Love Falls by Esther Falls

Book Stuff: Part One

Food that no one really wants to eat is called leftovers. Odd-sized lengths of fabric no one really wants to sew are called remnants. And books that no one really wants to read are called remainders.

The Dutch call remainder books ramsj, pronounced romp with a shh! at the end. It’s a Yiddish word, and it translates as ‘junk’ – as if the idea of leftovers, remnants and floaters wasn’t damning enough.

In the bookstore context, ‘junk’ calls to mind such low-brow reads as Harlequin romances. But this isn’t the case: remainder is just a class of sale book that the publisher has decided to mark down in price. And remainders don’t always carry a stigma (if you ignore the black mark that’s sometimes swiped across the pages to indicate the book’s on sale). Sure, an unpopular read may get remaindered when it’s just not selling. But a popular book can just as easily get remaindered to make space for a new edition.

What’s more, a remaindered book is not necessarily a remaindered author. In the past few months, remainder books by these writers (in no particular order) have been on bookstore shelves: Esther Freud, John Updike, Philip Roth, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, and JM Coetzee – not a slouch among them.

Now check out each author’s titles: Esther Freud’s Love Falls, John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick, Philip Roth’s Indignation, Fay Weldon’s Mantrapped, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, and JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. Clearly, these aren’t the books advertised as each author’s most popular.

Then why bother with them? After all, it takes twelve hours to read the average book, and, often, hardcore readers feel chronically behind on their reading. Why waste time on remainders?

Because in choosing only the most popular, acclaimed books, one may miss something crucial: an offbeat masterpiece, the specialty item overlooked by the majority and masquerading as a remainder.

The offbeat masterpiece speaks to the individual, not to the masses. A quintessential example from the last century: Mark Salzman’s The Soloist. This novel charts the inner life of a lonely cellist while he’s on jury duty.

A lonely cellist, jury duty – not quite the stuff of Hollywood films. (Ignore the Hollywood release of 2009 by the same name; different book, different author.) Mark Salzman’s Soloist is more literary than cinematic. It’s a wonderfully soft-spoken, reflective novel, praised as a gem by The New Yorker magazine.

So why was such a virtuosic book remaindered? As the appreciative reviewer asked in The New Yorker, who could the audience possibly be for such a work?

A note on availability: Remainder books in English are easy to find in Amsterdam. Among other book stores, The American Book Center sells them, De Slegte on the Kalverstraat carries them, and the swanky Martyrium on the van Baerlestraat specialises in remainders.

Lisa Friedman
The Amsterdam Writing Workshops
www.amsterdamwriting.com