A Very Special Year Read Free Page A

shop yesterday? Yes, she had. Taking a closer look, she noticed that a section of the shop, in fact the section furthest from the door (which didn’t mean very much in such asmall shop) was stocked with second-hand books. To be more accurate, many of them must have been third or fourth hand. Here were many tomes bound in leather with gold-embossed spines, some faded from years in the light, many well-thumbed. But all the volumes that Aunt Charlotte had collected in these two bookcases had quite clearly been handled with great care. Valerie picked out a book, which looked as if it must have been rebound at some point, and opened it – it looked like a collection of poems, but was in fact a novel:
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    You’re about to read Italo Calvino’s latest novel
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.
Relax. Compose yourself
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Put every other thought aside. Let your surroundings blur into an indistinct haze. Better close the door; the television’s always on in there. Tell the others right away, ‘No, I don’t want to watch telly!’ Raise your voice or they won’t hear you say, ‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’ Maybe they haven’t heard you, what with all that noise. Better say it even louder, shout out, ‘I’m about to startItalo Calvino’s new novel!’ Or don’t say it if you don’t want to. Hopefully they’ll leave you in peace
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    Valerie couldn’t help smiling. She’d never come across an opening to a book like this.
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    Find the most comfortable position: sitting, stretched out, huddled or lying down. On your back, on your side, on your tummy. In an armchair, on the sofa, on the rocking chair…
    Admittedly, it did all seem like a load of nonsense – a highly dubious exercise in silliness – but it was fun to read the ever-surprising and confusing twists and turns in the stories, from which a quite unusual novel emerged, navigating Valerie through eras and lands like a runaway literary carrousel, shunning convention and conspiring cheekily with the reader on every page.
    And so our protagonist found herself in the elderly bookseller’s armchair once more, after hours of enjoyable reading, while the samovar boiled incessantly beside her, at the very least giving off a pleasant warmth. She hadn’t drunk anything – she hadn’t evenpoured a cup – but she didn’t care. On the contrary, she discovered how good it felt to read a story purely for its own sake. And to her complete amazement she realized she enjoyed following this peculiar author through the amusing labyrinth of his finely crafted tales. It was something she hadn’t done since her schooldays, when she’d regarded reading as a particularly laborious form of mental torture. Now at a distance, she recalled all the bizarre things she’d had to learn: chiasmus and tropes, pleonasm, metaphor, ellipsis and all manner of other conceptual fog, behind which access to the written word was supposedly hidden. But this was certainly not the case with these stories. No, the more she thought in the writer’s playful language, and the more intricately she became entangled in Italo Calvino’s fascinating plot twists, the more fun she had, the more her curiosity grew.
    Or, to put it in Calvino’s words,
If you really think about it, I’m sure you’d find it preferable to have something in front of you and not know exactly what it is
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    One must imagine Ringelnatz & Co. to be a totally uncompetitive business by today’s standards. Too little space. Only in exceptional cases could such a tiny shop be profitable – perhaps if it sold high-end goods such as jewellery and expensive watches, or exquisitecosmetics – and that’s assuming a steady clientele that ages prosperously. But a bookshop will find it difficult to defy the dictates of the market. And even if we were to consider ourselves amongst the