A Very Special Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

annotation, set apart from the main text: ‘2 Flaubert’. She found a similar annotation on page 33: ‘3 Flaubert’. The book came to an end shortly after ‘7 Flaubert’; it only had 99 pages in total. But, as Valerie worked out, each annotation marked a so-calledprinted sheet, which consisted of sixteen pages. In vain she tried to picture the specific technique by which one of these sheets would have to be folded, printed and cut to end up with a meaningful sequence of text, or rather the only correct sequence, the desired sequence, the tale of a young Flaubert or another of the countless stories that had made it into book form over the past five hundred years.
    The Flaubert book was neither one of the most beautiful nor best smelling on the shelves. Not even the works of Ringelnatz, all of them fairly conventional-looking tomes (scarcely daring to emphasize the originality of the ideas they harboured), belonged in this category. But there were myriad books whose aesthetic charm was irresistible, so long as you gave it the opportunity to work its magic. The editions of Heinrich Heine, for example, which in just two volumes of delicate lightweight paper managed to reproduce all the fragility of Heine’s divine and wicked poetical art. You handled each page with the greatest respect, allowing the airy, shimmering ideas to take effect. There was the cloth-bound Balzac, whose dignified understatement was the very opposite of the pompous man himself – a commercial writer of the highest calibre – but it did lend the work a more universal validity. Although the volume wasalmost odourless, it had a flawlessly stitched binding that shimmered impishly. The ostentatious Dostoevsky, bound entirely in cognac-coloured leather that smelled slightly like an old, long-distance train compartment, in which a delegation of well-off gentlemen discuss prices on the wood market. On the front cover, embossed deeply in gold, was the author’s signature with its bold loops that rose as high as they sunk low, but completely illegible; it could have easily been the signature of any old vet. A perfidious edition of Christian Morgenstern’s
Gallows Songs
, which may have lain for goodness knows how long on the bedside table of a fashionable young lady – no, more likely under her pillow. The scent of her perfume had penetrated deeply into the rather brittle and yellowed paper, which was of the plainest quality and had already torn in places. The book’s appearance stood in sharp contrast to its olfactory charms, which made it interesting. Valerie was so curious that she sat down to investigate further. After spending a while getting used to the author’s bizarrely crafted ideas, she came across a poem entitled
The Daynight Lamp
. And as she was reading it, something switched on in her mind:
    Â 
    Korf invents a daynight lamp
    that turns the brightest day
    into darkest night
    the moment you flick the switch
.
    Â 
    When in Congress, by the ramp
    he demonstrates his light
.
    All who know their stuff, they
    must face up to the fact, which –
    Â 
    (Darkness replaces the light of day
,
    applause in the House reaches fever
    pitch)
    (They cry to the butler, Herr Hamp:
    â€˜Turn on the lights’) – must face up
    to the fact, which
    Â 
    is that this very lamp
    does indeed turn the brightest day
    into darkest night
    when you flick the switch
.
    Valerie stood up, put the book down, turned out the lights and inhaled deeply the discoveries in this wonderful cabinet of dreams, the scents of all the new and old books, the aroma of their experiences and promises, their curses and prophesies, of the hands in which they had rested, the care with which the papermanufacturer, printer and binder had worked on them, the ink with which they were printed, the glue, the cloth, the leather, the covers and dust-jackets, the stitching, the ribbons and tissue paper. No perfumery could produce as perfect a