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writerlibrarian's review against another edition
4.0
Paris. The 1920's, right after the first war. The memoirs of one of the members of what is now known as the "Lost Generation". American writers, poets, painters, musicians that found themselves in Paris at that time. They all at one point entered Sylvia Beach's bookshop "Shakespeare & Company". Hemingway, Stein... but the focus of Beach's professional life was Joyce. She published Ulysses when no one would. She worked herself to death for the man. She mothered him, supported him financially. The book tells the tales of all those talented people, American, Irish, British and French artists that haunted "Rue Odéon" during those years either at Shakespeare & Company or on the other side of the street at Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, Sylvia's partner in life and work. This period in time fascinates me and I come back and read about from time to time. This book is very much focused on Joyce and his work. It's entertaining but you need to be a little familiar with the names and the work of the artists Sylvia talks about. At the time Beach published her memoirs, the names were famous. Now only a few ring bells with the general public. Riley's book on the period "Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation" gives a more detailed account and analysis of this amazing period in time when writing, books, music were all done with a burning passion, and language and nationality didn't matter.
ktinka's review against another edition
3.0
At first I found it very intriguing, especially how Ulysses by Joyce was published and the struggles they faced. However the books is a bit too full of small episodes that consist of name dropping only.
kathycz's review against another edition
4.0
I'm fascinated by Sylvia Beach after reading this little memoir. It's not very organized, and there's clearly a lot more to the story of Paris's famous English language bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, which Beach, an American expat, ran from 1919 until the Nazis shut it down in 1941. The fact that Beach spent 6 months in an internment camp, for example, is breezed over as quickly as that. Next stop: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noel Riley Fitch.
amb's review against another edition
4.0
I will agree with other reviewers that the structure and tone of this is very conversational and anecdotal at times, I found it very engaging (and also very modernist in terms of feeling quite stream-of-consciousness) and fitting for what and who she was writing about.
This book is so interesting from a literary and historical perspective, chronicling the literary movement in Paris in the nineteen twenties through the realities of Paris during nazi occupation in wwii, and the way that so many of these iconic literary figures were not just involved in Beach’s life, but how these relationships and these people fared in wwii.
I absolutely recommend it as a fascinating memoir
This book is so interesting from a literary and historical perspective, chronicling the literary movement in Paris in the nineteen twenties through the realities of Paris during nazi occupation in wwii, and the way that so many of these iconic literary figures were not just involved in Beach’s life, but how these relationships and these people fared in wwii.
I absolutely recommend it as a fascinating memoir
jenniferaimee's review against another edition
4.0
This may be evidence of obliviousness on my part, but I'm fairly certain I had never heard anyone mention Sylvia Beach and her "lending library" until I read an introduction to The Great Gatsby (although it may have been mentioned in Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life or, more likely, John Baxter's The most Beautiful Walk in the World, but I'm still bitter over that book so I don't want to give it the credit). My ignorance is hopefully evidence of the fact that I haven't read much Joyce; I hope that if I had read Ulysses or if I had studied Joyce in school, Sylvia Beach's name would have been mentioned. Because, of course, Sylvia Beach is ultimately responsible for the publication of Ulysses.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, and it fast became the home base for many English-speaking writers who lived in Paris—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them. Beach spent a lot of time with Joyce, both in the process of publishing Ulysses (which was banned in the States and therefore rejected by big-name publishers) and after its eventual success, and much of her memoir does address their friendship. But Shakespeare and Company is not in any way limited to Joyce, and that is one of its best qualities.
Told through a series of anecdotes, each headed by a person's name or few-word summary of the section, the book is engaging and fast-paced. I found Beach's writing style to be fairly chatty (for its time, acknowledging that this was first published in 1956), and was quickly engrossed in her descriptions of the various people who settled on the couches in her bookstore and the many dramas they brought with them. Shakespeare and Company serves well as a descriptive and non-chronological Who's Who of the "lost generation." The best part about this, though, was that Beach didn't limit herself. With twenty-two years of material, she surveyed the best of those who visited her shop, and if she talked about Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she also mentioned Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Bryher, H.D., and Djuna Barnes—some of whom she claimed were among the foremost writers of their generation, many of whom I had never heard of. (I realize this review is casting a lot of doubt on my education. Whoops.) I read Shakespeare and Company with my phone open to Wikipedia, and I did a lot of research while reading. The Wikipedia pages on many of the above women (as well as some of the lesser-known male authors and others mentioned throughout the book) are fairly limited, and many of them list Shakespeare and Company among their source materials. Which leads to the question: Why has more scholarship not been done on these authors—all of whom were, based on their Wikipedia pages, very interesting? (I do wish I had more of a background on this era to uncover why that is—why study Ulysses and not Ruan? It could be down to quality, but I'm doubtful.) Regardless, Shakespeare and Company is valuable in that it does include the various lesser-known figures of the interwar period. Beach doesn't make comparisons between the authors, but she does suggest that the ones who aren't household names are as deserving of study as Joyce and Hemingway.
This book would have been valuable if it had been a dry recounting of the people who turned Beach's bookstore into a center of culture in Paris, but Beach was a gifted writer herself, and she made the book very readable. Really the only flaw I found (and I might not even call it a flaw) is that at times the gossipy nature of it felt more People Magazine than The New Yorker. It was as if she was sharing gossip just to share gossip, rather than for some overarching purpose. This only bothered me sometimes, because Beach was a member of this inner circle, her shop provided the structural basis for it, and therefore her occasional shift into the role of an outsider or onlooker providing insider gossip felt a little affected. Like I said, though, in most cases I found the style of the book to be a positive thing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. I very much wish I had discovered it earlier, and I look forward to reading some of the authors Beach introduced.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, and it fast became the home base for many English-speaking writers who lived in Paris—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them. Beach spent a lot of time with Joyce, both in the process of publishing Ulysses (which was banned in the States and therefore rejected by big-name publishers) and after its eventual success, and much of her memoir does address their friendship. But Shakespeare and Company is not in any way limited to Joyce, and that is one of its best qualities.
Told through a series of anecdotes, each headed by a person's name or few-word summary of the section, the book is engaging and fast-paced. I found Beach's writing style to be fairly chatty (for its time, acknowledging that this was first published in 1956), and was quickly engrossed in her descriptions of the various people who settled on the couches in her bookstore and the many dramas they brought with them. Shakespeare and Company serves well as a descriptive and non-chronological Who's Who of the "lost generation." The best part about this, though, was that Beach didn't limit herself. With twenty-two years of material, she surveyed the best of those who visited her shop, and if she talked about Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she also mentioned Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Bryher, H.D., and Djuna Barnes—some of whom she claimed were among the foremost writers of their generation, many of whom I had never heard of. (I realize this review is casting a lot of doubt on my education. Whoops.) I read Shakespeare and Company with my phone open to Wikipedia, and I did a lot of research while reading. The Wikipedia pages on many of the above women (as well as some of the lesser-known male authors and others mentioned throughout the book) are fairly limited, and many of them list Shakespeare and Company among their source materials. Which leads to the question: Why has more scholarship not been done on these authors—all of whom were, based on their Wikipedia pages, very interesting? (I do wish I had more of a background on this era to uncover why that is—why study Ulysses and not Ruan? It could be down to quality, but I'm doubtful.) Regardless, Shakespeare and Company is valuable in that it does include the various lesser-known figures of the interwar period. Beach doesn't make comparisons between the authors, but she does suggest that the ones who aren't household names are as deserving of study as Joyce and Hemingway.
This book would have been valuable if it had been a dry recounting of the people who turned Beach's bookstore into a center of culture in Paris, but Beach was a gifted writer herself, and she made the book very readable. Really the only flaw I found (and I might not even call it a flaw) is that at times the gossipy nature of it felt more People Magazine than The New Yorker. It was as if she was sharing gossip just to share gossip, rather than for some overarching purpose. This only bothered me sometimes, because Beach was a member of this inner circle, her shop provided the structural basis for it, and therefore her occasional shift into the role of an outsider or onlooker providing insider gossip felt a little affected. Like I said, though, in most cases I found the style of the book to be a positive thing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. I very much wish I had discovered it earlier, and I look forward to reading some of the authors Beach introduced.
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