Book Around the Corner

Petit éloge de la lecture by Pef. (2016)

I’ve been overworked for a few weeks and I also had a lot of family activities going on. Consequences: I’m behind with my writing about the books I read and I have a huge pile of unread reviews in my mail box.

This morning I decided to write a global billet about Eddie’s World by Charlie Stella, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson and The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. Just for the sake of catching up with billets and decrease the TBW pile. Then I started to read the quotes I had captured while reading Eddie’s World and found out I couldn’t settle for a hodge-podge of a billet just to tackle the TBW pile. I owe nothing to the writers of these three books, two of them are dead anyway and I doubt that my billet will bring anything to Charlie Stella’s life or book sales. Still. I owe it to the books and the pleasure I had reading them.

This brings me to another little book I picked: Petit éloge de la lecture by Pef. The title means Little praise for reading and here’s Pef about readers:

Pef is a writer of children books. His most famous collection is the one featuring Le Prince de Motordu. (The Prince of Twistedwords) and his adventures start in La belle lisse poire du Prince de Motordu, which can be translated as The beautiful furry tail of the Prince of Twistedwords. This needs to be read out loud and many thanks to Tony from Tony’s Reading List for understanding French perfectly and finding an English equivalent to Pef’s play-on-words. Pef loves playing with the French language and his prose is bubbly and classic at the same time. The quote above wasn’t easy to translate as it manages to encompass several difficulties between the French and the English language: body positions, the locution qu’ils soient, and the string of adjectives. So for once, the English text is longer that the French. Any alternative translation is welcome in the comments, I really struggled with it.

Back to Pef and his praise of reading. I started this with enthusiasm because I always enjoy reading about someone else’s delight with books. His is a collection of memories about reading moments. He pictures memories brought by books, memories of where you were when you read this particular book but also memories of the books themselves. We are inhabited by the characters we met through our reading. This is why recurring characters from crime fiction series seem like distant relatives to me or why I see Charles Bovary in Carl Joseph von Trotta. Pef’s book is 100 pages long and its 26 short chapters show different reading occasions and materials. Train carriages, holidays, school. Postcards, novels, comics. It is full of joyful descriptions in a gourmet style. He conjures up his favorite writers and reveals the breath of his reading and the depth of his addiction. Like most crazy-in-love-with-books readers, he’d read the phone book if it were the last book on earth, just to keep on reading.

Despite all this enthusiasm, I didn’t enjoy his book that much overall. Or perhaps I was too tired to enjoy it. I found it a bit old-fashioned. Pef was born in 1939 and you can feel his age in his pages because his reading memories relate to realities that don’t exist anymore. I would have preferred a praise by a younger writer, one who still has reading for passion despite video games, films, You Tube time, cell phones and all other distractions offered nowadays. Someone who backs up Pef’s statement:

And this is why I want to cheer on a decision the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) recently made. It has considered that libraries should be allowed to lend ebooks the way they lend paper books. It’s not an easy question from a technical point of view but it tends to treat ebooks the same way as paper books. Publishers are not in favor of this decision and the debate is not over.

This is in contradiction with another of the CJEU’s decision on VAT. In almost all EU countries, books benefit from a reduced VAT rate. It is 5.5% in France, compared to a 20% regular rate, so it makes a difference for book buyers. There’s a legal debate over ebooks: can they benefit from the reduced VAT rate or not? France has decided that the substance was more important than the form and applies a reduced VAT rate to ebooks. But according to a statement made in September 2016, the CJEU doesn’t see it that way. Ebooks are said to be “electronic services” and not books and thus shall bear a regular VAT rate. As far as I know, discussions are still going on in Brussels and I hope that France’s point of view wins in the end because, as Musset once said

HAPPY READING