From the moment you see the most-famed English bookshop in Paris, with books spilling out of its entryway, you sense the magic of the place. I have been living in Paris for four months, and started volunteering at Shakespeare and Co. a few weeks ago. When I was working there the other day I overheard one Frenchman say to his friend, “You can feel there is a certain energy here, it’s great! You can feel it from the people who work here and the customers.” This is the way a great bookstore should be.

Every Monday night, the store hosts a reading. That there is no real event space in Shakespeare makes readings there strangely perfect; you are quite literally sitting among the books. They are overhead, next to you, under you, and behind that shelf. On Monday, May 18, Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, came for a reading and discussion for the occasion of the English publication of his third and most recent novel, Once on a Moonless Night. I was sitting on the bench that lines the wall under the Fiction section, between the B’s and C’s, with a small pile of Saul Bellow books at my feet. It was a bit cool that night, and Sijie’s hair, long enough to rest on his shoulders, was a soft graying black against the full white scarf that remained draped around his neck the entire evening, over a violet jacket which he likewise never removed.

At first, he did not seem too comfortable: he did not read excerpts from his new book himself and while his work was being read (by members of Shakespeare’s staff in French and English), he did not appear enthused or pleased or even the opposite. His face seems to fall in a state of slight bemusement—his mouth turns down at the corners, but his face isn’t sad; it’s as if he’s poised to chuckle at something in his head, but only actually does so when he speaks.

All the seats were occupied, and the audience was full of eager faces, young and old, mostly expats and travelers. The first question, about how this book is an homage to language, solicited an unsteady reply from the author. He spoke unclearly, lingering on words and going back and forth, trying to say how there are many ideas in the book, and how language is a means of reporting the world, but I couldn’t quite understand what he was getting at. Thankfully though, perhaps because he felt the audience was receptive or because he was allowed to ramble in his answers, this awkwardness did not last the whole evening. After this initial stumbling reply, his mode of speech became increasingly fluid, and I noticed that his manner of speaking is almost childlike—he has a clear pleasure in recounting, and in using words. He loves language. His pleasure in manipulating it, using it to discern detail and as a means to express and create is as clear in his speech as it is in his writing.

Once on a Moonless Night is several stories in one. It is about Puyi, the last emperor, and of the eight-hundred-year-old silk scroll inscribed with a lost sutra composed by the Buddha he supposedly had. It is about the French narrator who hears the story from a greengrocer named Tumchooq, whose name is the same as that of the lost language. The scroll is sold illicitly to an eccentric French linguist named Paul d’Ampere, in a transaction that sends him to prison, where he will devote his life to studying the ineffably beautiful ancient language of the forgotten text. Tumchooq has just returned from three years of reeducation, and the narrator returns again and again to his shop near the gates of the Forbidden City. But when d’Ampere is killed in prison, Tumchooq disappears, abandoning the narrator, now pregnant with his child. She goes in search for her lost love, and in so doing, in search for the lost scroll as well.

“I am quite proud,” Sijie said with a smile, “of having invented the language in Moonless entirely myself.” He explained that he was greatly inspired by Sanskrit because of its unique structure. It has no verbs and thus there is no active voice; everything is passive. He was also inspired by the 1981 film La Guerre de Feu (Quest for Fire). The novel overall is much less autobiographical than Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, but Sijie believes a writer is never entirely absent from what he writes. “We cannot completely invent a story,” he told the audience. “Even in science fiction, there is always something of our personal experience.”

Sijie was born in China in 1954, and was reeducated from 1971-74. He first came to Paris in 1984 as a film student, and he considers himself both a filmmaker and a writer. While he has written all three novels in French, when he first started writing he did so in Chinese during the period of his reeducation. His early short stories in Chinese were not published because of political reasons, and his novels have not been translated. That is to say, if you want to read his work in China, you must look on the black market, a point of which he is also “quite proud,” he admitted with a chuckle. But pride aside, that his work is censored is also difficult for him because it means that his mother, who lives in China, has never seen his films or read his books.

In Moonless, the narrator remains nameless throughout the book. Sijie explained that he did not think it necessary to name her because she was a medium to tell a story not about her as a French student, but about Chinese culture. It is very hard for him to imagine a French character because he was already 29 years old when he came to Paris. He explained that for him, because he did not grow up around French people and customs, he does not have the same instinctive knowledge that he does for Chinese people’s habits. For example, some years ago he was on the set of a film of his that had French characters, and when he was asked how he wanted the women to look, he had no idea what to say. Had they been Chinese, he would have had no problem. He decided to never again have French characters.

By this time in the evening he had fully warmed to the scene, and everyone in the audience was enjoying themselves. The last question came from an older American woman, who before the event had begun had badgered the staff about not having French copies of the books to sell, even though it is an English language store. She asked Sijie what became of the girl upon whom the seamstress of Balzac is based, resulting in the most interesting reply of the evening. In real life, the girl was a peasant, he told us. He made her a seamstress in order to use the sewing machine as a torture instrument, something he really wanted to do. What was not invented however was her love for Balzac. Sijie explained that she was able to understand something in reading Balzac that it took himself much longer to learn and only really understand after living in France. She saw that a very important part of French culture was, “qu’un home doit plaire une femme;” a man must be able to pleasure a woman; it is expected. “If we cannot please a woman. . . it is very embarrassing and annoying. This is unique to France.” This is a concept totally absent from Chinese culture, he continued, adding with a grin and a chuckle, “let alone in a Chinese mountain village.” As to what happened to her, the last he knew of her was that she had gone to work in a city factory, and no one has been able to track her down since.

He ended on this note, “If you want to write, you must write every day, there is no secret.” And after a pause as the bustle of events’ ends began, he added, “You must be in love, and write.”

Shakespeare’s last event of May was quite different. It was a reading in celebration of Anvil Press Poetry’s bilingual publication of a collection of contemporary French poetry entitled, Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008. The event felt very intimate, not only because the room was packed and it was incredibly warm in a sweaty, humid way, but also because you could feel the connection and the mutual respect the collaborators and poets had for each other, as well as for the audience who had come to listen and discover.

Stephen Romer, a poet himself who co-edited and translated the poems, introduced the event. The book was many years in the making he said, and it grew out of a previous project of his on 20th century French poetry for Faber Press. He told the audience that 20th century French poetry is occupied “by very noisy French schools, like surrealism.” This book is composed of unassociated, “quieter voices.” He himself was introduced to these poets over many years, growing out of connections made when he moved to Paris as a young man (he is in his fifties.) None of the poets hail originally from Paris, and for him, “there is a sense of the outsider coming to Paris in all these poets.”

Romer’s co-editor and translator, Jennie Feldman, spoke of the “extraordinary business of translation” itself. The process of translating in this case began with “sifting through the French poems, looking for their English phantoms to come through.” She quoted Robert Lowell, who best captured what she wanted to avoid being: a “poet taxidermist.” She strove to recreate the poems for English readers, presenting as much of the original intent as possible. She shared with the audience that for her, the act of translation is “the ultimate way to enter the poem, and the poet’s mind.” Listening to her speak about her desire to be able to share the French poem with English readers, I thought of Flaubert’s famous phrase, “le mot juste.” This is what she was talking about—the need to find in English the words that would perfectly capture and express the meaning of the French poems without completely changing the language. Having now read several of the poems in the book in both languages, I believe she and Romer succeeded in doing just that.

Of the seven poets in the anthology, only the two youngest were in attendance: Guy Goffette, who is in his early sixties, and Gilles Ortlieb, who is in his fifties. Guy Goffette had a pointed dramatic energy when he read, with an older smoker’s rasp. Before reading, he rendered homage to one of the absent poets, Paul de Roux, who is suffering extensive memory loss. The anthology’s title is actually taken from one of his poems, “The Deep Street.” Gilles Ortlieb, who had the kind of reading voice I could listen to for hours—steady, deep, and soft—read another poem of de Roux’s called “The Starlings.” Both poems capture what the anthology as a whole is about—small instants in the city, with no attempts at greater meaning than capturing the sense and emotion of the moment. The other poets featured in the collection are Jean Follain, Henri Thomas, Philippe Jaccottet, and Jacques Réda.

After the reading was over and I bought a copy of the book, I asked the poets to sign it. Guy misunderstood; he miswrote my name twice, but when he finally got it right on the third try he decided to turn the whole mess into a lovely little dedication poem. When I handed my book to Gilles, I told him I enjoyed how he read, and he suddenly became awkward like a bashful young boy, telling me that he does not actually like reading aloud, especially his own work because he finds it very difficult. At the same time, he was trying to sign my book, and had a similar problem with my name that Guy had. After a few failed attempts at spelling it correctly, he simply said, “Désolé, nous sommes tous bourrés.”

“Sorry,” he said, “we are all drunk.”

Lauren Goldenberg is a former bookseller with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and a book reviewer for The Front Table. Originally from New York, she now lives and works in Paris and volunteers at Shakespeare & Co. whenever she can.