The girl who reads on the Metro by Christine Feret-Fleury
Translated from French by Ros Schwartz. Mantle, 2019. ISBN: 9781509868339.
(Age: 16+) Highly recommended. Travelling on the Paris Metro to work
in a real estate office, Juliette had often passed her time covertly
making out the book titles or the page being perused by fellow
commuters, and wondered about the lives of the readers and their
book choices. In a spontaneous variation to her route one day, an
encounter with a sprite of a girl, Zaide, leads her to the strange
dusty world of a bookshop, 'Books Unlimited', and its mysterious
owner Soliman, who dispenses books to 'passeurs' - not the agents of
the secret French resistance WWII escape routes, but people who pass
on books to the person most in need of them. Soliman tells Juliette
about Hornbaker's concept of BookCrossing, releasing books into the
wild, leaving books in public places for people to find; only
Soliman wants his passeurs to give the right book to the right
reader. It reminded me of Ranganathan's laws of library science:
every person his or her book; and, every book its reader. Juliette
had been studying readers on the Metro for a long time but the idea
of matching the right book to the right reader seems overwhelming to
her. But somehow she seems to have the knack . . .
The novel is set in the modern world of stressed work lives and
mobile phones, but the story invokes the quirkiness of past French
films, and I could just see Amelie star Audrey Tatou in the
role of Juliette, a person of lightness and grace, caught in the
humdrum of daily life, and bringing a spark to her encounters with a
variety of unusual people: the man in the green hat with his insect
book, the sad woman with Italian recipes, the pretty young woman
tearfully reading page 247 of the romance novel.
However Juliette has always led a sheltered life, never going
further than the few Metro stops to her work, her only adventures
those in the books she's read. When she enters into the bookshop
with its teetering piles of books, and then is suddenly asked to
take care of it all, the task seems overwhelming. But the friends
she has come to know help her to inevitably take courage and find
her true vocation.
This is definitely a book for book lovers; there are many references
to treasures of literature, both classical and modern. At the end
there is a list of amazing books. Readers will be familiar with
many, but are invited to also add their own favourites, books they
would "recommend to a friend - or to your worst enemy, so they will
no longer be so, if the magic works".
Helen Eddy