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拯救巴黎最古老的书店

Saving Paris's Oldest Bookstore

中国日报网 2014-10-13 14:13

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Wandering through Paris, one can find large chain booksellers—FNAC and Gibert Joseph, for example—but a defining characteristic of the city continues to be its tiny independent shops. Up to dozens can be found in a single neighborhood, specializing in everything from Portuguese and Brazilian literature to rare books to the contemporary rentrée littéraire—an autumn tradition when the French publishing industry releases a batch of new books.

 

Meanwhile, the combination of sky-high rents and online competition have pushed independent bookstores out of their spaces. A gloomy headline in The New York Times this spring diagnosed Manhattan as a "Literary City, Bookstore Desert." A similar piece in The Guardian reported that 500 British independent bookstores have closed since 2005.

 

Cultural exception aside, France is not entirely exempt from such shifts itself. Even in Delamain's neighborhood, the Librairie del Duca recently shut down, while the Librairie le Divan relocated to the more affordable 15th arrondissement.

 

In fact, the Delamain's threat may have less to do with the digital publishing landscape than with foreign competition of an entirely different sort. Average prices for Parisian apartments have skyrocketed in the last 15 years. A housing shortage that the government has called a "major crisis" can be attributed, in many cases, to foreign investment in Parisian properties—often by owners who never end up moving in.

 

The luxury market has been particularly impacted by foreign ownership, with owners from the U.S., Russia, and the Middle East finding Parisian property especially appealing. In some ways the trend is an echo of Japanese companies' flooding of the U.S. real estate market in the 1980s; in this case, Qatari companies entered when nations were crippled by austerity and in many cases eager for an influx of foreign capital. Constellation Hotel Holdings itself, currently in negotiations with the Librairie Delamain, has been quietly buying up luxury properties from Nice to Cannes for years—no doubt exacerbating the sentiment that there are too many foreigners in France.

 

Of course, Paris is far from the only European city to witness such a trend. Last year, a piece in Vanity Fair about London's One Hyde Park, the most expensive residential building in the world, revealed that a majority of its apartments sit empty, owned by absentee billionaires like Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani of Qatar. Constellation Hotel Holdings itself made the news last year for investing 400 million pounds in another London hotel; it makes billion-dollar Qatari investment deals buying up European real estate.

 

The knowledge that a historic Parisian bookstore may now be subject to the whims of a Middle Eastern mega-company has been incorporated into the French media's narrative about Delamain. It is already commonplace to complain that Paris has become no more than a museum, an empty shell from which the locals have fled, to be picked over by foreigners and students. And the line between national pride and hostility to foreigners has always been thin in France, where the universalism of liberté, égalité, fraternité coexists uneasily with a racially-based understanding of what it means to be French. A touch of xenophobiahas tinged the irony of some commentary, suggesting that Middle Eastern wealth is oblivious to broader cultural concerns. "If the Qataris hadn't understood that this is an important place, in terms of its physical site as well as its patrons, now they should," said one bookseller following a week of buzz in the French media. "But we're talking about Qataris, after all; these are people who have time and money for themselves." Monadé of Centre National du Livre noted that he hoped the Qataris, "mindful of their investments in terms of their image," will not let the bookstore close.

 

Given the peculiarities of the French cultural system, it's quite likely that the bookstore will in fact be saved. Other threats are not so quick to dissolve. On the same block of Rue Saint-Honoré, the revolving doors of the five-star Hôtel du Louvre welcome one set of patrons; the small streetside entrance of the Librairie Delamain beckons to another. The little bookshop and the international conglomerate are now intimately intertwined.

 

漫步巴黎,你会看到FNAC和吉贝尔·约瑟夫(Gibert Joseph)这样的大型连锁书店。但是,能代表这座城市特色的仍是那些小型独立书店。仅在一个街区,就聚集着几十家之多的独立书店,所售书籍涉及方方面面,从葡萄牙和巴西文学到各种珍本,再到当代文学。法国出版业有秋季推出新书的传统。

 

与此同时,天价租金以及来自网络的竞争却让独立书店无处安身。今春,《纽约时报》曾刊登头条新闻称曼哈顿为“文学之城,书店荒漠”,颇为悲观。《卫报》也发表了类似文章,称自2005年以来英国有500家独立书店倒闭。

 

虽有“文化例外”保驾护航,法国也未能完全从这一转变中幸免。德拉曼书店同一街区的Del Duca书店近期倒闭,而Le Divan书店则迁到租金较为便宜的第15区。

 

事实上,德拉曼书店面临的威胁更多来自其他领域的外来竞争而非数字出版的兴盛。过去15年里,巴黎房价飙涨。政府称为“重大危机”的住房紧缺现象在许多情形下是由于不断涌入的外国购房人投资巴黎房地产所致,而许多投资者都让房子空置着。

 

高档楼盘市场尤其受到外国购房者的影响,他们来自美国、俄罗斯和中东,对巴黎房地产情有独钟。从某些方面看,当前形势与20世纪80年代日本公司涌入美国房地产市场的情形颇为类似。卡塔尔的公司在各国经济紧缩、陷入瘫痪,急需外国资本流入之际进入法国市场。近期与德拉曼书店交涉的星座酒店集团已于近些年悄然购入从尼斯到戛纳的许多高档楼盘,无疑令人更加感叹法国的外国人实在太多。

 

当然,巴黎绝不是唯一见证这一趋势的欧洲城市。《名利场》杂志去年的一篇文章披露,世界上最昂贵的住宅建筑“伦敦海德公园一号”的大部分房间处于空置状态,而房主则是诸如卡塔尔总理哈马德·本·贾西姆·阿勒萨尼(Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani)这样的亿万富豪。去年,星座酒店集团豪掷4亿英镑投资于另一家伦敦酒店,一度成为新闻话题。它还促使数十亿美元来自卡塔尔的资金大量买进欧洲房地产。

 

有历史影响力的巴黎书店可能成为中东大型企业头脑发热的牺牲品,法国媒体谈到德拉曼书店时便会这样说。巴黎不过是个博物馆,供外国人和学生们挑挑拣拣,当地人已逃离,这里徒有空壳。如是怨言已成为老生常谈。在法国,民族自豪感与排外情绪之间的界限向来模糊。“自由、平等、博爱”的普世原则与对于“怎样才算是法国人”的种族主义理解,艰难共存。一点点排外情绪便会招致冷嘲热讽,言下之意是来自中东的财富显然能扩大文化关注。法国媒体对此喋喋不休了一周之后,某书商说:“如果卡塔尔人还不明白,这儿无论从物理位置还是顾客的角度说都是一个重要的地方,那么现在他们就应该去搞明白这件事。”“然而,我们谈论的毕竟是卡塔尔人,他们有钱又有闲。”法国国家图书出版中心主任莫那德表示,他希望“注重投资形象的”卡塔尔人别让这家书店关门。

 

考虑到法国文化体制的独特性,这家书店保留下来的可能性极大。而其他方面的威胁则不会那么快得到解决。在圣奥诺雷街的同一街区,五星级卢浮宫酒店的旋转门向一类顾客招手欢迎,街边德拉曼书店的入口则向另一类顾客开放着。如今,小小书店与大型国际集团在此亲密交汇。

 

 

[1]米歇尔·福柯(1926年10月15日-1984年6月25日),法国哲学家、社会思想家和“思想系统的历史学家”。

[2]西顿尼娅-加布里埃列·柯莱特(1873年1月28日-1954年8月3日),法国小说家。

[3]让·谷克多(1889年7月5日-1963年10月11日),法国诗人、作家和导演。

[4]在世界图书出版业,图书定价存在固定价格体系和自由价格体系两种不同的模式。固定价格体系是指对图书价格实行统一定价的制度,即规定图书价格由出版社定价,并在固定位置明确标示,任何图书销售机构都不得擅自加价或减价销售图书;而自由价格体系是指图书以自由价格在市场销售的定价制度,出版社通过周密的成本核算后,以一定的折扣批发给中间商,只要能保证正常运营,零售商可以自由定价销售。

 

(译者 AshleyColin 编辑 祝兴媛)

 

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