Good Book ( )

Historical fiction written and researched very well. This novel is a fictional portrait of the life of real American ex-pat Sylvia Beach, who opened a famous English-language bookstore and library in Paris in 1919, just after World War I, and also published its first and only book: James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses, which in its serial parts had been banned in the United States. The store, which Sylvia called Shakespeare and Company, was inspired by the Parisian bookstore—eventually called La Maison des Amis des Livres—run by Adrienne Monnier, the woman who would become Sylvia’s lover. When the two stores were across the street from each other on rue de l’Odéon, all the bright lights in the French and English literary worlds converged; Adrienne coined the term for the two stores together: Odeonia. Shakespeare and Company drew all the literary ex-pats living in France during a time in which censorship and morality crusades (the Comstock Act, Prohibition, etc.) made writing life in the United States inhospitable to many artists in terms of censorship and sponsorship. The real patrons of Odeonia were a who’s who of the literary literati—Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, to name a few—and these people appear in the pages of this novel to varying degrees.

The story is written in the third person from Sylvia’s viewpoint, and Ms. Maher convincingly fills in the fictional dialogues and Sylvia’s internal struggles when she is working tirelessly to bring Ulysses to print and her interactions with Joyce himself during the finishing of the writing, the revisions, the printing, and an ugly period when Joyce got Random House to publish it in the United States, cutting Sylvia out of the monetary rewards she might have easily gotten if she had not been a woman. The story seemed to sag in a few places; otherwise, it would have been a five-star review. ( )

It's the story of Sylvia Beach, a women's rights activist, a bookseller, the woman who was the first to produce Ulysses when no male publisher cared and nearly perished in the process.
In 1919 Sylvia opened her bookshop 'Shakespeare and Company'. She did this with the support of her friend and later partner Adrienne Monnier, who already had a French bookshop where French authors and intellectuals came and went. This encouraged Sylvia to open an English-language bookshop. Not only did the French authors support her, but she soon counted American and English authors among her friends. On the one hand, she ran the bookshop as a kind of lending library and on the other, she also sold the books.
Everything was going well until James Joyce came to her, who was looking to get his book Ulysses published somehow. In America, the first chapters were already among the 'forbidden books'. There was no chance that his work would ever be published. Joyce was a very unpleasant contemporary. Many of Sylvia's friends called him the false Jesus. He took the worst possible advantage of his fellow human beings and disappeared when he had to pay his debts.
Sylvia, however, felt that she had to support him and threw herself into an adventure as a publisher, but also into debt and hopelessness until her health suffered.

I was very impressed by this story. I also didn't realise that at the beginning of the 20th century, same-sex love and cohabitation were not a problem in France.
I can warmly recommend this book. ( )

I did enjoy this book very much but I found it too easy to devolve into skim reading it.

This is the story of Sylvia Beach and the start of her bookstore Shakespeare and Company (which I think I visited when I passed through Paris in the early 90s). She definitely was someone who had a goal and sallied forth to try to achieve it. She was definitely fortunate in getting support from others but there was a lot of work that she needed to put in herself.

One of the reasons I particularly was inclined to read this book rather than leave it until 2024 was that I'm planning on gifting it to my mother for Christmas. I don't quite know whether it's something she'd enjoy but I'll give her the choice. The main source of my hesitation is that I don't think she has any interest in Ulysses by James Joyce and there's a lot of the book that revolves around it's publication as well as Joyce himself. I don't think she'd be particularly impressed by the way he's presented. Still the setting may outweigh.

As other reviews have mentioned there was a lot of name dropping but it was woven into the text quite nicely. ( )

Although I am not usually a historical fiction reader, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
The liberalism of the times, the Paris setting and the cameos of emerging writers visiting Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop were really engaging. Sylvia’s own development as a businesswoman as early as 1919 made for a compelling central character.
Although Sylvia is affected by a lack of confidence, she is really brave in running her own business and supporting the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that had been banned for obscenity. Joyce is depicted as as a self centred, heartless bastard who doesn’t share the same integrity when it comes to business agreements and publishing. A lot of the authors who come into Sylvia’s orbit can also be considered as egotistical and unstable. Sylvia is continually forgiving and supportive. Sylvia and her partner, Adrienne act as patrons of many artists.
This was a really interesting look at Paris and the literary arts in the early 20th century. ( )