Books are like water
by Nicholas Royle
Publisher Berk Çetin of Thousand Horsemen Press sent me a copy of his new edition of Carlos María Domínguez’s short Spanish-language novel – or novella? – The Paper House, first published in the UK by Harvill Secker in 2005. He’d been prompted to do so by two coincidences, he said. Firstly, The Paper House references Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line and I have published a book called Shadow Lines. Secondly, the translator of The Paper House is also, like me, called Nicholas – Nicholas Caistor. Since I have had to get used to the idea of there being another writer called Nicholas Royle, it’s going to take more than the existence of another translator called Nicholas (I translated Vincent de Swarte’s novel Pharricide from the French) to get me going.
The Shadow-Line thing, however, did grab my attention. When I wrote Shadow Lines, I was aware of The Shadow Lines, a novel by Amitav Ghosh, but I somehow never came across Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, and even if I had, the difficulty I’d encountered wading upstream through The Heart of Darkness would have put me off finding a copy and attempting to read it. The Heart of Darkness is the longest 100-page book I’ve ever read and I’ve no desire to go anywhere near it or anything else by Conrad ever again. Definitely, for me, one of those cases where the film is better than the book, although only Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, not Nicolas Roeg’s Heart of Darkness, which stuck too closely to the spirit and the letter of the book and ended up being – unusually for Roeg – a bit of a slog.
As for The Paper House, the coincidences don’t stop at The Shadow-Line. In 1998, an academic called Bluma Lennon buys a second-hand copy of a poetry collection by Emily Dickinson in a bookshop in Soho. Were there any bookshops in Soho in 1998, I wonder, apart from, you know, that kind of bookshop? Maybe she bought it on Charing Cross Road and maybe an Argentine author can be forgiven for thinking that Charing Cross Road – the side of it the second-hand bookshops were on – and one or two do still remain there – is in Soho. But the important thing is that Bluma reads as she walks, which I do too, and gets run over, which I don’t – or haven’t yet.
Another coincidence, which Çetin would probably not have been aware of: the cover of Domínguez’s book is designed by Jon Gray – @gray.318 on Instagram – who in 2000 created the brilliant cover of the first edition of my novel The Director’s Cut.
The narrator of the novella – and I do think it is a novella and not just because it’s short (around 80 pages), but because of its limited focus, point of view and cast of characters – is a colleague of Bluma’s at Cambridge University. In the wake of her fatal accident, he accepts a delivery in her name. The package, posted in Uruguay, contains a second-hand book – Conrad’s The Shadow-Line – covered in cement particles and dedicated by Bluma to ‘Carlos’. A little detective work provides the narrator with a second name – ‘Brauer’ – and come the summer vacation he packs The Shadow-Line and brings forward his annual trip back home to see his mother in Argentina (to neutralise any hostility and get in the mood, think of Borges and Márquez rather than the national football team’s behaviour in the 2026 World Cup) and sets about trying to track down Carlos Brauer. His motivation is to uncover the real story behind an intriguing dedication in a second-hand book.
Sometimes you feel a book was written just for you. My books Shadow Lines and Finders, Keepers explore similar impulses.
The narrator’s search takes him to a second-hand bookshop, to the library of a dedicated bibliophile and finally to a tumbledown shack on a narrow spit of land on the Uruguayan coast. It’s a short book that casts a long shadow and is fascinating on the psychology of collecting, in particular extreme bibliophilia and its attendant problems, from infestations of silverfish to anxieties around shelving and categorization, not forgetting the inevitable tension between limitations of space and numbers of books.
Books are like water; they expand to fill the space available – and then keep on coming.
I read The Paper House in a couple of hours while walking from east London to Euston station and then from Stockport station to south Manchester. As I crossed the bottom of a quiet residential street in Heaton Mersey, a young couple came by in the opposite direction. ‘That’s really dangerous that,’ the young man said. ‘Imagine you get run over while reading a book.’
Nicholas Royle is the author of White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector, Shadow Lines: The Search For the Book Beyond the Shelf and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books. His latest collection of short stories is Paris Fantastique (Confingo Publishing). The Paper House (Thousand Horsemen Press) by Carlos María Domínguez is out now.
