Love letter to a bookshelf : NYC
Ever been tempted to buy an entire bookshelf? No, I don’t mean the furniture.
I mean a bookshelf-full of books.
I mean, spotting a glass storefront decorated by latest hardbacks, you step into a bookstore — the iconic McNally Jackson Books in the chic Manhattan neighbourhood, Nolita, with minimalist white acrylic surfaces, burnished aluminium signages, and light-grained honey-coloured wooden shelfs — and navigating around the centre stage pile of bestsellers of new releases, picking-dropping books with small review-blurbs from employees, glancing to your left at the steady murmur and gushes of steam from the coffee shop serving espressos and cortados, and at the diaries section across it displaying fifty dollar Japanese journals for you to pen precious thoughts; you are about to leave, when you chance upon a bookshelf, lonely as a cloud, mounted on a blue passageway wall in the back of the store.
You pause. You turn around and amble towards it. You browse through one book, then two, and before you know it is store-closing time. You wonder if you can buy this entire shelf of books. If you could, would they throw in the furniture for free?
The shelf is labelled AFRICAN, ASIAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE. Its multi-hued book jackets — red, yellow, brown, black, orange, blue, green, ochre — stand out like an arc of a rainbow piercing the grey, foggy sky. The shelf is divided into further subsections: Korean & Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, South-East Asian, South & Central Asian, Sub-Saharan African, Middle-Eastern & North African. The symbolism doesn’t escape you. The rest of the world’s literature neatly divided into small racks and relegated to a nondescript shelf at the back. Notwithstanding that, for someone like you, actively pursuing a non-white, non-Western authors to read, this shelf is heaven-sent.
Of course, the usual suspects, the giants of world literature, populate their respective regional shelves: Murakami, Tanizaki in the Japanese section. Su Tong, Gao Xingjian in Chinese, Han Kang in Korean. Vikram Seth, Tagore in South & Central Asia. Chinua Achebe, Coetze in Sub-Saharan Africa. Orhan Pamuk, Elie Shafak in Turkey, Naguib Mahfouz and Laila Lalami in Middle Eastern & North African. But for each author in each section that you have read, there are ten new ones waiting to be discovered. In short, you have struck gold.
The validation of the fantastic curation in this bookshelf keeps coming. You spot, Basti, a rare gem of South-Asian literature, Seasons of Migrations to the North is resting in the African section, The Time Regulation Institute is holding fort in the Middle-Eastern section. The last two are your all-time favourites. Furthermore, you discover celebrated authors from countries whose authors haven’t yet crossed your life — Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines, Lebanon, Iran.
And Iraq. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the most significant event of your adult life. It indelibly marked your worldview. But you never found good fiction about this war, this catastrophe (no, you did not want to read any of the dozens of books on this topic written by Americans). And here, in this bookshelf you find two. Two. Both written by Iraqi emigres. One of them, The Corpse Exhibition and other stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim, is the greatest short story collection (since Kafka) that you have ever read.
The book cover is matte black. Its title is carved on the front in glossy black, and also printed in small white letters. On the back cover and in the first two pages, reviewers from twenty different magazines sing its praise. “Surreal and mind-blowing and completely necessary.” — The Wall Street Journal. It is quite an eureka moment. How did you miss this book all your life?
You google. You, finding this book to be 11th on a best of the decade list (2010–2020), you read some other books that made the top 10. But they are disappointing in comparison. You always knew the best books are discovered at a bookstore. Not online, and certainly not one of those robotic recommendation algorithms. In a past life, you used to write those algorithms.
At any rate, buying the entire shelf is impossible. You don’t live in NYC. You wish you did. Exercising a great deal of self control, like a stoic, you buy only three books. And before your days in NYC come to a close, you revisit the store, you photograph every inch of the bookshelf — like a lover etching into his heart every little detail of his paramour before the tearful final goodbye. The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blues come to mind — “We’ll meet again someday on the avenue.”
You now live halfway across the earth from that bookstore, but the shelf lives in your pocket. Every time you need a book, you peruse that shelf on your phone, you google a book that catches your interest, you click “Buy now”. You think — someday, perhaps years from now, you will book-by-book own that shelf (or some Borgesian version of it).
But, today, here, now that possibility seems farfetched. Stuck at home, quarantined amidst a raging pandemic, your annual pilgrimage to NYC is cancelled, and even the option of buying books denied, all you can do is reminisce, all you can do is wait; all that is left to do is write an ode to that bookshelf, and pray that, it and the entire world of people that it represents somehow make it to the other side; hopefully, without too many scars.
