The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher

Thank you Iris for recommending The Paris Bookseller (2022) by Kerri Maher.  I have finally gotten around to reading this well written and well researched historical novel about the legendary Sylvia Beach and her  bookstore Shakespeare and Company.  And for readers who have an interest in Sylvia Beach, Paris in the 1920's and the ex-pat writers who frequented Shakespeare and Company this is a must read.

Who was Sylvia Beach?  She was born in Baltimore Maryland in 1888.  Her father was a Presbyterian minister and her parents raised their three daughters to be independent and pursue their dreams.  In 1902 Reverend Beach took a job in Paris where the family lived until 1905.  The family moved back to the US but for Sylvia the experience of living in Paris was life changing.  She would return to Paris in the later years of World War I where she met her life partner Adrienne Monnier.   The two women lived together until Adrienne's tragic death in 1955

The Paris bookseller covers Sylvia's life from 1917 to 1936 and in 1919 she opened  Shakespeare and Company.   It was a store that sold books but also served as a lending library for those who could not afford to purchase books.   As Ernest Hemingway would later write about Sylvia:  "She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”  

And that's the impression I got from Kerri Maher's portrait of Sylvia Beach.  A good woman, passionate about literature and also a risk taker.  Sylvia in 1922 was the first to publish James Joyce's Ulysees which was banned in America and Europe on obscenity charges.  James Joyce was forever grateful although he had a tendency to take advantage of his friends, asking for loans etc as the novel makes clear:

For Sylvia and Shakespeare and Company the 1920's were a highpoint, a decade of youth, parties art and adventure.  But things started to darken in the 1930's:

"Americans had been escaping to drink and write and love freely, and they frequently returned to their homeland; in fact, they were going home in droves these days. These German artists were escaping persecution and assumed they would never return to the country of their birth. They despaired of seeing sisters, brothers, cousins, and parents ever again"

The Paris Bookseller ends in 1936 but Kerri Maher provides an afterward regarding Sylvia Beach's life from 1937 until her death in 1962.  The Paris Bookseller is a very nice tribute to Sylvia Beach, a brave and good-hearted woman.