Shelfies #57: Mazin Saleem

Bookshelves are other people’s. Or were for me as a kid, though I suspect too for many of us from first-gen literary homes. You knew them from school (or shops) or the houses of friends, or at most a freestanding bookcase at the odd relative’s.

One uncle, a devotee of science fiction from its pre-prestigious days, had a case you browsed not to borrow the books but coo at their front covers (a Plutonian ice-henge!) Or to snack on back cover after cover, from a time when the blurb alone was enough to transport you (“It is not like our world: it has a central river with an unknown end. Reborn there is every last soul who ever lived on Earth...”). 

Growing up, I found bookshelves kept their potential energy. They didn’t house the husks of old ideas. That all the authors on them remained my senior didn’t make them only rungs to the past—the opposite. Finding Sartre’s The Age of Reason in a cargo-wood bookcase on the sunned low landing of stairs in a stranger’s house, I felt glad to have my whole life ahead to read it. I’ve still not, with half as much life left.

The first bookshelf I called my own I built myself, slotting it under the castle-slit of a window in a room so boxy it lowered my portion of rent. Flatpack bookcases were raised next. Who was it I said to that the full one at the end of the bed was overbearing meaning ‘looming’ but who thought I meant ‘intimidating’?

With your own bookshelves come questions, like how to stack. Alphabetically means recurrent shunting and stuffing. By colour is for those who live in Monocle magazine. And whether contrived hierarchy or random ‘order’, it doesn’t escape vanity: escape perceived intimidation. (Imagine if in the days of CDs you arranged your music collection covers-outwards…) I tried once turning my books front-to-back. “The only decent way to stack them is not to show their spines,” I explained to someone. (“You mean,” she said, “spinelessly?”)

The question has become moot in recent interesting times. Either side of the pandemic I moved enough I had to store most of my books at my parents’, and what I’ve gained since goes wherever there’s space and is hardly representative. But still stands testament.

Some books are mementos of serendipity; I’d been wondering after the enigmatic ‘O Time thy pyramids’ in the short story ‘The Library of Babel, when a flick-through a copy of Borges’s Selected Poems sprang me a clue that sent me to the all-answering central book of that labyrinthine library. Meanwhile Caspar Henderson’s Borges-inspired The Book of Barely Imagined Beings records the archetypal ‘great second-hand find’: an unplanned stop at a used bookstore; a title I’d never heard of; and a pristine copy with a poignant inscription: “For Freddy and the wild and wonderful adventures in your future!” A nature book whose every chapter branches from its headline creature into the wild and wonderful, it gets that biology as much as physics has its epic and lyric sides.

Other books are mementos of calamity. I wish there were a non-morbid way to get Sallie Tisdale’s Advice for the Dying (or Advice for Future Corpses as it’s crisply titled in America) for all my friends and family—for anyone who’s grieved or will, i.e. everyone. Written by a Buddhist nurse, it’s a How-To on getting through “the distinguished thing”, a Tibetan Book of the Dead but not for the shuffled-off but the muddling-on: the living (or, as Sallie Tisdale might say, the living for now).

Her practical compassion covers the big questions and small details. Jen George’s short story ‘Guidance/The Party’ from her collection The Babysitter at Rest is similarly capacious, to the point of anthemic. So much so I’ll drop my line against metaphorical criticism (“To watch this film is to gorge on cake!”) and liken the story’s voice-of-a-generation encapsulation and elegiac closing lines to hearing LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’ come on at the end of a night.

If that story sounds too much like it’s from what Charlie Brooker called “Planet Fucking Now”, then there’s Harry Mulisch’s World War II novel The Assault. Years ago I’d trudged to the end of his reputedly best book, The Discovery of Heaven,with Olympian unmet expectations (it’s supposed to be about the discovery of heaven for God’s sake). A lesson in giving writers you’ve not liked once a second go: a hallelujahing review of The Assault jostled me to retry Mulisch. And while the rest of the novel is thoughtful and admirable, its first fifty pages are as great as literature gets. Which suggests a further lesson, in the quieter role of your bookshelves. Waiting on them, standing by, are those books that you haven’t read yet but that already contain writing that’ll redirect the course of your reading life.

To read more by Mazin Saleem on books, as well as music and films and working in the arts, subscribe to his Substack newsletter Artless. He’s also the author of The Prick - a comic novel about a snorkler whose life is saved by his worst nightmare - and its follow-up The Pricklet, in which a baby boy learns how to be a real man — both available from wherever you order books.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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