The Readers' Room E-Book

Antoine Laurain

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 192

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When the manuscript of a debut crime novel arrives at a Parisian publishing house, everyone in the readers' room is convinced it's something special. And the committee for France's highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt, agrees. But when the shortlist is announced, there's a problem for editor Violaine Lepage: she has no idea of the author's identity. Yet there are clues in the book that point to a close connection with her own life. As the police begin to investigate a series of murders strangely reminiscent of those recounted in the book, Violaine is not the only one looking for answers - but with her memory impaired after an accident, she might be the last to find them.

Leseprobe

Antoine Laurain lives in Paris. His award-winning novels have been translated into over twenty languages and have sold more than 150,000 copies in English. The President’s Hat was a Waterstones Book Club and Indies Introduce selection, and The Red Notebook was on the Indie Next list.

Jane Aitken is a publisher and translator from the French.

Emily Boyce is an editor and in-house translator at Gallic Books.

Polly Mackintosh is an editorial assistant and in-house translator at Gallic Books.

Praise for Vintage 1954:

‘A glorious time-slip caper … Just wonderful’ Daily Mail

‘Delightfully nostalgic escapism set in a gorgeously conjured Paris of 1954’ Sunday Mirror

‘Like fine wine, Laurain’s novels get better with each one he writes. Vintage 1954 is a charming and warm-hearted read’ Phaedra Patrick, author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

Praise for Smoking Kills:

‘Funny, superbly over-the-top … not a page too much’ The Times

‘Formidable – and essential packing for any French summer holiday’ Daily Mail

‘A brisk black comedy … Laurain’s considered tale retains an elegant detachment … And it does, fittingly, make cigarettes seem seductive again, even to committed non-smokers’ The Observer

Praise for The Red Notebook:

‘A clever, funny novel … a masterpiece of Parisian perfection’ HRH The Duchess of Cornwall

‘This is in equal parts an offbeat romance, detective story and a clarion call for metropolitans to look after their neighbours … Reading The Red Notebook is a little like finding a gem among the bric-a-brac in a local brocante’ The Telegraph

‘Resist this novel if you can; it’s the very quintessence of French romance’ The Times

‘Soaked in Parisian atmosphere, this lovely, clever, funny novel will have you rushing to the Eurostar post-haste … A gem’ Daily Mail

‘An endearing love story written in beautifully poetic prose. It is an enthralling mystery about chasing the unknown, the nostalgia for what could have been, and most importantly, the persistence of curiosity’ San Francisco Book Review

Praise for The President’s Hat:

‘A hymn to la vie Parisienne … enjoy it for its fabulistic narrative, and the way it teeters pleasantly on the edge of Gallic whimsy’ The Guardian

‘Flawless … a funny, clever, feel-good social satire with the page-turning quality of a great detective novel’ Rosie Goldsmith

‘A fable of romance and redemption’ The Telegraph

‘Part eccentric romance, part detective story … this book makes perfect holiday reading’ The Lady

‘Its gentle satirical humor reminded me of Jacques Tati’s classic films, and, no, you don’t have to know French politics to enjoy this novel’ Library Journal

The Readers’ Room

ANTOINE LAURAIN

Also by Antoine Laurain:

Vintage 1954

Smoking Kills

The Portrait

French Rhapsody

The Red Notebook

The President’s Hat

The Readers’ Room

ANTOINE LAURAIN

Translated by Gallic Books(Jane Aitken/ Emily Boyce/ Polly Mackintosh)

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Le Service des manuscrits

by Flammarion, 2020

Copyright © Flammarion, Paris, 2020

English translation copyright © Gallic Books, 2020

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,

London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805333562

Typeset in Fournier MT Pro by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Contents

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART I

Marcel Proust opened his heavy-lidded eyes and gave her a look that was kindly, with a touch of irony, as if to say he knew why she was there. Violaine stared at the author of In Search of Lost Time – those dark circles under his eyes, that impeccably combed moustache, the jet-black hair. He was wearing his sealskin coat and sitting on a wooden chair, right beside her bed. His right hand rested on the ivory and silver handle of his cane, while his left smoothly stroked the gleaming pelt of the coat. Violaine turned her head on the pillow and saw that her room was filled with silent, almost immobile visitors. The man in the beige polo neck with wild hair and that strange goatee but no moustache could only be Georges Perec. A black cat perched on a table was enjoying his caresses, showing its appreciation by extending its muzzle towards him. They were looking at each other as if conversing by telepathy.

In cords and a faded denim shirt, Michel Houellebecq stood by the window, gazing into the distance. He was drawing very slowly on a cigarette, wreathed in a cloud of blue smoke. With his stringy hair, long at the back, and his thin lips, he looked like an old witch.

Violaine wanted to call out, ‘Michel!’ but no sound came from her lips.

She hadn’t noticed at first, but there was also a young woman sitting at the foot of her bed, staring at the wall and murmuring things that Violaine could not hear. The woman’s hair was loosely knotted, and with her long white dress and profile like a cameo brooch, she was easily recognisable as Virginia Woolf. Violaine closed her eyes then reopened them. They were all still there. She turned towards the other window and there against the light could be seen the tall figure of Patrick Modiano. He appeared to be in urgent conversation with a blonde girl in a black dress, whose face Violaine could not see. He was having to lean over so that he was on the girl’s level. The girl nodded.

‘Patrick …’ Violaine would have liked to say. But once again, not a word passed her lips. However, Modiano did turn slowly towards her and studied her anxiously. He smiled slightly and put a finger to his lips.

‘She opened her eyes … She’s coming round.’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Go and get Professor Flavier. Everything’s fine, you are not alone,’ the voice went on. And Violaine wanted to reply that no, she was definitely not alone. Proust, Houellebecq, Perec, Woolf and Modiano were with her.

Two million French people dream of having their book published if the surveys that have appeared over the years are to be believed. Most of them never get round to actually writing the book. Their draft stays in their head all their lives – a dream that they like to entertain on holiday. Except that they always choose swimming in the pool, or checking the temperature of the barbecue over sitting at a table in the gloom of the house to reread the pages they wrote the day before by the light of their computer screen. They will often talk about the book they have in their head. At first their nearest and dearest are admiring, then, seeing the years pass with nothing produced, they exchange knowing glances every time the would-be author, looking resolute, mentions their upcoming book by saying, ‘I’m going to sit down and write it this summer.’ But nothing will be written that summer. Nor the next. And certainly not in winter. All those phantom books form a sort of enveloping cloud around literature like the ozone layer around the earth.

Those who will never write more than three pages and an outline are, on the whole, harmless. No readers’ room will ever be troubled by their manuscripts arriving in the post. Some other aspiring authors will decide to get down to it properly. Whether it takes them three months or five years of their life, they want to see and to hold in their hands that thick rectangle of white paper, spiral-bound, with, on the cover, a title and their name in Times New Roman size 25 and also the little words ‘A Novel’. Their manuscript. This copy, when it has finally been printed out, from the cover page to the very last sentence, will be the fruit of sleepless nights, of rising at dawn, of notes scribbled down in the metro or in airports, of ideas that came to them suddenly in the shower or in the middle of a business lunch like an attacking wasp. The only way to deal with them will have been to write them down as quickly as possible – either jotted down in a red Moleskine, or in Notes on their phone. These sudden ideas will have been crucial for the novel. Or not.

For those people who persevere all the way to ‘The End’ but know no one in the publishing world, the day will come when they have to send their manuscript out to editors. One morning or evening they will go to a photocopy shop, and ask for ten or twenty copies of their work with a transparent cover, a cardboard back (black or white) and plastic spiral binding (black or white). There are only two colours available. When they get home with their carrier bag as heavy as a little dead donkey, it will be time to slip their covering letter into each copy. Like a letter of recommendation – but from themselves!

Some letters – the kind Violaine prefers – are very simple. Others are unbearably pretentious, claiming for the work a place somewhere between James Joyce and Maurice G. Dantec, or Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway. Still others will imply that they know someone influential, without specifying whom – as if that constitutes a veiled threat. The hint of a power that can immediately be invoked in the event that the manuscript is turned down. Violaine kept the funniest, the most ridiculous and the most pathetic in a file in her office for the readers’ room archive. The file was labelled ‘Insects’ which might be taken to mean the file contained information on beetles. But if you knew Violaine, you knew that ‘insect’ – actually a very ordinary little word – was, when she said it, the ultimate insult.

Phrases such as ‘That other insect emailed me this morning …’ or directly to someone’s face, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to? Insect …’ peppered the speech, usually so refined and friendly, of the elegant forty-something whom everyone found so charming with her green eyes and reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair.

To be called ‘Insect’ by Violaine Lepage, editor and head of manuscript services, was to be consigned to the lowest form of humanity; it would have been preferable to be a stone. Even authors, journalists, editors, photographers, film producers and agents were not immune from being labelled ‘insects’. Once you became an insect, you would be an insect all your life, there was no antidote for that metamorphosis. No return to grace was possible. The status of insect was conferred on you in perpetuity. That was how Violaine operated. She had reigned over her manuscript domain for more than twenty years, having started as a reader before ascending through the hierarchy.

The would-be author was never an insect, nor really a man or a woman. They were not identified by face or age or job. All they were was a name – possibly not even their own – at the top of the first page of their manuscript. What did it matter whether you were called Damien Perron or Nathalie Lefort, Leila Alaoui or Marc Da Silva, whether you were born in 1996 or 1965, if you were a waiter in a brasserie or senior management at AXA, if your family had lived in the Auvergne for ten generations or you were a second-generation immigrant? What mattered was your text; the text you would dispatch one grey morning or one evening from your local post office, where you had been going for ever to send registered letters and formal correspondence, but which that day would take on a special significance. That day you would be more aware of the other people than usual; you would not want them looking over your shoulder and seeing the names of the publishing houses written on the thick brown envelopes along with the words ‘For the attention of the manuscript service’ like a declaration of helplessness, a sign that you don’t have enough influence to get your manuscript read by any other means. The scale will tell you how much postage is needed for the weight and destination of your parcel, all you have to do is press the button for ‘No. of parcels’. And the number you enter will be the number of publishers you are entrusting your innards to, your child, the companion of your nights, the torment of your early mornings. Your masterpiece.

Finally, there will be a huge pile which will need both hands to carry out of the post office, and then you will feed the envelopes one by one into the relevant postbox. Usually the destination will be Paris. With two or three exceptions, all the publishers who count have a Parisian address. The dull thud as they land at the bottom of the dark interior of the postbox will perhaps give you the disagreeable sensation that you have just thrown your novel in the bin. Who will care? Who will bother responding? So you will hastily shove the remaining copies into the letterbox as if getting rid of a corpse in the woods at the dead of night.

Once home, you will pour yourself a big glass of wine or whisky. You will feel like crying but you won’t, nor will you tell any of your nearest and dearest about your painful postal experience. You won’t speak of it, in the same way that you don’t tell anyone when you have done something bad for fear that you will be judged, or worse that you will judge yourself as you recount your misdeed.

‘Did you send your manuscript off?’ someone will ask you that evening.

‘Yes,’ will be all you say before changing the subject.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Violaine … Lepage.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘I’m an editor. Where did they go?’

‘Who?’

‘… Where am I?’

‘In hospital, in Paris. Everything’s going to be fine. Rest now, I’ll come back later.’

Violaine closed her eyes.

‘There’s no such thing as an undiscovered genius.’ Violaine often murmured that phrase like a mantra, as her green eyes scanned first the packages strewn over her desk each morning – the publisher received between ten and fifteen every day – and then the manuscripts piled up on the shelves waiting to be read. Behind each one, a life; behind each one, hope. Every day that a manuscript remains on the shelf is another day of anguish for its author who, every morning, expects to receive a letter in response, or an email or phone call. Their story has captivated the publisher; literature, so long deprived of the author’s great talent, will now be properly served.

Five hundred thousand rejections a year, across all publishing houses. What becomes of all those stories? All those fictional characters? The public will never know them, and soon they will be forgotten by the professional readers of publishers’ manuscript services. Nothingness awaits them, like those defunct satellites drifting in outer space which even the Deep Space Network no longer monitors. Most authors want their precious manuscript to be returned to them. They can supply a small fortune’s worth of stamps so that the publisher will send it back. Or they can go to the publishing house themselves and collect it. Few choose that option. They have dreamed of going to the publisher to be greeted with warm anticipation, to be offered a seat in a large armchair, to say yes, they would like a cup of coffee, to talk a bit about themselves and their book, and finally to produce a beautiful fountain pen and to sign their first contract which they believe – sometimes correctly – will mark the beginning of a new life. So, to go in and ask at reception for the return of their rejected manuscript which an intern would retrieve and hand over with an embarrassed smile and a ‘have a good day’ would be more than they could bear.

‘Madame, I am disappointed that you and your publishing house have not seen fit to take on a manuscript as good as mine. This speaks volumes about the state of our country and its literary culture. It is for that reason that I no longer read French novels and haven’t for a long time …’

‘You obviously enjoy turning down the manuscripts of good people and just publish people you know. Editors are scum. Enemies of the people!’

‘I have received my manuscript back from you in the post. I placed a hair on page 357 and I see that it is still there. You haven’t read my work. I know that publishers never read any submissions.’

Anonymous: ‘To the Manuscript Service: you can all go and fuck yourselves!’

‘I have decided to end my life. Only the publication of my book could persuade me that life is worth living.’

‘I am going to call my friend who is a politician and I think you will see that I’m not just anyone.’

‘All my friends and family tell me my book is amazing! You’re depriving the world of a wonderful story and your publishing house is missing out on a big success.’

Letters as colourful as those are rare. They form part of a file within the ‘Insects’ file labelled ‘Sometimes they write back!’

The point of a publisher’s manuscript service is to find new authors and to publish them. This mission is accomplished two or three times a year. And when it happens, it makes up for all those hours spent reading the prose of strangers, those thousands of opened envelopes, hundreds of reports written, thousands of form letters sent all over the country and sometimes across the world. ‘We are sorry to inform you that we will not be publishing your book because despite its many qualities it does not fit our lists.’ Yes, two or three times a year the readers’ room erupts. A murmured ‘I think we have something here’ is often the first sign.

That’s what happened six months ago with Camille Désencres’s Sugar Flowers. A text of 170 pages, bound with its transparent cover and cardboard back, sent for the kind attention of the manuscript service. Marie, the youngest of the readers, opened it after she had read the very simple covering letter: ‘Hello, my name is Camille Désencres, I hope you will like my book. Best wishes CD.’ At page 27 she uttered the words, ‘I think we have something here.’ Stéphane and Murielle looked up. An hour and a half later Marie had finished Sugar Flowers.

‘Well?’ asked Stéphane.

Marie smiled then uncapped her pen and drew a sun on the cover. ‘More like a heatwave, in fact,’ she said.

There were three symbols used in the manuscripts department.

Square: reject.

Crescent moon: not uninteresting, worth reworking – or the author could submit another text which would be considered favourably.

Sun: publish as soon as possible.

The normal procedure on discovering such a gem from the mass of manuscripts was for the reader to rise immediately from their desk, to leave one of the four reading cubicles and walk the ten metres to knock on Violaine’s door. But the day Sugar Flowers was discovered, Violaine was on a business trip to London.

‘Hello Violaine, it’s Marie. I think I have found a sun in the manuscripts. Could you let me know how we should proceed since you won’t be back for another four days?’

The message remained unanswered for several hours, but then a text arrived, ‘Wonderful, Marie. I trust your judgement, but since I won’t be able to read it straight away, get Béatrice to read it as soon as possible. Keep me posted.’

‘I’ll have it taken to Béatrice and let you know.’

Béatrice was the fourth member of the reading room. And, at seventy-five years old, the eldest. Violaine valued her experience and knowledge of contemporary literature. She too had come to the manuscript department via the post, but for once, the envelope had not contained a heavy stack of bound paper, just a simple letter, beautifully phrased and very moving. She explained that she read on average four books a week, and wrote a reader’s report for each one, just for fun. Should the publishing house need a manuscript reader, perhaps she could make herself useful. It would be a great pleasure for her since her days had been free for a very long time. She also said that she lived five minutes away from the publisher. Violaine had contacted her and said she would drop in after a lunch, adding ‘I’ll make a note of the code for your apartment block and the floor you’re on,’ only to be told there wasn’t one and she should just ring the bell.

There was only one bell with no name. When Violaine rang and announced herself, the heavy door opened onto what appeared to be the principal room of a house. There were Persian carpets, Louis XV armchairs and what looked like a Canaletto on the wall. It might have been a copy, but Violaine did not think so. ‘Come up, Madame Lepage, I’m on the first floor!’

Violaine was a little disconcerted by the abrupt change from the outside world to this luxurious interior. She crossed the room which led into another with a tiled floor. And beyond that there was a large sunny garden at the end of which you could make out a flower-covered arbour and a swing seat. Violaine had not known that such an incredible place could exist less than five minutes from the manuscript service. She went up a wide wooden staircase and found herself in an immense drawing room covered in cashmere hangings where the tables and dressers were decorated with fine glass or bronze ornaments. A woman with short white hair and dark glasses sat on a sofa, an incredibly well-toned young man in shorts and T-shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail, by her side. ‘Come over … I’m sorry I can’t get up, I have trouble walking. It’s so kind of you to take the trouble to come here,’ said Béatrice.

Violaine shook her hand, noticing the rings, one diamond, one ruby, each the size of a dice, then sat down on one of the armchairs.

Béatrice introduced the young man: ‘Marc – I couldn’t do without him,’ and Marc smiled politely.

As they drank a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee,

Béatrice told Violaine which books she had read recently and others she had read previously. She remembered reading Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever when it had appeared in 1994 and how she had straight away concluded that he would go far. Marc passed Violaine some reports on novels that had just been published. Béatrice was obviously very good at analysing a text, highlighting the negative and positive aspects.

‘I would be very happy to send you over some manuscripts and then we will see if we can work together. And if it works out I will have to give you a salary.’

‘I couldn’t accept payment,’ said Béatrice.

‘Yes, you must,’ insisted Violaine.

‘But, you see … I own the whole of this street,’ murmured Béatrice.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Yes, there are still some old Parisian families who were able to keep their family’s inheritance intact across the generations. This street is not all that big.’

‘You mean all the buildings in the street belong to you?’

‘Yes, all the residents are my tenants. I have never worked, and that’s enabled me to read thousands of books.’