A Resurrection, Of a Sort

After an absence, of some years, I have decided to return to this journal of my current reading and my reactions thereto. The proximating cause has been the recent discovery of a new bookshop cum beer garden cum Spanish wine bar not far distant, The Wild Detectives. Having spent some hours there this past Saturday evening, allow me to furnish several immediate impressions. The pints are cold, there are no bottled beers, but merely a half dozen on tap, beginning at $5.50. There are rather more wine selections, perhaps a dozen and half, including three whites, all of Spanish provenance (the two owners are apparently emigres from Madrid) with various obscure varietals and starting at $7.00 a glass.

The books available for purchase are a curious lot. A few hundred novels, a couple of hundred volumes of poetry, and perhaps the same number of volumes in Spanish. The inclusions are impressive. I left with the Comte de Lautreamont's "Maldoror and Poems" which had been shelved, unaccountably, in the poetry section, notwithstanding the fact that "Maldoror" is a novel and the "Poems" of the title are written in prose and are screeds of a literary critical type, and a collection of Rimbaud's letters (as I already possess his poems in the same Modern Library edition, it seemed a shame not to acquire the companion volume if only for the sake of completeness). $16.00 and $15.95, respectively.

As I said, the inclusions and omissions are highly idiosyncratic. For Patricia Highsmith, they offer all the Tom Ripley books EXCEPT for "The Talented Mr. Ripley". For Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the volume stocked is NOT "Journey to the End of Night", which I would certainly have acquired had it been available. Gide is well-represented, "Madame Bovary" is here, but there is no Balzac. Arturo Perez-Reverte is likewise absent; too popular? In poetry, there is no Yeats, but Cavafy is available; I would have purchased the letters of John Keats had it been stocked. There is no Guillaume Apolinaire; I should rather have expected to see "Les Alcools" and "Les Calligrammes", but Rimbaud's poems were likewise missing. Joris-Karl Huysmans' "A Rebours" and "La Bas" were also unavailable, but they stock the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness.

As I said, curious. In many cases the selection appears to be inspired by the personal tastes of the two owners.

The staff appear friendly and personable. I was obligated to correct a statement by one of the bartenders that Hemingway drank himself to death with the words "Actually, he committed suicide by putting a shotgun in his mouth. Ketchum, Idaho, 1962 (sic)" The room is pleasant and seats perhaps twenty, although by nine o'clock on Saturday night there were perhaps twice that many persons present both inside and out. The crowd is generally young, heterosexual, of the bohemian middle-class, and dressed in the singularly graceless style that one associates with Deep Ellum:  some very bad haircuts on the boys, a plethora of ill-considered tattoos, vast herds of flip-flops and cargo shorts stretching to the distant horizon. Intelligent life, perhaps, but not as we know it.

For a bookshop that appears to wish to characterize itself as a pleasant nook to enjoy a glass of tempranillo over a volume of Auden, I found it ironic that I was virtually the only person in the room actively reading. One couple was playing chess, rather badly, or so it appeared from my vantage point. I had brought two books on which I am currently engaged--Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and a translation of Montesquieu's "Les Lettres Persanes" and the bartender Caroline was sufficiently civilized as to ask me my impression of the novel. But it appears that The Wild Detectives will be rather more Ice House and rather less Les Deux Magots or Cafe Central.

Pity.