The Paper House by Carlos María Domínguez, elegantly translated by Nick Caistor, is very short but packed with ideas. A book about books for lovers of great literature, it is a compelling blend of storytelling and philosophical reflection, written in a meditative way. It begins on a tragic note.
Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge professor working in the Hispanic Studies department, buys a secondhand copy of Emily Dikinson’s poems. As she reads on the street corner, she is knocked over by a car and killed. The summing up of the eulogy at her funeral causes an uproar, “Bluma devoted her life to literature, never dreaming it would take her from this world.”
“Books change people’s destinies”
The narrator, her colleague, receives a strange package covered with Uruguayan stamps meant for her. Inside there is a damaged copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, splattered with Portland cement and inscribed with a message to Carlos, a reclusive and obsessive book collector. Intrigued by the mystery, the narrator ends up going to South America to look for Carlos and to try to find out the link between him and Bluma.
“A man may conquer many books, but then a conqueror finds he has to administer them”
It turns out that Carlos owned thousands of books and became obsessed with them. He created a personal system of organizing his twenty thousand volumes based on relationships between the authors. For example, if they had quarrelled they could not be placed on the same shelf. He even arranged books on his bed in such a way that they reproduced the shape of a body. “We were all dumbfounded . . . Was he playing with then like a young girl plays with her dolls?”
After a fire destroys his index cabinet, even though his bookcases remain untouched, he sells his house and his life spirals out of control. He builds a shack made of cement and books on the coast of Uruguay, between a remote lagoon and the sea. “The cardboard, pasteboard and paper, bound and welded into the mortar, proved more resistant than anyone could have imagined.” The Shadow-Line was the only one not used in the construction of his house. Why?
“Over the years I have seen books used to prop up a table, known them make a beside table, piled up one above the other with a cloth over the top; many dictionaries have ironed and pressed things more often than they have been opened; and more than one book has kept letters, money and secrets hidden on their shelves. People can also change the destiny of books.”
Finishing The Paper House, I thought about how a love of reading can become an obsessive way to escape from life, especially when things go wrong. The danger arises when we stop using books as a way to understand the world and start using them as a replacement for it. The very thing that builds our identity can also be the thing that keeps us from living our lives. It reads like a parable about addiction.
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