THE PARIS BOOKSELLER opens in 1917, as World War I ends and Paris is alive as a thriving center for culture and modernity. With new ideas rapidly taking the post-war world by storm, Sylvia Beach moves to Paris and opens the doors to her new English-language bookshop with the help of fellow writer and bookseller Adrienne Monnier. What starts as a partnership and friendship with Adrienne soon blossoms into a romance, and the women work together to create a haven for English writers and readers.
Sylvia quickly falls in love with James Joyce’s prose, especially his unpublished manuscript, Ulysses. When the contentious novel is banned in the United States for its obscenity, Sylvia takes a massive financial and personal risk, deciding to publish it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company. She quickly realizes that the success and notoriety of publishing the most influential book of the century comes with steep costs. While many patrons applaud her efforts, some believe she has marred the integrity of Shakespeare and Company as she remains staunchly loyal to Joyce. Even worse, the future of her beloved store is threatened and her most enduring friendships are put to the test when Ulysses’ success leads to Joyce being wooed by other publishers. Now on the cusp of World War II and facing financial ruin, Sylvia must decide how far she will go to keep Shakespeare and Company alive.
Maher not only captures the life of a brave and inspiring bookseller, but also transports readers to the electric cultural atmosphere of Paris in the early 20th century. Sylvia’s romantic relationship with Adrienne Monnier is exquisitely rendered, and offers an insightful look into what it meant to be a lesbian in Paris in the early to mid-twentieth century. Maher’s descriptions of a society grappling with the effects of World War I while simultaneously entering an age of modernism will captivate readers, as will cameo appearances from much-beloved literary figures.
There are an overwhelming number of books that are set during the WW2 era, while WW1 and the fallout of it, seem to get less attention, even though it's a vibrant space to work in as an author. Is it freeing to work with material that occurs in a lesser-known time period?
Absolutely! For me, though, it all depends on the main character. For instance, if you’d told me before I discovered the story of Kick Kennedy that I would write “a World War 2 book,” I’d have said you were crazy; I just wasn’t naturally drawn to that time period. But because I was totally entranced by Kick’s story, and the meat of it occurred during that war, I became interested in it through the lens of her life.
I’ve always been interested in World War 1, on the other hand, likely because I’ve always been interested in the writing of the 1920’s, and the Lost Generation expats to Paris—movements that were a response to the devastation of the so-called Great War. So when I decided to write about Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore in that time period, I got to draw on a few decades of reading that I’d already done in that time period (like Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s novels, Sylvia’s memoir, and a terrific book I read years ago called Everyone Was So Young by Amanda Vaill), which made research a little easier.
Writing about real people is always a challenge but writing about real authors seems like it would be even more so. Readers can be fiercely protective of the memory of their favorites. What was it like to write about James Joyce in a fictional frame?
You are so right. And there were many times I thought to myself, “Who am I to put words in the mouth of James Joyce?” Thankfully, I’d already had to answer the question, “Who am I to put words in JFK’s mouth? … Grace Kelly’s? Alfred Hitchcock’s?” Writers of historical fiction whose work explores the lives of real, often famous, people, just have to shove aside this anxiety and get on with it. It helps me to remember that the James Joyce in The Paris Bookseller is not the “real” James Joyce; rather, he is my interpretation of James Joyce. I’ve based my interpretation on rigorous research, but it’s still many steps removed from the genuine article. And that’s okay!
Bookstores have been hard hit by the pandemic, and your novel reads like a love story to the independent bookstore. How has your own life and history with bookstores impacted the writing of the novel?
Oh, my answer to this question could go on for pages, so I’ll try to be brief. As soon as I graduated from college (more than 2 decades ago!), I moved to New York City from California to work in museums—or so I thought. My parents told everyone I was moving to New York to become a writer. Though I’d been an English major, I also loved Art History and thought I was destined to be a curator. A hot minute into my summer internship and I knew that museums were not my world. My parents, surprise-surprise, had been right.
By September, I was employed as a nanny and a clerk at the Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a schedule that gave me the freedom to write every morning. Though the structure of my days was important for getting my first (unpublished) novel written (and revised), working at the bookstore proved more important. For hours a day, we aspiring writers on the staff talked amongst ourselves and with the consummate readers and writers who were customers, about our own work as well as the novels we were reading and what we’d learned from them; we argued about whether Dave Eggers’s first book really was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius; we shared connections and ideas and suggestions and heartaches.
We were, essentially, like the young, hungry writers who first came to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the early 1920’s. A few years before as an undergraduate, I’d read Sylvia’s memoir and marveled at the richness and texture of her life. To be honest, I’d also been a little jealous: how I wished I, too, could live in Paris among my literary heroes, during my favorite decade!
So, imagine my amazed glee when I got to do just that in writing The Paris Bookseller—live Sylvia’s life as much as anyone can, through the miraculous act of time travel that is writing historical fiction. And I am able to bring readers along for the ride, just as Sylvia herself invited patrons into her shop.
Censorship is a big part of the novel and can be a hot topic still today. Did you have any concerns about reactions to some of your content?
Gosh, I hope no one objects to the content of my book! The subject of censorship is very different today than it was 100 years ago when Joyce’s Ulysses was banned. In the early 20th century, art was legally banned if it was deemed “obscene,” or found to corrupt its audience. There was a patriarchal idea that men in power had to protect others, mainly women, from seeing anything they deemed to be lewd. We are *way* past that thinking today, living as we do in the age of racy television shows and violent video games that we simply take for granted; a ton of content is simply available, and we can choose to consume it or not, and put parental controls on devices to protect young eyes that might legitimately need protecting.
Today, though, we have the concept of cancel culture, which could be considered by those who oppose it (or those who think cancel culture has gone too far) as an evolving form of censorship: where the opinions of everyday citizens—the court of public opinion—can be powerful enough to act as a modern form of censorship. What I wonder is this: What will writers 100 years from now say about the cultural moment we find ourselves in? What parallels will those future writers draw between what’s happening in 2022 to what happened in 1922, and what might be happening in 2122? Since we are living it, it’s hard to know; we can’t see it with any perspective.
Kerri Maher holds an MFA from Columbia University. She lives with her daughter in Massachusetts. Learn more online at kerrimaher.com.