They came to buy wacky postcards (‘Reading kills prejudice’ or ‘People who read don’t lie – at least not at the same time’) or miniature books in brown medicine bottles, or to take photos.
Yet these people were downright entertaining compared with the third kind, who thought they were kings but, unfortunately, lacked the manners of royalty. Without saying ‘Bonjour’ or so much as looking at him as they handled every book with fingers greasy from the chips they’d been eating, they asked Perdu in a reproachful tone: ‘Don’t you have any plasters with poems on them? Or crime-series toilet paper? Why don’t you stock inflatable travel pillows? Now that would be a useful thing for a book pharmacy to have.’
Perdu’s mother, Lirabelle Bernier, formerly Perdu, had urged him to sell rubbing alcohol and compression stockings – women of a certain age got heavy legged when they sat reading.
Some days he sold more stockings than literature.
He sighed.
Why was such an emotionally vulnerable woman so eager to read Night?
All right, it wouldn’t have done her any harm.
Well, not much.
The newspaper Le Monde had feted the novel and Max Jordan as ‘the new voice of rebellious youth’. The women’s magazines had worked themselves into a frenzy over the ‘boy with the hungry heart’ and had printed photo portraits of the author bigger than the book’s cover. Max Jordan always looked somewhat bemused in these pictures.
Bemused and bruised, thought Perdu.
Jordan’s debut novel was full of men who, out of fear for their individuality, responded to love with nothing but hatred and cynical indifference. One critic had celebrated Night as the ‘manifesto of a new masculinity.’
Perdu thought it was something a bit less pretentious. It was a rather desperate attempt by a young man who was in love for the first time to take stock of his inner life. The young man cannot understand how he can lose all self-control and start loving and then, just as mystifyingly, stop again. How unsettling it is for him to be unable to decide whom he loves and who loves him, where it begins and where it ends, and all the terribly unpredictable things in between.
Love, the dictator whom men find so terrifying. No wonder that men, being men, generally greet this tyrant by running away. Millions of women read the book to find out why men were so cruel to them. Why they changed the locks, dumped them by text, slept with their best friends. All to thumb their nose at the great dictator: See, you’re not going to get me. No, not me.
But was the book really of any comfort to these women?
Night had been translated into twenty-nine languages. They’d even sold it to Belgium, as Rosalette the concierge had been keen to note. As a Frenchwoman born and raised, she liked to point out that you could never know with the Belgians.
Max Jordan had moved into 27 Rue Montagnard seven weeks ago, opposite the Goldenbergs on the third floor. He hadn’t yet been tracked down by any of the fans who pursued him with love letters, phone calls and lifelong pledges. There was even a Night Wikiforum, where they swapped their news and views about his ex-girlfriends (unknown, the big question being: was Jordan a virgin?), his eccentric habits (wearing earmuffs) and his possible addresses (Paris, Antibes, London).
Perdu had seen his fair share of Night addicts in the Literary Apothecary. They’d come aboard wearing earmuffs and beseeching Monsieur Perdu to arrange a reading by their idol. When Perdu suggested this to his neighbour, the twenty-one-year-old had gone deathly pale. Stage fright, Perdu reckoned.
To him, Jordan was a young man on the run, a child who had been proclaimed a man of letters against his will – and surely, for many, a whistle-blower on men’s emotional turmoil. There were even hate forums on the Web where anonymous posters ripped Jordan’s novel apart, made fun of it and advised the author to do what the despairing character in his novel does when he realises that he’ll never be able to master love: he throws himself from a Corsican cliff top into the sea below.
The most fascinating things about Night were the author’s descriptions of male frailties: he wrote about the inner life of men more honestly than any man had done before. He trampled on every one of literature’s idealised and familiar images of men: the image of the ‘he-man’, the ‘emotional dwarf’, the ‘demented old man’ and the ‘lone wolf’. A feminist magazine had given its review of Jordan’s debut novel the appropriately mellow headline MEN ARE HUMAN TOO.
Jordan’s daring impressed Perdu. Yet the novel still struck him as a kind of gazpacho that kept sloshing over the edge of the soup bowl. Its author was just as emotionally defenceless and unprotected: he was the positive print of Perdu’s negative.
Perdu wondered how it must feel to experience things so intensely and yet survive.
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