The Book - I suspect very few readers of this review are not avid lovers of books. Yet with all the many volumes you have come across, how many feature an actual book as first-person narrator? If you are like me, the answer is immediately obvious: absolutely zero. Thus I was instantly captivated when I read author Zoran Živković's opening sentence:"It isn't easy being a book."
Marvelous. Time to grab some coffee, sit back in my reading chair, position my footstool, put my feet up and settle in, time to enjoy an entire novel where a book will share her plight at the hands of humans. Oh, yes, the book is a she - more on this below.
First off, she informs us that books can do without humans but how about the reverse: can humans do without books? No! No! No! It would be nearly impossible to envision human history without the aid of writing and books. And what would our human memory amount to in the absence of books? Gulp. One shudders to think.
Right up front, our bookish first-person narrator also lets us know a book is most definitely a she rather than a he - after all, in many languages, the word “book” is of the female gender. And for good reason: that’s exactly how a book is treated. “So our place in the scheme of things was fixed from the outset in their male-dominated world. We were the equivalent of females in their society – not, as is well known, a very enviable position.”
As she goes on to relate, books have never been very well treated by humans, mostly by men (reading for many years was primarily a male activity) - men holding us, pawing us and even inserting their grimy fingers deep into us. And that's just for starters. There's such disgusting habits as licking our pages, folding down the corners of our pages and ripping and tearing out our pages. As if books had no feelings at all. Ha! Other readers can's stop underlining passages, writing in the margins, scribbling or drawing anytime they spot a blank page. Not to mention those historic eras where some men, the power players, ordered us books to be burned en masse. Is there any doubt that reading and the various ways humans handle books have only brought us harm?
She moves a step back in the business of books to detail how her sisters spend their lives prior to being turned over to a new owner - all for a price, of course. The poor dears are confined to bookshops that are no better than slave markets. After they are initially placed on display in the front window it’s a quick switch to the bottom shelf and put on sale or discounted or even worse, if her time in the bookshop continues too long, labeled a remaindered book.
Of course, there are those instances when a book might be judged a collector’s item, at which point she is carried away like some Cinderella to receive special placement by her Prince. But such books are rare; much more common is the ultimate fate of being lined up with other cheep commodities in outdoor stalls, thrift shops, bargain basements or carts on wheels.
Our poor narrator then takes yet another step back to focus on a prime culprit in the mistreatment of books: the world of publishing. “While humans need a midwife only at the moment of birth, books demand comparable assistance throughout the entire pregnancy. A single midwife, moreover, is not enough. For a book to be born, a whole team of midwives is required, each with their own responsibility: editor, copy-editor, technical editor, typist, proofreader, printer, binder.”
Now, as she assures us, the aforementioned publishing process takes a good amount of time and energy and money. Big emphasis on money. Is it any wonder publishing houses do a back flip when they receive a manuscript that's not one of those complex, sophisticated pieces of “literature” but more along the lines of a best-selling romance or fantasy or mystery or spy novel; in other words, a good old-fashioned work of genre fiction? “Genres are God’s gift to editors, who have better things to do than read swathes of redundant prose.”
As a sort of grand finale, The Book hones in to take a look at an actual case study. Oh, happy day for a major publisher - they're on the cusp of publishing what just might be a huge moneymaker. To alert the media, the book world and the general reading public, the publisher schedules a book launch. Nothing like an event with sizzle and razzmatazz to prime the pump for those all important sales numbers.
And here we are at The Launch. Hundreds of people crowd around the star of the show, a skinny guy, author of The Rotten Ghost of the Monastery (a title chosen by the publisher's marketing department). But then the unexpected happens: the Director of the publishing house clears the way for a computer geek to work his magic at one of the company computers. A hush falls on the crowd. When the geek is done, the Director grabs the final product and waves it over his head and proclaims he is in possession of something that will change the world of the book forever.
Any guesses as to what the Director is holding?
In addition to being both fun and funny, The Book is one of the most charming novels I've come across, a book I recommend highly to my fellow booklovers.
Serbian author Zoran Živković, born 1948
"Let's take, as a for instance, those men who don't start snoring after a page or two. Those who don't stop reading until they finish the last page. The cover-to-cover people. Tireless. Once they get hold of us, a frenzy of passion seizes them, blinds them. The more they read, the more insatiable they are. They can never have enough. True literary erotomaniacs." - Zoran Živković, The Book
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