Mrs Tsk *

Entering the French bookshop, she felt almost furtive, like someone who didn’t really deserve to be there.


The books seemed serious yet libertine, severe yet playful. As she picked them up and began leafing through their pages, it seemed to her that even their austerity was sensual.


In the culture she came from, books seemed embarrassed to be books. They seemed to want to be television. They wanted garish colours and a volume switch. And now that they were being sucked up into electronic devices, they were getting them.


These books, on the other hand, relished their bookishness. They contented themselves with simple typographical covers and the colour of paper itself.


The books in the French bookshop seemed to have resisted the modern age. And yet this resistance was not conservative, but a sort of defiance of something the books knew would corrode their strength as books.


Some would say that in the age of television books have to be, if possible, a TV tie-in. And in the age of the computer books have to be data. But these books knew their true strength.


Some would call them boring. But that just made the hidden excitements of these silent friends more subversive.


In the bookshop she almost felt that she was not allowed to be in France, or that France was not allowed to exist in the world as she knew it.