A Very Special Year Read Online Free

volumes with quite different eyes. A farm, yes, that was somewhere which she could imagine might still function without a computer. Or perhaps a greengrocer’s, where they only sold a limited range of goodsand it wasn’t hard to keep an overview of such perishable stock – what they bought in the morning was sold by the evening. But with books, of which there were thousands, no, millions of different ones and which often stood on the shelves for weeks and months, maybe even years before they were finally sold… No, there had to be a system. It might be antediluvian, but there had to be some kind of functioning system.
    Of course there was a system. It was bound up with index cards and catalogues as well as an array of binders that the elderly lady had put together over the years, and which her niece had until now simply failed to notice, just as you can look straight past an ancient and obsolete traffic sign by the roadside even though it’s under your nose.
    The index cards were in compartments in the two top drawers of the desk. Noted down in elegant yet painstaking handwriting were author, title, publisher, edition, price and order number, together with a variety of other rather opaque details. In tiny, but razor-sharp letters, the elderly lady had also made notes on the individual books. Points, as Valerie could see, with which she summarized the particular features of a book in a few words. Her curiosity aroused, she flicked through to the card for Calvino, Italo:
If
on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
and read, ‘A bit frivolous, slightly whimsical, but wonderfully ironic – for those who don’t (or shouldn’t) take life so seriously.’
    Could anybody else have put it better? Of course, this was exactly the point of that curious little volume. What about Kafka’s
The Castle
? To Valerie’s disappointment her aunt hadn’t made any notes on it. A quick glance at the other cards revealed that this was a rare exception. Why? Maybe there were books which were such must-reads that they didn’t need any selling points. And perhaps
The Castle
was one of those.
    As she gradually battled her way through the elderly lady’s archive, Valerie realized there were a number of books that had been sorted without any keywords, such as Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks
or Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
. Quite a few children’s books fell into this category too. Beside
The Happy Leeward Isles
Aunt Charlotte had just put an exclamation mark. When Valerie went to get the book she discovered an extraordinarily long and jolly title:
The Journey of Captain Davorin Midrankovic and His Passengers to the Isle of Honey, the Isle of Peace, the Isle of Towers, the Isle Where the Fiddles Grow, the Isle of Brushes, the Isle of Gugelhupfs and the Isle of Beautiful Truth, Narrated by Himself and Written down by James Krüss for
All Those Who Are Happy or Should Like to Be
.
    Of course, before she could continue working it was essential for Valerie to read some lengthy passages from this enchanting book and actually feel a little happier. It was already early evening by the time she had got as far as a volume that bore the auspicious title:
A Very Special Year
, by… Intrigued, Valerie went to fetch this book from the shelves too (it stood between a Dorothy Parker biography and Ferdinand Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
) and sat down with it in the armchair, which had by now taken on the scent of her perfume (and of eucalyptus balm). The cover showed a ticket for passage on a ship, old-fashioned and appealing. And the moment she flipped open the book she was thrust straight into the middle of a story; it felt as if the text had whisked her away instantaneously.
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    There had been no forewarning of the sudden change in weather. To begin with it was barely more than a gentle breeze. The elegant silhouette of a woman of indeterminate age was reflected in the shop window.