The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury

I will begin by saying that some reviews have not been especially kind to The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, but I loved it. Originally written in French [La Fille Qui Lisait dans le Métro] and translated by Ros Schwartz, it’s about a young woman, Juliette, who lives in Paris, hates her job as a realtor, but loves commuting on the Métro where she has the opportunity to read and to observe what her fellow commuters are reading. One day, she hops off the Métro at a different stop and wanders around for a while. She meets Soliman, the owner of a bookstore, who believes books have the power to change lives. He gives Juliette a job as a passeur—someone who match-makes people with second-hand books. I will end my summary here because there is a rather long quote I want to include. I think it captures the charm of this book perfectly. In the scene from which the quote is taken, Juliette and her new friend Leonidas are looking for a clue to help them figure out how Soliman is organizing the books in his shop. Leonidas comments on possible guiding principles.

“You see,” said Leonidas, “the classification of books has a history that is at least as interesting as that of the books themselves. I once knew a man…”
Changing his mind, he went on: “Perhaps I didn’t really know him. Let’s say I read a book in which he was the main character—but that’s a good way of getting to know people, isn’t it? Perhaps the best. Well, this man avoided putting on the same shelf two books whose authors didn’t get on, even after their deaths…Did you know that for having criticized Cicero, Erasmus was sentenced by a Verona judge to pay one hundred crowns to the poor? Shakespeare and Marlowe both accused the other of plagiarism; Louis-Ferdinand Céline called Sartre a ‘little shit-crammed piece of filth’; Jules Vallès considered Baudelaire a blusterer. As for Flaubert, he was a master of damning with faint praise: ‘What a man Balzac would have been, had he known how to write!’ Writing has never prevented people from being jealous, petty, or bitchy. Excuse me; I’m not usually so crude, but there’s no other word for it.”
Juliette shot him a sidelong glance and began to laugh. This man made her feel better. A benevolent scholar, a sort of uncle like you find in old novels, the kind who sit you on their knee and let you play with the charms on their watch chain when you’re little and later give you an alibi when you stay out all night. She wished she could have met him sooner.
He talked about books as if they were living creatures—old friends, occasionally fearsome adversaries, some resembling bolshie adolescents and others elderly ladies working at their needlepoint by the fireside. According to him, bookcases housed grouchy scholars and lovelorn women, wild furies, would-be killers, skinny boys made of paper holding out their hands to delicate girls whose beauty disintegrated as the words to describe it changed. Some books were frisky horses, not yet broken in, that whisked you off on a mad gallop, breathless, clinging to their manes. Others, boats drifting peacefully on a lake under a full moon. Other still, prisons.
He spoke to her of his favorite authors, of Schiller who never wrote without having put rotten apples in his desk drawer to force himself to work faster, and plunged his feet into a basin of iced water to keep himself awake at night; of Marcel Pagnol, so passionate about mechanics that he patented a nut and bolt that couldn’t be undone; of Gabriel García Márquez, who to survive while he was writing ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ sold his car, his heater, his blender, and his hair-dryer; grammatical errors in Apollinaire, Balzac, Zola, and Rimbaud, errors which he happily forgave them and even noted with a certain relish. [pp. 91-92]

Note. Print edition includes a Suggested Reading List.

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