Wang Xiaobo wrote in the "Golden Age": "I was twenty-one years old that day, and in the golden age of my life, I had many extravagant hopes. I want to love, I want to eat, and I want to become a half-light and half-dark cloud in the sky in an instant, and later I learned that life is a slow process of being hammered, people grow old day by day, and their extravagance disappears day by day, and finally become like a hammered cow. But I didn't foresee this on my twenty-first birthday. I felt like I was going to be fierce forever and couldn't hammer me with anything. ”
Life is a slowly hammered process. When we were young, we all thought we would be the way we wanted to be, and we all had a naïve imagination of the world.
But if one day we find that everything in the world is not what we imagined, even ourselves are not what we imagined, how can we continue to live?
"Library of Paris" tells the story of a girl who has experienced the stormy waves of life, re-acquainted herself, the world, and the truth of human nature.
Library of Paris by Janet Skesling Charles by Fan Deng Recommends CITIC Press Books ¥38.35 Purchase
In February 1939, in Paris, France, a girl named Audre attended an interview with a nervous heart, and she wanted to become a librarian at the Library of Ameliega in Paris. She likes the feeling of being surrounded by books, as long as she smells the musty smell of old books or the smell of ink wafting from newspapers, as if she were coming home.
Finally, she got her job, and a library journey began.
She longs to be a good librarian, to be a professional woman who can truly stand alone like the curator, Ms. Reed; to break through the traditional patriarchal thinking and make her father realize that he will find a soul mate like Beauvoir, rather than relying on blind dates to find a "stable meal ticket" for herself; eager to save reported Jewish readers in World War II, and guard the library, a spiritual refuge for people...
She was convinced that she was good, and that the obscure parts of human nature had nothing to do with her. She did not expect that she would one day be controlled by a thought, accidentally revealing the secret of her companion Margaret, causing her boyfriend Paul to do something that the other three people could not let go...
In all her grief, Audre ran away, married an American soldier, and became Mrs. Gustavson, and this guilt also accompanied her in a foreign land for the rest of her life.
At this time, a rebellious American girl, Lily, breaks into Audre's life.
A young girl trapped in the difficulties of life and an old man who has experienced vicissitudes is the spiritual exchange of two generations of women, and it is also a soul redemption that spans centuries, and it also makes a sedimentary and mottled history surface.
The Library of Amelia is not a fictional library of authors, but a library that has existed in history and is still in operation, and was founded in 1920 and is the largest English-language library on the European continent.
In the book, many of Audre's librarian colleagues are not fictional characters of the author, but real people in history.
Janet, the author who once served as a project manager at the Ameliega Library, borrowed Audre's eyes to record the story of the librarians who braved power during the Second World War and waited for the last spiritual harbor for the book lovers in the city of Paris, and also told the story of the small acts of kindness and hidden sins of ordinary people in that stormy era, the faint light and the wavering gray areas of human nature in that stormy era.
In this story, there are no Nazi officers who are purely ferocious beasts, there are no citizens of Paris who are absolutely just, there are just ordinary people, struggling between their ideals and desires, perseverance and abandonment.
Group photo of librarians of the Amiriga Library during World War II
The curator, Ms. Reed, who remained firmly at the library as german troops approached Paris, led the library into wartime mode shortly after the start of World War II, providing tens of thousands of books to soldiers who fought on the front lines.
The patron of the library, Countess Chambrun, as a nobleman who truly traveled the political and business circles, had a close personal relationship with President Roosevelt. In her deliberations, the library remained operational during the heat of the war. Librarian Boris was shot by the secret police in order to deliver books to Jewish readers, but fortunately was later rescued, and after the war, he smoked a cigarette and continued to work healthily in the library with a hole in the lungs until retirement, and lived to the age of 80. Dr. Fox, the Nazi censor, although in the Nazi camp, missed the pre-war free thought days and turned a blind eye to the "transgressions" of the library. Ms. Reid and Dr. Fox knew each other before the war, and it was their friendship and love of books that took them beyond politics and war and protected the library from destruction during the German occupation of Paris.
The war changed the city of Paris. Tens of thousands of whistle-blowing letters targeting Jews poured into police stations. People called those letters "crow letters." The people who sent those letters were none other than the reported person's friends, students, neighbors, and even relatives. Many wealthy Jews were arrested temporarily, leaving themselves in their empty luxury apartments in Paris. Those apartments became secret strongholds for the lovers of the private meetings of the parisians.
After the war, the Germans withdrew from Paris, leaving behind a large number of Parisians with whom they had had contacts, businesses, and even personal contacts. Parisians, living in chronic mental tension and material deprivation, spilled their anger against the Nazis on their innocent compatriots. Some women were suspected of having an affair with German soldiers, shaved their heads, paraded naked in the streets, and held their recently born children.
Poverty, jealousy and hatred were spreading, and librarians were still holding on to the library.
Audre saved some lives and left behind regrets that she will never forget.
In this story, the author does not make a moral judgment on everything that happens, but in an immersive way, provides a lot of details for the choice between each person's thoughts, and restores the real life of people in special times.
The complexity of human nature, light and darkness, all kinds of subtle details, are vividly displayed under the curtain of war.
Some people died, some people died suddenly, some people disappeared.
But people still exchange rations for chocolate on the black market, newlyweds go to jewelry stores early in the morning to get wedding rings, and teenage wounded soldiers gossip at the rear hospital.
As the author writes in the afterword, she wants to share this little-known chapter of history with the reader in this story, and she wants to explore the relationship between people and people, what makes us what we are now, how we help each other, and how we hurt each other. You could say it's a war story, but peeling back the shell of a shell, it's ultimately a story of growth and life.
In some times, many people say "I complain", but few people say "I repent"; in some times, many people say "I repent", but few people say "I complain".
Audre, who lived alone in her twilight years, also became what young girls longed to be. She saw the reef of human nature, learned to remain calm in the midst of surging public opinion, and never stopped reflecting on the past. She can finally speak freely about the mistakes she made when she was young, and no longer evade or make excuses for herself. She had despised some people, and she had become the kind of person she despised, and in the end, she accepted the unbearable self.
She didn't become a mainstay of the cultural world like the librarian, she didn't find the soul mate she dreamed of, she didn't even become the self she thought she wouldn't hurt anyone. Life hammered her hard, but she did not fall into decadence. On the contrary, the hammer of life allowed her to see herself as she really was and learned to control her desires. She gave up the naïve but shallow fantasies of her youth and became a mature woman who truly thought independently and dared to be different. The hammer of life leaves not only scars, but also marks of growth.
"When I was younger, I thought I was the wind. It wasn't until I was finally covered in scales and wounds that I didn't know when I was old that, in fact, we were all grass. In whichever direction the wind blows, the grass falls. ”
In the tide of fate, we, who are like grass seeds, may not be able to stop the direction of the tide. However, even a grass seed can determine how it germinates and how it grows.
If you have also experienced moments of disillusionment in your growth, and you have also regretted a regret in the past, you may find the true meaning of growth in the Library of Paris.