Translating Community

Mini pop-up libraries are one of the great joys I’ve discovered during my free time.  Appearing in the oddest locations—perched outside an imposing office building or on a well-tended front lawn—they have added many unusual treasures to my bookshelf, everything from a fashion guide to Kafka’s short stories.  Occasionally, these editions bear traces of their previous owners: a note in the margin, a scrawled address on the title page.  This week’s book, Ros Schwartz’s translation of Christine Féret-Fleury’s The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, provides a compelling but uneven snapshot of a similarly quirky community of book lovers.

Parisian Juliette, dissatisfied with her office job as a real estate agent, develops a fascination with her fellow commuters’ reading materials on the way to work each morning.  Their eccentricities are intriguing; a man in a green hat only reads about insects, one woman reads a cookbook, and a young girl cries each time she reaches a certain page.  Seeking a reprieve from routine (a milder form of the escapist fantasy in The Pine Islands), she exits at a different train stop and encounters a mysterious bookseller, spiraling ever deeper into his strange realm of dusty books and eclectic readers.  While the novel offers a powerful take on Juliette’s loneliness and longing for companionship, it falls short in terms of character development, overshadowing the community it seeks to illuminate.

Juliette’s ennui and solitude are convincing, compelling her to seek alternate forms of connection.  For those who have ever sat across from someone staring at a phone, her failed attempt to sell a house to an entitled upper-middle-class couple feels especially poignant; they continue scrolling through email as she enthusiastically lists the house’s selling points, ignoring her as she chases after them with her business card.  When she encounters Soliman, a bibliophile of Middle Eastern descent, she also discovers an occupation that is a much better fit. Soliman hires her as a passeur, a cross between a people-watcher and a bookseller, who matches members of the public with books based on intuition.  As Juliette sets out on this ragtag mission, we seem to be headed toward a cozy ending in which she finds a meaningful life purpose, fulfilled by fellow book lovers.

Despite all indications to the contrary, the narrative took a few sharp turns into dark territory that left me puzzled.  After only a short acquaintance, Soliman abruptly tells Juliette that he must go “away” for a while and asks her to move in and care for his daughter, Zaide.  We also learn that the woman with the cookbook on the train was not only a fellow passeur, but also has committed suicide recently.  Leonidas, the man in the green hat, was secretly in love with her and becomes a friend to Juliette.  Yet another death close to home forces Juliette to confront her feelings of alienation.  The unusually high body count in what seemed a whimsical, brief novel (it clocks in at 175 pages in English) comes at a high price.  Though The Girl Who Reads on the Métro poses as a love letter to book lovers, it never really offers a nuanced characterization of this intriguing community beyond a few surface impressions.  I enjoyed reading it—lighter fiction is rarely on offer in translation—but it left me wishing for a stronger portrait of its unusual characters.

Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, trans. Ros Schwartz (Flatiron Books, 2019)

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