This had been going on for several years: I was losing control of my personal library. There comes a confusing moment in the life of a reader, when you realize that your library is full, that not a single book will be able to find its place there. Some get by temporarily by stringing two rows of paperback books into the depths of the shelves; others stack them horizontally hoping that they will hold…
I had my strategies for decluttering it. They did not bear fruit, but at least allowed me to prolong the denial for a few years: when I lent a novel, I strongly suggested that it not be returned to me; all over the house, I erected pretty little towers of books.
But one day my library started to stink. A smell of dead wood and ancient knowledge began to mushroom. I had watered a plant, the water had flowed, and soaked the pages of certain books… Today, I can tell you that it was the French section that suffered. The winter trip by Amélie Nothomb, King Kong theory by Virginie Despentes, The sex life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet and 99 francs de Beigbeder: they were the ones schlinging.
This story which begins – and will be divided into three chronicles -, I reassure you, it ends well. Today, my books have moved and are continuing their life in their new home. Recently, I fulfilled a reader’s fantasy: I had a wall bookcase built in my small writing office. A madness triggered by two events.
In recent years, heat pump pipes, very ugly and very visible, have spoiled an entire section of wall, crawling like moray eels around the books, going around the corner to stop at the top of the door. In all the Teams, Zoom and other virtual meetings, we only saw them, intertwined, exposing their ugliness in broad daylight. Then, last fall, this unexpected gift: one of my books won a Governor General’s Literary Award (GG), and that came with a major grant.
What does a writer do with such a gift? I asked all the GG winners with this question last week in Ottawa, where the cohorts of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, for the seven award categories, in English and French, were gathered for the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall. Responses from the main stakeholders: three quarters pay debts. A good number of them invest the amount, pay their taxes, their mortgage. Flat things that help you breathe better. Some people buy a car to replace a jalopy. A generous playwright donated his scholarship to an organization that needed it more than he did. A poet buys plane tickets to visit her lover in France a little more often than expected. In his correspondence, Jacques Ferron says that he bought his daughter a horse with his purse. Some refuse the amount and make a big show of it. I reinvested part of this grant, received for one of my books… in the room where I write them.
A carpenter came to the house to take measurements and draw plans that would correspond to the exact dimensions of the content: a good 80% of regular or pocket novels, a few large formats (comics, beautiful books and children’s albums), a space to slide in my favorite vinyls and, at the top, integrated boxes for storage (and to encage the moray eels).
The process was quite long, but when the last shelf was installed, the carpenter beckoned me to come:
— Instead of a last shelf of books, I would leave this space open to put… something beautiful, pleasing to the eye. The decision is yours.
– Like what for example ? What would be beautiful to you in this place?
We stood in the dust and the smell of wood glue, standing in front of a white square, doubtful.
— Perhaps a work that I would have made with my hands.
I imagined, in his head, a very beautiful wooden sculpture, say a large bird, or an abstract canvas, in rich, pigmented colors. All I can do with my hands is type on a keyboard to transform stories into books… We didn’t come from the same planet, we didn’t sculpt ideas in the same way.
“OK,” I said, “so let’s not install the latest tablet and I’ll think of something beautiful that could live in this space.”
The day arrived when the library was ready to receive the books that had been sitting in boxes in the basement, but something unexpected also happened. In front of these wonderful shelves open and ready to be occupied, I froze.
Where to start ? How to classify books? Like before ? By families of influences, corpus of editorials or national? Bring together author friends? Bring the novels together by their dimensions and colors, deploy a whole range of whites, ranging from broken to waxy? There were works in the lot that I no longer wanted to own or host: the #MeToo ones, others that had less stood the test of time and, unfortunately, those that stank.
I started by collecting all my Anne Héberts in a department, and I slipped The big book of words, by Richard Scarry, at the top in the cube reserved for large formats. In the space reserved for beautiful things, my cat Moka has made herself comfortable. And then, nothing. Faced with the dream come true, I was paralyzed, completely stunned by the possibilities that were offered and the void that was opening up.
Visits to the library of the Académie française in Paris and Library and Archives Canada in Gatineau would give me the key to organizing the chaos.