(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024)
There is something redemptive about the act of reading.
That may seem like an artful overstatement to some, but the truth is, when you open a book and lose yourself in the story within, a lot of the pain and trouble of life seems to fall away.
Perhaps only temporarily and only insofar as the story blots out the dark shadows of a troubled reality, but redeem you it often does and not in that overblown and uselessly performative way of certain religions.
As someone who found themselves desperately lonely and socially cutoff thanks to unceasing bullying as a child (and honestly right up to the next-to-last year of high school), I can attest that it was reading that more often than not saved me.
It opened doors to other worlds and different possibilities and reminded me that while my current experience felt lost and isolated, it didn’t always have to be so.
That’s something that comes reassuringly to life in Carsten Henn’s The Door-to-Door Bookstore which celebrates how deeply and transformatively the act of reading, and the community that can sometimes flow from that, can change your life, not just temporarily either but for the better and the long-term.
The master of the house would have loved to discuss books and authors in depth with Carl, whom he regarded as an educated, well-mannered man, and a kindred spirit. But with the passage of time, the words of invitation had escaped him. Perhaps he had lost them among the many room of his grand home.
Set in a town in Germany where the local bookstore is the centre of many peoples’ lives, directly or otherwise, The Door-to-Door Bookstore believes passionately in the idea that there are books written specifically for each one of us.
Books that will speak to us like they will to no one else and which have the power to alter our circumstance, our outlook and our sense of social connectedness.
That may seem airily and unrealistically optimistic, especially when life is bleak in a thousand different ways, but when you have someone like Carl bringing this charming idea to robust and materially impactful life, it starts to seem less dreamy and far more muscularly real.
Carl is 72-years-old and he’s worked for the City Gate Bookstore to decades, first for his friend and mentor Gustav Gruber, who treated him like a book-loving son, and then, less happily, for Sabine, Gustav’s daughter who, despite growing up with Uncle Carl, as she once called him, treats him rather cruelly like a dispensable employee long past his prime.
Sabine may indeed have some great ideas that will invigorate the bookstore and see it survive well into the 21st century but what she misses is how Carl gives life to the work of the bookstore, connecting the books which line its considerable shelves with its customers, a number of whom for a whole host of reasons cannot leave their homes.
They depend on Carl’s faithfully executed early evening deliveries not only for new reading material but for a critically important slice of social connectivity, with Carl often the only person who sees and talks to them on a given day, or often, week.
(courtesy Amazon)
Carl loves books and he loves people and this magically sweet combination makes him the exact right sort of person to bring books to people for whom reading is the only redemptively good thing about their lives.
Wealthy Christian von Hohenesch who, like many of Carl’s customers has been given a literary moniker, in his case, Mr Darcy, is one such example.
Living in a huge house, Christian is the sort of person who should have been the world at his feet; he is, however, cripplingly lonely, alone in a house full of art and with a back garden full of beautiful plants, and it is Carl’s daily conversations that sustain him.
This lifeline becomes even more richly meaningful to him when Carl is joined on his route by an garrulously precocious nine-year-old Schascha who decides on one lonely evening when her father is still at work, that what Carl needs is an assistant.
He doesn’t, of course, or at least he thinks he doesn’t, but Schascha is not easily dissuaded and over a number of days, she charms not only Carl but also people like Mr Darcy, Mrs. Cremmen aka Effie Briest and Mrs Longstocking, Dr Faustus and the Reader, and becomes a key part of a social network of people who, over the course of this heart-warmingly charming novel that embodies some real darkness and rich humanity which add real emotional heft to its idealistic loveliness, become a found family who prove instrumental in changing each others’ lives very much for the better.
Carl may have got the ball rolling but Schascha gives its extra vitality, oomph and momentum, and under her zestfully naive but intelligently thoughtful drive, a simple delivery run becomes a book-fuelled lifeline that proves what a huge d
There was the sound of laughter, but it was the sound of joyful anticipation. It was part of Schascha’s plan that from now on, an adult would work with Carl every evening to be there for him.
Together, the Book Walkers trod the path through the darkness.
Because the books needed someone to show them the way.
A love letter writ large to books and bookstores, The Door-to-Door Bookstore rather cleverly doesn’t pretend that everything is lovely in a world where books prevail.
There are people in the novel who refuse the redemptive power of books and the way they can bind disparate souls together, and those among that number, though small, will surprise you, but for the most part, the characters in The Door-to-Door Bookstore are people whose lives come alive because Carl, and to an extent, Schascha, know which books will mean the most to them.
A slowly unfurling and richly told novel, The Door-to-Door Bookstore celebrates the undeniably seductive idea that books are far from just bound printed pages with a fetching cover and an enticing back cover blurb.
It says instead that books have the power to knit us all together, to bring people who might otherwise not come into contact with each other, and in The Door-to-Door Bookstore that is almost all of them isolated as they are for a host of reasons in their homes and in one case a convent, and bind them together into one big, inclusively supportive family who, in the book’s final act, prove pivotal to the future direction of Carl’s life.
It is the community made by books and Carl’s great love for them – he has a heart of gold and it’s his love for people that makes a huge difference in addition to the deliveries he makes – that form the enormous heart at the centre of The Door-to-Door Bookstore and which leave you feeling as if the world can be a better place and that reading may just be what makes that happen.