An Aussie Coup In Paris

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday April 14, 2006

Reviewed by Mark Tewfik. Mark Tewfik is a London bookseller.

Left Bank Waltz

By Elaine Lewis

Vintage, 352pp, $27.95

THAT ELAINE LEWIS hasn't appeared on the national honours list seems an appalling oversight. She has just published her memoir of the 16 years spent planning and running the Australian Bookshop in Paris, and reading it makes this reviewer weep that more isn't being done to promote Australian literature abroad. I still shake my head every time I think about it.

The thought of the Australian Bookshop perched proudly along the Seine is an obvious measure of how far we've come in trying to shake off the dreaded cultural cringe. Ventures such as Lewis's are vital if we're ever going to clear this particular hurdle.

For all their wonder, European cities can be spirit crushing. Lewis's conviction and determination are, quite frankly, remarkable. She takes us through the whole journey - from the moment of inspiration, sitting in Paris watching the opera, through the return home, the endless paperwork, French lessons, making contacts, an initial trial six months in Paris, and the friends she made. Her coming of age in the face of French bureaucracy is a triumph all its own.

It's a funny mishmash of a book, which tries to hit a number of notes at the same time. The little things - such as including a recipe for chou rouge aux pommes, the parade of eccentric characters and the commissioning of an artist to create and build the shelves - all convey the wonder of living in Paris and the labour of love that the shop becomes. You get a good sense of Lewis's character through her prose, which is a little tentative in places, though it grows in confidence as the book unfolds. It's a well-balanced narrative and Lewis mostly reports the events, sticking to the trail of her story and digressing only to register the things that thrill and frustrate her.

To Lewis's pleasant surprise, as soon as she declares she wants to open the Australian Bookshop, people from all walks of French life express an interest and bemoan the lack of access to Australian literature (this was in the days before the internet). Perhaps taking her lead from Shakespeare & Co, George Whitman's famous Parisian bookstore, she staged a series of readings at the store and the shop quickly became a meeting point for Australian writers in Europe. The rollcall of names is a fascinating who's who of Australian literature in the 1990s. It's impossible to overstate the value of such a place for Australians and gratifying to read that it becomes exactly the type of place that Lewis set out to create and that Australia needs.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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