Two works of fiction failed to get a mention

I wrote about the bookstores and libraries I knew before the Digital Revolution, but I forgot to mention several works of fiction based on that cultural scene, because I was just warming up with a few brushstrokes.

Just as struggling actors fight for their dreams waiting tables or working as baristas, struggling writers end up as clerks in bookshops—as did George Orwell and Penelope Fitzgerald, two British authors who used their experience to craft superior, heartbreaking fiction.

Orwell, in the mid-1930s, worked for almost two years as a part-time assistant—just afternoons—at Booklovers’ Corner, a secondhand bookshop in the London borough of Hampstead. He was a real nut job, and probably was dealing with a ton of guilt after his experience in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Indeed, he was a thirty-year-old, but fast and expeditious in translating his adventures into fiction, always peppered with the current leftist ideas of that decade, when Stalinist commie propaganda still wasn’t exposed as a total fraud.

Fitzgerald, in the late ‘50s, worked part-time for four years as a clerk at The Sole Bay Bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. She was already a forty-year-old mother of three children and the wife of an alcoholic trial lawyer, who was already on his way to disbarment for theft and public disgrace. But Penelope never dared to abandon him, because he had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war, and legend says she began writing fiction just to entertain her husband on his deathbed in the late ‘70s.

I say “legend says” because anything you may read about Penelope Fitzgerald is just heartbreaking. Or maybe it’s me, because of the deep connection I feel while reading The Bookshop. That idea about reading for pleasure or entertainment is total BS for retarded, fat, and bored panda bears. I mean it. Reading is dangerous, and good novels are always written on the razor’s edge. That’s the deal.

While mourning her alcoholic partner, Fitzgerald sat at her desk and channeled her whole love story with authorial control, writing about a childless young widow, Florence Green, who decides to open a bookshop with a small inheritance in the back of beyond.

Call me crazy, but what I feel reading the first page is a dark genius gutting me with a butcher’s knife. Remember the narrative skill required to immerse you immediately in the story and activate your suspension of disbelief? This is it. I’ve read it out loud like a hundred times, and each time my voice breaks. It’s not about empathy; it’s about the narrator’s skill to project Florence Green’s worries onto a heron flying across an estuary while trying to swallow a long eel.

That being said, you are right for thinking: what a drag those writers are! Is this one of those books about books? Well, let me cut it into slices for you. Real writers are too busy writing to care about anything other than books, the money they need to remain tightly focused on their next installment, and the amount of love and dedication they can get from their partners or non-committed relationships to survive the constant ordeal that writing entails. Pulling up all-nighters is not for the faint of heart.

I wrote a novel about The Chocolate Party, the Barcelonian bookstore of my younger years, because I was immensely fortunate with the bookseller, who took my literary ambitions as his own. And we couldn’t have been more different, as I came to realize.

It took me two long decades to find an interesting angle to write about The Chocolate Party, centered entirely on characters, way beyond the usual clichés about the parochial clientele, book clubs, coffee stains, and cigarettes—and I still think it cries out for a third act. Because of the gripping march into the Digital Revolution, and its nefarious consequences both for readership and creativity.

While working the afternoon hours at Booklovers’ Corner, Orwell couldn’t turn on the heat because the owner thought it would steam up the window display and drive po