Writer and committed citizen, the author has taught literature at college, is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-directed and co-wrote the collective essay Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
“Amazon does not deserve the beauty of volcanoes. This magnificent sentence is not mine. It’s that of my new neighborhood bookseller, Léo Loisel. With his associates Olivia Sofia and Frédérique St-Julien, he manages the Un livre à soi bookstore, which recently opened in a Petit Laurier that needed it.
I waited, feverishly, for the independent bookstore to open its doors, following the progress of its installation on social networks, where “Léo le libraire” sometimes revealed the freshly oiled floor or the majestic gold-coloured embossed ceiling, sometimes the elegantly curving counter, the shelves or the cases of books freshly received. Just before opening, late on a scorching May evening, I spied the daylight left by the kraft paper stuck to the windows.
Two people were busy, ants among the books. The work that remained to be done seemed colossal to me, and I wanted to knock to offer my help, but the fear of imposing myself prevailed. I’m probably not the only one to have curbed my desire to help this trio who would finally bring books to the neighborhood. At the time, I was afraid of jostling them with this gesture, which would have trumpeted “you are at home here, thank you for having chosen us”. Now I tell myself that I should have.
“There was a surge of solidarity, tells me Léo, whom I meet at the Byblos café, a few doors down from the bookstore. Very quickly, people confirmed to us everything we wanted to provoke. Are social acceptability studies superfluous when caring for others is part of the house’s values?
“For me, it was super important to be as close as possible to my environment. I believe the neighborhood belongs to its people. Sometimes, traders arrive from outside the neighborhood, do not take the pulse before settling. That’s not the case this time around, I can personally attest to that. Nothing creaks. In fact, the symbiosis is so perfect that Un livre à soi deserves to appear in a dictionary next to the entry “neighbourhood bookstore.” »
The bookstore is political
The more I talk to Leo, the more his repeated poetic calls to boycott Amazon resonate; a leitmotif that he matches with “kisses” to end his Instagram posts. The Quebec book industry is a fragile ecosystem, in which many players are struggling to stay upright… The association of the American behemoth with the Literary Prize for College Students had also created a major shock wave in 2018… And, we forget it too much often, the Goodreads platform serves much more to feed the machine of the multibillionaire than to really do useful work with its users.
Where a megalomaniac gets rich, the bookstore gives back to his community. Where a giant robotizes its employees, tight-knit associates work for their neighborhood. Where Amazon destroys (local shops, lives overworked by productivity at all notches, social justice…), Un livre à soi unites. “We are here first and foremost to create links,” confides Léo, for whom opening an independent bookshop was a political gesture. He first posed it for the neighborhood.
And this commitment shines through everywhere: in the spacious places, thought out as a scenography so that all body types feel good there, as in the books, whose selection emphasizes postcolonial, indigenous, feminist, intersectional writings .
Like the books on its shelves, Un livre à soi welcomes the other in all that he is, never trying to swallow it. Artistic performances, discussions, launches, guests going beyond the field of literature: the benevolence of the trio spreads through the neighborhood – light years away from a Jeff Bezos who, at first a “simple” online bookseller, is now trying to colonize the in space rocket.
Know how to read people
As refined as it is, Amazon’s algorithm loses out to the fundamentally human profession of bookseller. “It’s still a calculation. The algorithm can intellectualize, but it cannot know your state of mind or the state of your heart when you buy your book. It does not take into account the psychological or mental state of the person or the weather. »
One day, a customer with an ordinarily cheerful step walked into Un livre à soi. Overwhelmed by sadness, his body commanded a completely different reading than his usual choices. The empathetic bookseller decoded it. The wife left with a book on mourning, to help her do her husband’s. It was this very recent ordeal that hunched his shoulders. They kept in touch.
Leo tells me that he finds it essential to “read the play”; I think he reads people. After two hours of conversation, my first impressions of the bookstore took root more deeply. I know that I will always be welcome to enter it with a soft heart, one of those days when the being cracks for no precise reason. I will then come out with a Sophie Calle in my bag and the words of my booksellers-photographers-dancers around my neck. I know that in front of their welcome, our discussion around books, life, the life of books (or in front of, perhaps, our heard silences), my knots will be gently untied.
Finally, I know where I will buy a Quebec book today and, also, that my booksellers certainly deserve the beauty of volcanoes — and the love and support of an entire neighborhood. No doubt yours too.