Jumping Le Shark

One of life’s small pleasures can be had by spending time in a good French-language bookstore. Banished are the scented candles, the tchotchkes, the tables groaning with self-help manuals, the blurb-spattered covers, the weird gothic-romance lettering, the garish, the loud, the overeager.

In their place, a certain quiet sobriety. Francophone booksellers often stock their shelves by collections. Not very user-friendly, but pleasing to the eye. Thus there are books identical in format, often in subdued colors and graphically austere, grouped together on floor-to-ceiling shelving, and the visitor passes chromatically from Flon to Flammarion, Actes Sud to Balland, 10/18 to Hachette.

One of the most familiar sights is Gallimard’s Folio collection (If you ever took a French lit course in college, you have at least one of these). Simple white paperbacks, with a reproduced artwork on the front, and a short paragraph excerpt from the book on the back, the Folio collection covers the last two hundred years of fiction, in a reassuring, no-nonsense, canonical way. There is no Oprah book club endorsement, no log-rolling blurb by a friend of the author, no breathless suggestion about perfect beach reading or ideal Christmas gifts. Just the text.

Recently I was drawn to the Folio wall in Ottawa’s excellent Librairie du Soleil. A fine expanse of white, with hundreds of titles and authors running from bottom to top (French publishing convention holds, illogically, that the words on a book spine have to be read from the bottom up). In the wall of white, a few books were turned, cover out, to attract attention.

One such was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; in French, Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent.

And then one of life’s small pleasures just got smaller.

The cover showed the name and title above a Romantic painting. But the art had been obliterated half-way down by a garish yellow rectangle – not a paper banner wrapped around the book, but printed directly over the illustration. And what did it say?

Le roman préféré de Bella et d’Edward.

That is: “Bella’s and Edward’s favorite novel."

Twilight, indeed.