I counted American books in French bookstores - a study, with methodology and results and so on

Now, something about the French reading Americans, rather than me reading the French.

In July, I counted the titles by American fiction writers on the shelves at a French bookstore.  I even made a few notes, although most of what I include here is from memory.

The exercise was just to count the number of titles.  Prestige as measured by the proxy of shelf space.  Likely also sales, but who knows.  These are for-profit bookstores.  I doubt they have much on the shelf just for show.  They want to sell books.  They know their readers.

So, which American authors had the most titles on the shelves of a particular French bookstore in July?  There was a tie, two authors with 21 titles each.  You can guess while reviewing my methodology.

The bookstore I studied carefully was Librairie Passages, an exemplar of the mainstream bookstore.  I checked my results, pretty casually, at Le Bal des Ardents, Lyon’s most picturesque bookstore (see left), and the Decitre at the mall, which is the closest bookstore to the main public library.  The library is almost in the mall.  French life is well organized.

Le Bal des Ardents is weirder than Passages, with more tiny presses and oddities.  It is more highbrow, with, for example, the Complete Works of Antonin Artaud in 26 volumes on the shelf – who is buying this?  Decitre is populist – mall bookstore – but local, a branch of a century-old Lyon institution.

My American control is Prairie Lights in Iowa City, the best bookstore for hundreds of miles in any direction, which I visited in August.  It is not a typical bookstore, since Iowa City is the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a UNESCO City of Literature.  All of these bookstores are roughly the same size, I think.

The non-American winner – I was not even counting non-Americans, but he stood out – was Stefan Zweig, who had 50 books (not titles, too many books to check for duplicates) on the shelf at Passages.  50 books!  Stefan Zweig!  Prairie Lights had one book, maybe.

The American winners at Passages were Philip Roth and Jack London.   Roth I had guessed myself.  But London!  London has a much higher status in France than in the U.S. Prairie Lights had a dozen or more Roth titles out, but just two by London, among the “adult” books, I mean, The Call of the Wild and I don’t remember.  Maybe there were more downstairs with the kid’s books.

The runners-up, all in the 10-to-12 title range:  Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Jim Harrison.  Living writers in the same range: Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison (alive then), Don DeLillo, Paul Auster.  I may have missed some of these.  I would have thought that Poe would be out of the running by this counting measure, but his works are rearranged into enough editions that he was close.

I did not jot down the numbers, but at Le Bal des Ardents, the winner (with fewer than 20 titles) was easily Faulkner, and second, including Russian works, was Vladimir Nabokov, who only had a few books at Passages.

Prairie Lights was generally similar.  Big differences, besides London: just three books by Joyce Carol Oates, and two or three by Kerouac.  I was surprised that it had as many Jim Harrison titles.  Maybe an artifact of the special qualities of that store.

Harrison mentions, several times, in the essays in A Really Big Lunch (2017), that his popularity at some point moved to France:

Luckily my books do very well in France…  The French saved my little family for which I’ll always be grateful.  I had many bestsellers over there but never in America.  (p. 265)

I remember Roth somewhere describing the same phenomenon (substituting Europe for France – German readers buy a lot of Roth).  It has struck me that French readers, or some of them, a lot of them, are interested in outsized American masculinity, thus the relatively high status of London, Hemingway, Kerouac, Harrison, and also noir detective novels and maybe even Oates.

Or maybe they like Harrison because of his many passages like this:

I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I’d get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhône.  (164)

A kindred spirit.  Classic Lyon cuisine is not the healthiest food in France.

At the mall bookstore, the Americans with the most titles were, maybe – I did not keep exact track – Stephen King and George R. R. Martin and Mary Higgins Clark, like that.  Actually, it was probably a comic book writer, Geoff Johns or Stan Lee.  This was not true at Passages (I checked).  Donna Leon was up there, but nowhere near 21 books.

Anyway, something a little bit more concrete to go with all of the other impressions I have picked up.  How do other people think about literature, that is the endlessly interesting question.

Animals were so clearly just themselves - wandering in the woods with Jim Harrison's Farmer

Kevin, at Interpolations, suggested folks read Jim Harrison’s Farmer (1976), so I did.  I’d never read him before.  The short novel makes a nice companion piece to Jean Thompson’s Iowa novel The Year We Left Home – Harrison’s Michigan novel could be re-titled The Year I Stayed Home.  Actually, in the first chapter, we see that our hero Joseph has, in fact, left home, or at least gone on vacation for the first time in his life, so never mind.  The Year I Left Home works for this novel, too.  Joseph just has to work out a few minor issues before he can leave home.  Death, love, vocation, that sort of thing.

Joseph spends a lot of time wandering in the woods, hunting and fishing and looking around.  I would have been happy if the novel had been nothing but, like a book-length version of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Fisted River.”  Just one of these after another:

One afternoon he had been lucky enough to see a Cooper’s hawk swoop down through the trees and kill a blue-winged teal.  The other ducks escaped in a wild flock circling the pond twice while the Cooper’s hawk stood shrouding its prey with its wings.  Joseph watched it feed on the teal’s breast then fly off to a large dead oak to preen.  It was far too spectacular to be disturbing.  (15)

A water snake swam passed the boat; the doctor poked at it with the tip of his flyrod and the startled snake turned and hissed.  Then it continued on its way, leaving an S-shaped miniature wake in the water.  (102)

Man in nature – the “man” part is what makes it literature.  Harrison’s novel is about Robert Louis Stevenson’s “ennobled lemurs,” a more humanistic investigation of human animalism than Zola’s Thérèse Raquin:

Animals were so clearly just themselves, much more so than humans.  He liked the idea that man was the only mammal that thought of himself as part of a species.  (42)

The best ideas in the novel are about Joseph, or Harrison, investigating the relationship between his animal self and his “ennobled” self, how a sexual affair with a student* relates to his love of Keats and Whitman, or why he will hunt grouse (“splendid dinners wandering around in the forest waiting to be gathered and eaten”) but not woodcock or deer.  What strange animals we are.

I guess Hemingway never wrote a story called “The Big Two-Fisted River,” but he should have.  Someone should.  I am thinking of the one he did write, with the similar name.  “Hearted,” not “Fisted.”

*  Poking around, I have of course come across comparisons of Farmer with Lolita, reminding me of how utterly, shamefully ignorant many people are about Nabokov’s novel.