I've missed a trick this year - I'm sure that with a bit of planning and an extra injection of charm I might have persuaded a bookshop somewhere to do an MB Valentines Day promotion.
The Concubine of Shanghai pushes all the right buttons for instance - and we got it out in time (regular readers of this blog, if any, will remember much mention of deadlines at the beginning of this year. We met them, hooray!) but there are others:
How about The Devil in the Flesh?, which one of my most favourite booksellers says they sold five copies of yesterday.
Jules et Jim?
The Politics of Love?
Eroticism?
K, of course...
For those lacking someone:
In Praise of Masturbation
and for those who just can't be bothered:
The Art of the Siesta
Cathy says that anyone who is embarrassed to read the second-to-last title on the tube is a prude so, on my recent trip I decided to go one better and read it on my long haul flights back to the UK (9 hours to Washington from Buenos Aires, 8 from Washington to London) only to find that neither of my neighbours on either leg spoke a word of English. Which rather diminished any effect the title might have had. It is a very good book though, which, I suppose, is the main thing.
Personally, I used up all my romance on the trip AND found time to buy a mountain of books. In Buenos Aires they not only have cavernous second hand stores filled with treasures and immensely knowledgable staff, but they have book shop bars! Why, oh why, don't we have them here? I would do my bit to keep them afloat.
Because lists are strangely compelling here is one of the books I bought or was otherwise given:
In no particular order. Unless, like Borges, you don't believe in Free Will.
Don Quijote which I didn't previously own in Spanish.
Viaje Olvidado by Silvina Ocampo and another collection of previously unpublished Ocampo writing which I've forgotten the name of and is at home. Silvina Ocampo is a quite, quite brilliant writer whoeveryoneshouldread.
A literary biography of Clarice Lispector.
The second newest (he seems to have just released another) book (again I can't remember the title) by Marcelo Cohen, who is described by his publisher as 'the best contemporary Argentine novelist'. High praise indeed, but from what I've read by him its deserved.
Respiracion Artificial by Ricardo Piglia
The Buenos Aires Affair by Manuel Puig.
A volume of Keats' letters edited by Julio Cortázar
and, most excitingly, the last remaining copy of 62: Modos para Armar also by Cortázar, in all of Buenos Aires. Or at least in the fifteen bookshops I looked in. Cortázar's work is being re-edited in Spanish which means that for next few months it'll be really difficult to get ahold of. If there is a better feeling in the world than searching for a favourite book that you've previously lost and the finding it in the last shop of the day at five to eight when it shuts at eight, especially when at first they say they don't have it but then find it in the display window then I don't want to know about it.
All of which means I have plenty to be getting on with. Constructing some new shelves for a start...
Kit
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