No one understands the importance of this quiet place called the “public” library (the adjective is essential), like a wounded scholar from a working-class family. In the past, books – literature, knowledge – were only accessible to a privileged few, from families with a certain purchasing power and cultural education. Thanks to the welfare state and growing literacy in the last century, access to education, despite the inequalities that still hinder education, has been democratized. Librarians and teachers are often excellent midwives for new (and unexpected) readers.
Looking at the profile of Ali Smith (Inverness, 1962) – father an electrician and mother a bus driver, youngest of a family of five brothers and sisters raised in social housing – it is not surprising that she knows well its role in training and, even more, in life. His latest book published in Spanish, public library (2015; Nórdica, 2024, transl. Magdalena Palmer), is, in part, a tribute and a vindication: in a context where the United Kingdom is beginning to run out of libraries – many public libraries have closed their doors or become “community libraries,” a euphemism for run and funded by volunteers” – the author asks friends and colleagues what these spaces mean to them.
Places to escape
The result is a compilation of brief statements, reproduced in italics in odd-numbered chapters, in which they share their personal memory of public libraries and reflect on their social role. Contrary to what usually happens in what is called bookish books (or books about books) of commercial quality, its words go beyond simply uncritically celebrating the benefits of reading and the beauty of the love of books. Because libraries are not just about that: they are “the only place where you can simply show up, a free and democratic place where everyone can come in and be there without needing money”. […]. With people of all ages.
These are the words of Helen, the daughter of novelist Kate Atkinson. The latter says that the York Children’s Library had to issue her an adult pass at the age of six because she had borrowed too many books. He is not the only well-known name to collaborate with Ali Smith on this book: “I see the public library system as a kind of living, caring organism,” explains Helen Oyeyemi, for whom the three libraries of her childhood were “a protective space”. triangular. » Kamila Shamsie also expresses herself in this sense, defining them as “places of escape”, in addition to emphasizing that there is perhaps “no better way to observe the changes in oneself than through the books that our eyes previously neglected and that now “they have captivated us.
The other friends are less well known around here, but that doesn’t matter, because in this book, like in the public library, everyone is equal. Sophie Mayer, author of a collection of poems inspired by the heroines of television series, includes the library card as one of the weapons of the protagonist of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Libraries save the world, a lot, but outside the narrative mode of heroism: through contemplative, anonymous and collective action.” Pat Hunter, a librarian for 40 years, remembers that as a child in the 1930s, “registration was only allowed from the age of seven. In 1939, I did it with great respect and emotion. For her, “libraries have always been present in our civilizations”, therefore “they are not negotiable. “They are part of our heritage.”
Others emphasize its value in their sentimental education, like Anna Ridley, who, as a young woman, became enthusiastic about the Marquis de Sade: “I don’t know what horrified me the most: that my mother had him found it or think that the librarian had found it. I knew from the start what I was “wearing”. The librarians, discreet when necessary, also play an active role with certain users, like Emma Wilson, who remembers a case from her childhood: “He gave me the impression that I alone worried about it. Choosing books each week was like an introduction to the dreams I could have.
And of course there is no shortage of learning: “For me, libraries represent the chance to learn,” says Claire Jennings. Faced with the impotence due to the impossibility of reading everything that some people experience, he designates these accidental and intuitive discoveries as a rebellion against regulated and enriching knowledge for the reader: “As if an inner compass led us to places that we had never visited. I imagined we could visit. […] “Libraries can get you out of your way in the best way possible. » They discovered another vocation in her: she changed chemistry for philosophy.
At the edge of (non)reality
These testimonies, in reality, are only part public library: Ali Smith incorporated them after she had already completed the stories she planned to publish; The social urgency of budget cuts demanded it. The majority, the even episodes, are short fiction, a genre of which he had already published four collections, including his first, free love (1995). They do not have the scale of his last novels, like How to be both (2014) or the Seasonal quartet (2016-2020), but they share identity traits, namely: formal experimentation, the links between past and present, and the notion of limit, transformation, crossing borders in more than one way. Oh, and his touch of humor.
Almost always in the first person of a reader who could be herself, and breaking the patterns of conventional narrative (it must be said: Ali Smith is a very particular writer, very postmodern), each story explores in its own way this idea, with which so many writers identify, of being between two worlds. Conversations with his deceased father – the author’s father died in 2010 –, analog customs that no longer exist, dreams, imaginary friends or machines that respond to humans are some of his axes. It is not surprising that some texts are titled End, beyond either Another party’s art.
There is also a strong presence of bookish motifs, such as the desire to know the origin of words, the study of history or, more directly, the appearance of writers with first and last names as a narrative element, like Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. or DH Lawrence, especially in The ex-wife, where the narrator paints a curious portrait of her ex linked to the obsession she felt for the Australian author. And, as usual with Ali Smith, the scholarly coexists with the popular, nature with the virtual, the past with the present, which is why figures like Tarantino, Annie Lennox or the group The Springfields also appear; There are many traces of audiovisual culture.
“I spent my whole life trying to get somewhere else,” says one of the characters. Someone who observes how local businesses are replaced first by shopping malls and then by digitalization feels something similar. We live between two worlds, between the material and the uncertain, between practical concerns and the fictions that we construct for ourselves (sometimes through art, sometimes by pure survival instinct). This idea is paired with libraries, these spaces which are more than a warehouse of documents: spaces which protect and open horizons, where you do not need to say what you are doing or open your wallet, where you can take and share. “I look at the closed door. “Things change when people come and go.” And those that have books, like those in public libraries, are always open.
