To read is to be elsewhere. If what we enjoy in traveling is transiency, then reading-as-journey grates against denials of flux and the imposition of certainty. The great bibliophile Alberto Manguel wrote in A Reader On Reading, “Reading at its best may lead to reflection and questioning, and reflection and questioning may lead to objection and change. That, in any society, is a dangerous enterprise.” A bookstore, then, is the gate, the wharf, the platform beside the tracks. A place not only for departures, but returns. And much chatter about destinations, the getting-there, the unforeseen, and the revealed.
In 1935 at the age of twenty, Edmond Charlot decided to discontinue his studies and to open a bookstore in his birthplace of Algiers. Just a few years earlier, the French had celebrated the centenary of their colonization of Algeria. In her ingenious and moving novel, Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi conjures Charlot’s unflagging efforts to establish the store as well as to publish his Éditions Charlot which ultimately included the first works by Albert Camus. He called his bookstore Les Vraies Richesses, the title of a book by Jean Giono who gave his permission for this usage. The store measured a mere 21 feet long by 12 feet wide.
Charlot died in 2004, a celebrated culture hero who recounted his early years to interviewers and colleagues. Adimi drew on those anecdotes, as well as film documentaries, memoirs, articles and archived materials to portray Charlot’s youthful enthusiasm in the form of a diary.
“July 23, 1935. Back in Algiers after a short trip to Paris. Talked with my father in the kitchen till late. I told him how deeply I admire Adrienne Monnier. I got a chance to visit her extraordinary lending library, La Maison des amis des livres, at 7 Rue de ‘Odéon. Hundreds and hundreds of volumes! They have everything! And what an extraordinary woman Madame Monnier is … She told me she started out with just a few thousand francs. It’s what we need in Algeria. My father agrees, but on a smaller scale, he said. Yes, a smaller scale, as long as it’s in the same spirit. That is: a store selling new and second-hand books, which is also a lending library, and not just a business but a place where people come to talk and read. A sort of meeting place for friends, but with a Mediterranean outlook too: bringing together writers and readers from all the Mediterranean countries, regardless of language or religion, people from all around this sea … We have to think bigger!”
The journal entries continue through October 12, 1961 when Charlot was living through the final, violent weeks of French rule. But in Our Riches, Charlot is only part of the story. Adimi structures her novel with chapters that alternate between the diary, a third-person narrative that remarks on life in Algiers and around Les Vraies Richesses during the occupation and after, and a third strand — the story of Ryad, a young Algerian man living in Paris who is hired to return to Algiers and clean out the now empty bookstore. It is to be turned into a beignet shop. “Well, it hasn’t been a bookstore since the 1990s,” says the unnamed speaker, “when the Algerian government bought it from Madame Charlot, the original owner’s sister-in-law. A nameless place that passers-by rarely even stop to look at. Still, we go on calling it Les Vraies Richesses bookstore … We are the people of this city and our memory is the sum of all our stories.”
Everything in the world seems to militate against Charlot’s dream. Perhaps he is not such a great businessperson. Perhaps he places trust where it isn’t deserved. While in Paris during the German occupation, a paper shortage disrupts his progress and summons his creditors. Nevertheless, and despite the political upheavals in Algiers, the bombings and massacres, Charlot’s sanguine and sweetly fervent attitude colors the text. The very first pages tell the reader that Les Vraies Richesses is abandoned. Its final caretaker, an old and ailing man named Abdullah, stands vigil in his robe across the street. There are still articles in the bookstore that belonged to Charlot’s time, as well as a large photograph of him on the ceiling. Ryad, ripping out what remains, has no interest in books.
Meanwhile, we look back at Charlot and his Éditions – he brings out translations of Moravia, Austen, Woolf, Stein, Pessoa. In Paris, 1947, organized prostitution is outlawed and so Charlot finds an empty brothel as location for his new store. He sells Les Vraies Richesses to his brother Pierre. Other catastrophes occur, new plans are hatched for another store in Algiers. Are Charlot’s travails and victories even relevant in a world so besotted with injustice? The third-person articulates the hate:
“Those Arabs. Those ragheads. Those rats. Those kebabs. Those turds. Those lice. Beat them. Slaughter them. Rub them out. Send them flying. Use batons. Use our police weapons. Use bricks. Kill as many as possible. Kill them by the dozen. Slaughter these people who have no right to be here in Paris, by the Seine, among our monuments, our trees, our women … Chases in the streets of Paris. Don’t think twice: throw them over, into the Seine. Broken bodies. Beaten with rifle butts and batons. Bodies hung in Bois de Vincennes. Seine full of corpses …”
And yet … Adimi, who was born in Algeria in 1986 and spent her early years in Grenoble, returned to Algeria in 1994 just as the Algerian Civil War was waging between the government and Islamic rebels. La sale guerre. Her novel, held together by way of suggestion, anecdote, humor and unblinking recognition, testifies to the sustaining power of story and memory, enduring beyond the forces that would snuff them out. Our Riches enacts the fragile but ardent spirit that Edmond Charlot served with a stubborn strength.
[Published by New Directions on April 28, 2020, 160 pages, $15.95 paperback]