Great classics on the 23rd April

This time they are my 1st and 2nd year ESO students the ones who write about those great English classics and stories everybody knows about: Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, The Jungle Books...

Roald Dahl (1916 -1990)

This 13th of September marks the centenary of Roald Dahl's birth. Loved by millions of readers all over the world, not many people know that this Welsh children's author was also a Second World War Royal Air Force pilot and spy. He met and worked alongside Ian Fleming, who would later become James Bond's creator . As a screenwriter, Roald Dahl himself would write the script for You Only Live Twice.

His charming characters  are unforgettable. His skilful and magic stories keep the reader enthralled from start to finish. Although they are widely popular nowadays also thanks to their screen versions - like Spielberg's Gremlins,  Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Danny de Vito's Matilda or James and the Giant Peach - he firmly believed in the importance of reading, and he was not always pleased with these adaptations.  "I'm probably more pleased with my children's books than with my adult short stories. Children's books are harder to write. It's tougher to keep a child interested because a child does not have the concentration of an adult. A child knows the television is in the next room. It's tough to hold a child, but it's a lovely thing to try to do."        

150th anniversary of Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland

First published in 1865, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland has just turned 150. This timeless children book, playful and puzzling, was inspired by real events and a real child. Lewis Carrol, Charles L. Dogson´s pen-name, was a lecturer in maths in the Christ Church college in Oxford. Although he suffered from a bad stammer, he was a natural storyteller who liked to invent tales to entertain his friends and this speech dysfunction seemed to disappear when he spoke to children.

On a summer day, three years earlier, he had taken a boat trip up the river Isis (the Thames in Oxford) accompanying the Dean of his college and his three young  daughters for a picnic. Lewis Carrol started recounting them about a bored little girl called Alice who, while looking for adventure, tumbled down a rabbit hole. So enthralled was everybody that the medium girl, also called Alice, implored him to write it down. 

Once published, it soon cut the mustard and people of all ages were drawn to it. Both Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde adored it, for instance. His personal circumstances might have had a bearing on the creation of this masterpiece. The mathematician is well-known to have suffered a rare neurological disorder that provoked hallucinations in him and affected his vision of the size of objects. Besides, the surreal world into which Alice falls is oddly mathematical and logical.

Both Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, inaugurated a new era of children literature, which did not longer have to be didactic or moralistic. Lewis Carrol broke new ground by adding a whole world of imaginative whimsy which would let the children´s minds roam free. The tragic and unavoidable loss of childhood innocence, life as a meaningless puzzle or whatever it might represent, what is certain is that Alice is considered one of the most beloved characters in the classics today and she has kept us good company ever since.

Henry James, Washington Square and Cervantes

Like many 19th c. Americans, Henry James (1843 -1916) grew up with that feeling that culture, beauty and sophistication lay on the other side of the Atlantic. Living in a country with no antiquity or mystery, but only with commonplace prosperity, class distinction involved travelling to the Old World to imbibe all its art and elegance; probably, just a question of snobbery. He could afford doing so and so could and did many of the upper-middle class characters in his novels.

He anchored most of his cosmopolitan writings in an idealised aristocratic Europe, focusing on personal relationships and aiming at a kind of psychological realism: The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turns of the Screw... Although Washington Square is mainly set in the New York quarter where he was born, describing his maternal grandmother's house, Austin Sloper and his daughter also cross the ocean. It is something brief, but "she failed to gather animation from the mountains of Switzerland or the monuments of Italy". A wicked father, an unscrupulous suitor and a virtuous and wronged heroine were familiar types from Victorian melodramas. This novel, which defies a happy end, was turned into the unforgettable The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift; a film I watched a long time ago, and before reading the book, probably too young to understand how Catherine could resign herself to a lonely future, locking the door against the man who had once betrayed her love.

In a recent trip to New York City, I wanted to visit the place. Nowadays there is a residential neighbourhood which has developed around Washington Square Park, a green space to hang out and stage demonstrations, a park adored by the locals and a kind of sanctuary for the Beat Generation of the 40s and 50s. Strolling around, just a few metres away from the park arch, we arrived at NY University campus where, at the end of a courtyard just off the 5th Avenue, we unexpectedly met... a statue of Cervantes.

We could read it had been a present to the city from the mayor of Madrid in 1989 and, first intended to be located in the middle of Washington Square Park, the statue had been considered too fragile and they had opted for this charming alley instead. Surfing the net, we also learnt that at the end of the 19th century the small Spanish colony in New York had already made an unsuccessful proposal to raise money to donate the city a statue of Cervantes in order to improve the hostile image of Spain at that time due to the war in Cuba. The statue would finally manage to turn up a century later, but by other means and for other reasons.

Another World Book and Copyright Day

"As a lad," the elderly bookseller reminds, "we all queued up at midnight for a book about a wizard. It was the vogue."

The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling; Robinson Crusoe, by Defoe; Moby Dick, by Melville; Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson; The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, by Tolkien; Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl; Frankestein, by Mary Shelley, Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.. .These are some of the classics in English literature I have remembered today with my 1st year ESO students:

And my 2nd year Bachillerato students have also reflected on the power of words and reading:

Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born in the Ukraine, but naturalized British. Captain in the English merchant marine, his novels were outlined from his wide experiences at sea and in other different parts of the world; he was even embroiled in arms smuggling for the Carlist cause in Spain. Due to the malaria, he had to stop travelling and it was then that he started writing. 

He wonderfully depicted English characters against exotic backgrounds and rendered the dangerous life aboard vessels, with skippers yelling through gale force winds. His work is set in the context of colonial expansion in late Victorian England. The nature and effects of European imperialism, brutal and brutalizing, are less central in Lord Jim than in other novels like Heart of Darkness, masterpiece which would be the basis for Apocalypsis Now. Both novels share the same narrator, Marlow. In Heart of Darkness, his trip along the river in the Belgian Congo (which Francis Ford Coppola marvellously turned into the Vietnam background) is compared to Dante´s descent to the inferno, while in Lord Jim he explores the question of honour and moral conflicts of man's struggles at sea. 

Captain Marlow tells about Jim´s fall and redemption. He is a British naval officer disgraced by a single act of cowardice in the past and haunted by a guilty conscience since then. He, who had always dreamt of proving his heroism at sea, was paralyzed with fear the day he had to put his courage to the test. Together with the other disreputable crew, he abandoned their ship in a storm, not taking care of the sleeping passengers who were unaware of their peril. The story, which is partly based on true events, is about moral dilemmas, humiliation and second chances, about men who despite their heroic appearance are quite hollow.

A Greek hero? Like in all Aristotle's tragedies, Jim has got a flaw: probably his romantic idealism. Duty, conscience, self-sacrifice, self-knowledge, personal growth... Is death the only way honour can be retrieved? Does anyone care about all this? We are more than likely to be just talking about old-fashioned values, no longer valid nowadays...

At the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome

At the right foot of the Spanish Steps, in the very heart of Rome, I´ve just visited the Keats-Shelley House, a museum dedicated to the second generation of the English Romantic poets. It preserves the memory of Keats, Shelley and, to a less extent, Byron. All of them, geniuses who have attained an iconic status, died very young. In fact, it was as if the Romantic spirit and its intensity of feelings had to be associated with youth and that peculiar and sublime immaturity. 

The house was the final dwelling place of Keats, who had travelled to Italy with symptoms of consumption, in vain hope of a better climate to alleviate his poor health, but who would finally die here at the tender age of 25. He was the archetype of the young, beautiful and doomed Romantic writer. On his gravestone (also on one of the walls of the building) a Greek lyre was carved with four of its eight strings broken, in order to "show his classical genius cut off by death before its maturity".

Devastated by his death, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais. A year later, he would drown off the coast of Tuscany at the age of 29. A volume of Keats´ poetry was found in his pocket. Both are buried in Rome´s Protestant cemetery.

Also imbued by the classical mythology, but having the epic ancient Greece in his imagination, the aristocratic Lord Byron would die (from a fever) for the cause of Greek independence against the Turks, in an adolescent attempt at making himself a Homeric hero.

Definetely, the museum was worth the visit. And a great pleasure to leave, at least for just half an hour, the hustle and bustle of the overcrowded Piazza di Spagna outside. I could enjoy the quiet solitude of the library, full of first editions, and, strolling around the rooms, gaze not only at original letters (by authors like Mary Shelley or even Oscar Wilde or Borges, who adored Keats) but also at a variety of memorabilia such as a lock of Keats´ hair or a carnival mask Byron once bought in Venice.

These tortured poets were dreamers who created a religion from the spirituality of their own experiences. And it is inspiring and overwelming to believe that the fellowship and reciprocal admiration they maintained was genuine and sincere. Nothing to do, I´m afraid, with the so often recurring rivalry between some green-eyed authors nowadays.

Leonard Cohen turns 80

Leonard Cohen, the often labelled "poet laureate of pessimism", turns 80 today. His mournful and gravelly voice, his warmth and elegance and his heart-rending songs still inspiring and enchanting so many.

Federico García Lorca was a poet who touched him deeply, even naming his own daughter Lorca after him. The lyrics of the widely acclaimed Take this Waltz derive from the  Little Viennese Waltz part of theSpaniard´s collection A poet in New York.

Here is my humble tribute to this musical icon, a spiritual songwriter for such unspiritual times.

Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, Nadine Gordimer was one of the noteworthiest chroniclers of oppressive life in South African apartheid, a system that crippled humanity. But in her novels and short stories there was much more than writing about the injustices of racial segregation; her concern was also on relationships and this worldwide confusion of human values. 

Rereading The Late Bourgeois World this week, I´ve rediscovered Liz´s story in a novella overtly political - but also of moral dilemmas and search of the self - which makes use of imprisonment as a metaphor of the human condition.

To be or not to be Shakespeare, 450 years on

"After God, Shakespeare has created most", said 19th c. novelist Alexandre Dumas. Indeed, the Bard of Avon has traditionally been considered as the greatest playwright of all time, with a skill of language unequalled and a profound understanding of the human nature.

Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night´s Dream... are part of our collective cultural inheritance but, was this actor and sharer in an outstanding theatre company, a newcomer in London with humble provincial origins and without much education, the real author of these masterpieces?

The scarce details of his life have been analysed under countless microscopes and several literary critics and scholars have taken the international world of Shakespeare by storm with the idea that the universal genius was another. At the heart of his authorship controversy, three names:

Christopher Marlowe? Also on his 450th birth anniversary this year, he represented the first true voice of Rennaissance in that Tudor England. He was regarded as their best poet and playwright when he was supposedly stabbed to death, very young, in a tavern brawl. Being a spy for the crown, he might have faked his own death and, hidden, could have gone on writing signing with another name.

Theatre patron Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? At that time it was deemed socially unacceptable for a noble man to be involved in such a a low art as writing, and he might have used a pseudonym. Unlike Shakespeare, he had travelled to Italy, where many of these paramount plays are set, and had enough experience in law and politics to write about it with such complex brilliance.

Essayist Francis Bacon? It´s been affirmed that the philosophical ideas promulgated throughout all these plays reflect the personal opinions of this Cambridge graduate, one of the creators of empiricism. Furthermore, there are ciphers, coded messages about politics, and similarities in style and terminology to the rest of his work.

Thus, to be or not to be Shakespeare, that is the question for some skeptics. Nevertheless,  what is undeniable is that these plots and characters are as alive today as they were when they were originally staged during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. We humans still experience love, loyalty, betrayal, loss, forgivenes, revenge, jealousy, lust, thirst for power... and we still have so much to learn... Definitely, it'd be a lovely option to turn to some of these plays, once again, during these summer holidays, and reflect upon these universal human values and concerns.

On a 23rd of April

It was on a 23rd  of April that Shakespeare (1564) and Lolita´s author, Nabokov (1899), were born; that the Romantic poet Wordsworth died (1850); and, above all, in a year very easy to remember, 1616, that two of the greatest literary giants, Cervantes and Shakespeare, are said to have died. For that reason, this day has been designated as the World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO.

It is not so important if research has shown that it was not the very same day when The Quixote´s author and the English bard passed away. Cervantes´ death date was based on the modern Gregorian calendar, while Shakespeare´s on the old Julian one, still being used in England at that time. Neither is it significant if the World Book Day is celebrated a few weeks earlier in the UK and in Ireland -on the first Thursday of March- because on the 23rd of April Saint George´s Day has priority.

What really matters is that, at least during these days, a world tribute is paid to books, its authors and the laws that protect them. One of the aims is to encourage everybody to discover and appreciate the sheer pleasure that reading can entail.

Bookcrossing, recitals, literary competitions, prizes, authors signing their work, British children dressing up as their favourite storybook characters... But what about that growing number of infrequent readers? I'm not sure if this worlwide celebration  succeeds in engaging them. If any, this year, they may take advantage of the bookstores discounts today and buy a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to decorate their livingroom.

Reading and enjoying The Canterville Ghost

Some of my 2nd year ESO students (Compulsory Secondary Education) have read and enjoyed Oscar Wilde´s The Canterville Ghost.  They have drawn some comics, an amusing tool to foster their written expression and communicative skills, and searched about the great Irish writer´s work. Good excuse today, Saint Patrick´s Day, to show it to you.

"Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin. After that he wrote lots of plays like The Duchess of Padua, poems like Ravenna and tales like The Canterville Ghost." (Irene Cagigas)

"Nobody wanted to live in that house because they said that it was haunted. But Americans are very practical and the Otis family didn´t believe in ghosts" (Selena Martín)

"The tale teaches you many lessons but it is disappointing too." (Sara Cecín)

"Strange things happen and it´s exciting." (Nahia Martínez)

"It´s fantastic to practice my reading in English." (Paula Arce)

"When you read you feel in another place. With books you can travel around the world. When we read we can´t see the words, we see pictures, we see the story in our head. Books make you think about the world, the humans, the animals and our future. Books are our world, our culture, our past, our present and our future... Don´t stop reading, please!" (Cristina Pérez de las Cuevas)

Books always make great gifts

Here is Christmas time again, the holiday gift-giving season par excellence. And if all of us always strive for the best and most special present for our nearest and dearest, why not a book this year? A print book, I mean.

Electronic books could also work, but the emotional connection is greater with paper ones. In fact, we usually keep good memories of each single book we have in our home libraries: where and when we got them, who bought them to us... Besides, isn´t it a really depressing image seeing us more and more pushed towards a screen all the time? Wherever we look nowadays, we see everybody attached to their smartphones and digital devices, obsessed with downloading the latest mobile apps or snapping selfies, for instance. 

Books are affordable, they last a lifetime and they can provide hours of emotions, whatever the reader´s age. There are lots of must-reads in the market (and not necessarily the bestsellers of the moment; on the contrary, I´d be ashamed of getting some of these!), ranging from ageless classics to contemporary ones.

Books fire the children´s imagination and they also broaden the teens´ minds. Helping them to understand and deal with this increasingly complex world, they are essential for their growth and development process. But in today´s digital environment, where most of them would rather play a video game or surf the net chatting with friends or updating their Facebook profile, getting them to read may be a challenge. Their love of words and stories can be fostered introducing them to books that match their interests and hobbies. Once they discover they can travel through time, back and forth, with both historical and science fiction or they can become an expert on that subject they are mad about, books will become allies in their pursuit of adventure and learning. Furthermore, they will also realise that any dream can come true within the pages of a book. Can you imagine a more wonderful present than a world of dreams wrapped in pretty colourful paper?

Happy Christmas and happy readings!

The act of reading according to Doris Lessing

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”     (The Golden Notebook, 1962) 

 Doris Lessing, another Nobel Prize for Literature who has just passed away...  The image of her, sitting on her doorstep in London, surrounded by the journalists who had just communicated her the news when coming back from grocery shopping is now a legend. The Swedish Academy had phoned her home a few hours earlier, but she wasn´t in ("Oh! Christ! ... I couldn´t care less", she said to them).  Something which also said a lot of her character was the fact of having turned down the offer of becoming Dame of the British Empire because "a British Empire no longer exists". However, there was no problem in accepting the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature.

In her novels and short stories, she explored a great variety of topics ranging from the mystery of being female in a male-dominated world or the degradation of the educative systems nowadays to racism in British colonial Africa or her disillusionment with communism.

Doris Lessing was one of the most vividly representative literary figures of our times, and she will be best remembered for her semiautobiographical Children of Violence and the experimental The Golden Notebook. Many readers will sorrow the loss of her courageous outspokenness, her intellectual restlessness and fierce curiosity about the changing world around us.

Seamus Heaney, Dante and Asturias

Seamus Heaney, who was born Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland, never forgot the world where he came from. He was intensely aware of the often violent political and religious struggles that plagued his country and the unrest and oppression it entailed. At the same time, his roots and poetry lay deep and were grounded in that Irish rural countryside. 

The Little Canticles of Asturias is a beautiful tribute to a region he loved and used to visit because one of his sisters-in-law lived here. Besides, Asturian landscape lovingly evoked his homeland. This work is also a version of The Divine Comedy, the well-known 14th c. epic poem where Dante describes his journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, an allegory of the soul´s pilgrimage towards God. Like the Italian genius, Heaney looks into human experience trying to explain the mystery of our own identity. 

All along three stanzas, he renders a splendid account of a drive in Asturias. In the first one, it is midnight, they are driving through an industrial area among furnaces and hot refineries and they curse the hellish roads. (And then at midnight as we started to descend / into the burning valley of Gijón, / .../ for we almost panicked there in the epic blaze / of those furnaces and hot refineries / ... / and gathered speed and cursed the hellish roads.). 

In the second canticle, during the purgatorial next morning, the farmers who are working in the fields on both sides of the road wave at him. Their rural labour brings him memories of his childhood in Ireland. (Next morning on the way to Piedras Blancas / I felt like a soul being prayed for, / ...). In the third and last stanza, he arrives at a paradise of rivers under sunlight. (At San Juan de la Arena / it was a bright day of the body. / Two rivers flowed together under sunlight. / ...). The final words (of distant Compostela, stela, stela) emulate the Italian stelle which also finish the three canticles of Dante´s masterpiece.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize in 1995, and one of the most productive, lauded and beloved of the living poets, has passed away. Ireland, Asturias and the whole world mourn his death. Life is ephemeral, we know,  but let's remember poetry is not. Cherished and celebrated, his verses will remain forever.

Pilgrimages and literature

When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales at the end of the 14th century, pilgrimages to shrines like St. Peter´s at  Rome, St. James the Greater´s at Compostela or St. Thomas Becket´s at Canterbury were very popular. Pilgrims, who used to go in company for protection, had a wide variety of purposes: to venerate a saint, to do penance for sin or to be healed of some sickness.

In Chaucer´s masterpiece, a group of them meet at an inn as the starting point and, on their way to the cathedral of Canterbury, they engage in a tale telling contest. The landlord has offered a free dinner for the best story. The tales, mere entertainment for a hard journey, turn out to be a remarkable anthology in Middle English of medieval literature: courtly romance, saints´ legends, sermons, fabliaux, beast fables...

On my recent "Camino", Way of Saint James, there have also been moments for stories and literature. Since every single item in my rucksack had to be weighed (travel light was a must!), I could only afford to take one paperback with me. After hours and hours of often silent walking every day, there was always some time for sitting and reading in the youth hostels or engaging in enriching talk with other pilgrims. Camaraderie and fellowship made it possible to exchange anecdotes and personal stories, other books or anything you might need.

More than purposes or goals set before starting the "Camino", I can write about the rewards gained during this life-affirming, physically challenging and fulfilling experience. Each completed day built on everybody´s self-confidence. For me, it has also turned out to be a journey of inner peace and faith in myself.   

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Life is a chaos between two silences", said Samuel Beckett. The Irish playwright was only sure of two things: he had been born and he had to die. He left Dublin and travelled to Paris with the obsession of meeting James Joyce. He joined the novelist´s literary circle there and became his assistant. But Lucia, Joyce´s schizophrenic daughter, fell in love with him and his refusal of her caused Ulysses´s author to ban him from his home.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett is one of the great names of the Theatre of the Absurd. First written in French, Waiting for Godot is a metaphor of the absurdity of human existence, of man´s loneliness and boredom and of the deseperate search for meaning in life. Throughout the play, and while they are waiting for Godot, the main characters, two tramps, try to fill in the empty time on an eternal Saturday which follows Good Friday but which never becomes Easter Sunday. Very little 

happens, life is meaningless. Like them, we also spend much of our time waiting constantly for something new to happen so that our life has sense. Their incoherent dialogue dramatically shows our failure to communicate. Literary critics have wondered who this Godot is, someone who seems to be on the point of arriving but who never does so. Beckett used to say that if he had had the answer, he would have written it.

One day, Beckett was flying to Paris when the chief flight attendant said: "I´m speaking in Captain Godot´s name..." Immediately, he wanted to jump out of the plane up in the air.

The Little Prince

Sometimes I look around and see nothing but foolishness and nonsense. 

Mankind, too worried with power, wealth and technology, seems to have forgotten about the importance of sincere friendship and true love. Most people don´t even realise that "to forget a friend is sad. No every one has ever had a friend." 

A great deal of grown-ups, full of prejudices and misjudgements, are not sensitive to the poetry, mystery and beauty of the world. They are dull, unimaginative, ignorant and blind to the simple things that matter. They don´t even know that "the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart."

Sometimes it seems to me that adults, so narrow-minded and absurd, are constantly rushing and stubbornly keeping on mindless pursuits, but at the end "no one is ever satisfied where he is." 

I´ve just finished rereading Antoine de St. Exupéry´s masterpiece (so proud to have been able to do it in French this time!) and, again, it has left me reflecting about the sense of life...

Sometimes, like The Little Prince, I am also bewildered by what I see and experience every day. Like him, I go on my quest for understanding the meaning of this strange world. And meanwhile, I continue gazing at the stars...

The Great Gatsby

So much violence and the nonsense of World War I left Americans in such a state of shock that those who could afford it turned to a wild life of excess to compensate. The unprecedented levels of prosperity of the nation enabled F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, icons of the Roaring Twenties, to live extravagantly staying out late and drinking heavily in continuous lavish parties. The couple, who idolized wealth and luxury, was really fascinated by the very rich and all their magic. Their sprees continued in Paris, so full of youthful idealism, where they soon became part of a celebrated circle of American expatriates. 

But F. Scott Fitzgerald could also see through all that glitter of the Jazz Age, discovering the moral emptiness and hypocresy beneath this pointless pursuit of pleasure. The Great Gatsby is the tragic hero, solely faithful to a dream. All the wealth he has been able to achieve has only one aim; to recover his former love Daisy. But the mistake is to try to recapture the past and carry it into the future. His spiritual quest, in a materialistic society,  is to be defeated by selfishness and indifference.

The story represents the disintegration of the American Dream and those times of economic growth and loss of moral values should sound familiar to us. They turned out to be a warning sign of harder times to come. 

Shakespeare & Company Bookshop in Paris

"On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books in the window, and photographs of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive"

                                                                   Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

These lines depict Sylvia Beach´s Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, a haven for all English speaking writers in Paris during the interwar period and a gathering place for regulars like Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald or James Joyce. With the German occupation of the city it was closed down, but a few years later, an American bohemian, George Whitman, would open another bookstore with the same name and the same ideals. It continued to be a free boarding house for aspiring and penniless writers and the new owner went on playing host to well known authors like Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett or the Beat poets W. Burroughs and A. Gingsberg. Whitman´s daughter runs it today, still managing to hold on its original principles.

I´ve recently visited it for the first time and I can assure you it´s worth it: on the floor, piles of second-hand books stacked there because there is no room left on the ancient wooden bookshelves; on the walls, old photos, drawings and newspaper cuttings yellowed by the years; an old typewriter, a piano waiting to be played, worn-out velvet armchairs for sitting and reading... An incredible place to hang out for those instilled with a deep and passionate respect for literature.

Take note! Facing Notre Dame Cathedral, on the left bank of the river Seine... It had to be situated in the legendary literary Latin Quarter..