminist interests against the more forceful proponents of the revolution. In the end, she fails, and there is little left for Francois other than to wait out the end of his life.

So although this is a book with a serious amount of historical revisionism, it is also crammed full of exciting events. Perhaps too many. Occasionally the plot feels like it is being stretched beyond its means to suit the needs of history. Francois wastes some time in Dijon, in Paris, in the Bastille. Years appear to fall off him like water off a ducks back, and so, come the end he is a very old man, yet we have spent so little time with him that he remains young in our head. Where the plot stays still for a while and we are allowed to dwell in the sights and smells of life, The Only Son is engrossing, but too often decades are cast off with barely a paragraph, and this makes it difficult to stay engaged. The Only Son is just short of 250 pages, yet there is material enough for twice as much, and it is impossible to take the grand, picaresque tour which Audeguy attempts in such a short space of time. In its epic scope The Only Son reads like Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx, but in abbreviated form. It wants to be longer, but it is not. And this makes it a little unsatisfying.

Furthermore, sexuality litters the book, a cross between the anti-Confessions of Rousseau, and something outrageous by the Marquis de Sade. Readers easily frustrated by such French erotica will quickly become bored of the endless passages which seem only to present pre-revolutionary France as the capital of excessive, wealthy libertinism, just as history has viewed it.

However, it is also in the realms of history in which Audeguy is at his most successful. The Only Son is a fascinating account of the hidden history of the French Revolution, from the perspective of ordinary people. It would be difficult to find a book freer from political history. Louis XVI is never mentioned, Rebespierre makes but a very brief appearance, and otherwise, the higher echelons of society are thoroughly ignored. Instead we meet fictitious, recognisable, every day folk, who really bring the period to life. Having no more than a basic knowledge of the French Revolution, Audeguy has ignited my interest in this period: what more can you ask of quasi-historical fiction than this? In its original French language, it was even written in authentic eighteenth century language; it is such a shame that this is so completely lost in translation.

Francois portrays history as an accidental, stumbling process, full of lies, fabrications, and misconceptions. And this is no more so the case than with the Rousseauist legacy which is at its heart. The Only Son does not read as a critique of Rousseau, for it is far too jolly and irreverent for that, but, at its heart, it is this. Audeguy has a talent for hiding his messages under layers of plot, so for many readers, myself included, it is almost invisible. But there is really passionate vitriol at its heart. Audeguy shows no sympathy whatsoever for the disciples of Rousseau. The revolution is the result of a mass of Rousseauist wannabes who see themselves as unique and perfected, who charge through history like a bull in a china shop, without pause for thought. As Francois notes, “You thought yourself unique, and because you were, an army of your kind rose up to change the order of things.” There is no romanticising the revolutionaries here. And modern day Rousseauists escape no better.
“Rousseau … gains by a reading that is neither too literal nor too sentimental, above all now, with the theories of all these bleating runts, these unwitting Rousseauists, filling our TV screens, our bookshops and using so many gigabytes in the blogosphere; tiny people all convinced that they too are unique on the simple grounds that they are individuals.”

For such a light-hearted, erotically bizarre, and picaresque jaunt through history, there is startling passion running through The Only Son. Although it is not as ephemerally beguiling as The Theory of Clouds, it does confirm Stephane Audeguy as a major talent, and one who is worth listening to. He has that rare ability to entertain, even while critiquing, and to make one think freshly about things you never thought to question before. The Only Son is witty, fun, serious, and compelling. I’m already eagerly anticipating his third novel.

The Only Son - Stephane Audeguy

Something exciting happened to me today. A book I have been waiting months for, finally arrived! But first, a little backstory

Megan and I were in America visiting her family last year, when her step-mom gave us a $20 gift voucher for Barnes and Noble. Well, I hardly need tell you that we were excited. So off we went, eager to sample the local fare.

Barnes and Noble were running an interesting promotion along the lines of Waterstone's recent New Voices, a selection of debut authors with exciting potential. So I stopped by to have a read, and found a book which caught my eye. In every sense, The Theory of Clouds, seemed perfect for me: an ephemeral subject, sparse plot, beautiful sounding prose. The blurb on the back likened it to Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes as well. Eager and excited, I bought the book, unsure exactly what to expect.

Back in Norwich I started it in the bath one night. It was strange, seemingly one biography after another with a thin plot struggling to tie them all together. I had not read anything like it, and wasn't sure what to think. But soon I was engrossed and by the time I finished it, breathless and awe struck one quiet pre-Christmas afternoon at work, I knew I had found a book to love. I was stunned. But no-one I knew had read it, and I wasn't entirely sure of the quality of my taste. So I did something that I had never done before: I read it again. Immediately. And the second time it was even better. In my insanely long review I described it as "the book I have always wanted to read." And it was.

So I recommended it to some other bookshops, put a staff recommendation on it, and convinced my Dad to read it too. We sold 4 or 5 copies in the first 3 months (good going for hardback fiction in a our Campus bookshop) and my Dad loved it. A couple of months later, I even went as far as to encourage the New Writing Partnership to include the author, Stephane Audeguy, in their New Writing Worlds festival (I liked the idea of my favourite unknown author alongside J.M. Coetzee, one of my favourite all time authors). It was too late for him to be included, but hopefully next summer he will be here.

And ever since the day I finished it for the second time, I have been anxiously anticipating the English language release of Stephane Audeguy's second novel, The Only Son. It is a fictionalised biography of Rousseau's lost brother, Fancois, a man of whom next to nothing is known, besides a paragraph in Rousseau's Confessions. Having already won the Prix des Deux Magots in France, I was pretty excited.

And now we get to the significance. IT ARRIVED TODAY! I had just spent 10 minutes being trained in the new Sony Reader by someone who knew nothing about either books, or technology, and was feeling intrigued with the idea of an eBook reader. Then i was handed a small red book, and immediately I remembered exactly why I just don't think i would ever really use an eBook reader. The Only Son is a beautiful book to behold. It has a smooth, unfashionably simple jacket, is strangely short and broad. I have never had a hardback with crinkle cut pages, they are thick and corse to the touch. The typeface is wonderfully familiar from The Theory of Clouds, the smell deep and unknown. And instantly on being handed the book, I was filled with grand enthusiasm, drunk on the potential of these 246 pages, and the adventures to be had within them.

I have only read the first chapter, but so far, so good. When Andy Murray has finished his tennis this evening, I will eagerly devour some more. It is an oft stated, and commonly known fact, but books are utterly enthralling. The more you think you know them, the more they can surprise you. No matter how many I see each day, I am never able to get over that rush of Christmas mornining-esque excitement that I feel when i pick up a book and realise that I want to read it. No matter how much I moan about pay, I am privileged to be able to spend my time working with something I love, and to be charged with sharing this passion with people whenever they step into the shop.


On another note, Waterstone's has today launced another fantastic promotion, Philip Pullman's Writer's Table. I assure you that I am very far from a corporate hack, but credit must be given where credit is due. In the last year, Waterstone's has really made a move to be seen as celebrating great writing. They were becoming far too concerned with profit margins and business speak, so this change in focus has been a delight to witness. First there was Sebastian Faulks Writer's Table, then the fantastic What's Your Story competition (some of the entries, if you havn't read them, were absolutely fantastic), and now Philip Pullman has followed in Sebastian Faulks footprints.

To be given an inside view of Mr. Pullman's tasts is enthralling. Every day, I work with many different promotions, few of which focus on backlist titles, even fewer have a wider purpose than discounting popular book in order to sell more of them. So isn't it a joy to have a non discounted table of books, with a consistant theme throughout them all. Pullman's taste shines throughout, from the inevitable Richard Dawkins, to a whole selection of humourous novels and a couple of books on art and design. Already I have had two customers comment on how interesting it is, on the great variety of books, and how unknown some of hem are. Each comes complete with a little handwritten recommendation from Philip Pullman (one even has a tip-ex mark on it!) which says something about why he chose the book, what he likes about it, or why it should be read. Put together, they look completely unlike anything else in the shop, and offer that rare of things, substance over style.

So well done Waterstone's. You may do some things wrong, (from your absurd decision to remove National Book Tokens from visibility, to your ignoing of Aleksandar Hemon's fantastic new novel, The Lazarus Project) but in this, all praise to you. I think you have realised that big business has a profound place in supporting and celebrating literature, and that perhaps your best chance of long term sustainability is to create a reputation as a company who puts quality above quantity, and who works hard to ensure that books are at the heart of everything you do.

Goodnight people, Andy Murray has just won the first set, and I am eager to read another chapter or two before bed. I love fiction, I really do.