Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 18

On two occasions in recent years—or it might have been three—I have been approached at the Lisbon Book Fair by readers, in twos and threes, weighed down by dozens of new volumes, freshly purchased, usually still in their plastic wrappers. I asked the first of these who approached me what seemed the most logical question: whether he had come across my work recently and, it would appear, been overwhelmed by it. He replied no, that he had been reading my work for a long time but that he had got divorced, and his ex-wife—another enthusiastic reader—had taken the dismantled family’s library with her into her new life. It then occurred to me, and I wrote a few lines about this in the old Lanzarote Notebooks, that it would be interesting to study the subject from the point of view of what I described at the time as the significance of divorces in the multiplication of libraries. I acknowledge that this was a somewhat provocative idea, which was why I let it go, to save myself from accusations of putting my own material interests before others’ marital harmony. I don’t know, I can’t imagine, how many conjugal splits have led to the formation of new libraries without any harm befalling the old ones. Two or three cases—which are as many as I’m aware of—were not enough to make a summer, or, to spell it out, they were not enough to improve either the publisher’s profits nor the royalties I was able to extract.

What I frankly never expected was that the economic crisis that has kept us in a state of permanent alarm should have made divorces even more difficult, and therefore incidentally slowed down the intended arithmetical progression of libraries—and I’m sure we’d all agree that this represents a real crime against culture. What is to be said, for example, about the complex, often insoluble problem of finding a homebuyer nowadays? If so many divorce proceedings are stalled, if court cases do not go ahead, then this alone is the real reason. Worse still, how should one proceed against certain examples of scandalous behavior already in the public domain, such as the (regrettably common and utterly immoral) case of a couple still living in the same house, perhaps not sleeping in the same bed but using the same library? There is no longer any respect, no longer any sense of decorum—this is the wretched situation we have come to. No one ever says that Wall Street is to blame: in the television comedies they finance there is never a book to be seen.