IN THEORY, 2020’s lockdown should have provided the perfect conditions for major outbreaks of bibliophilia.
But, following an intense publishing year in 2019, when The Washington Post book section declared that “fascism is back in fashion” and classics like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Sinclair Lewis’s It Could Happen Here shot up bestseller lists, 2020 ironically seemed less fevered the rise of Covid-19 and the US presidential election shifted the ground beneath publishing’s feet somewhat.
Faced with a worldwide assault on democracy, with authoritarian populism gaining traction in countries including Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil and, of course, the US and Britain, many writers seemed to have entered the depressive stage of the grief cycle.
The City and the Writer: In Oxford with Maya C. Popa Italo Calvino,
Can you describe the mood of Oxford as you feel/see it?
Oxford is made up of large slabs of sunlit stone and broad tree-lined streets leading to narrow cobbled passageways cluttered with bicycles. It is dotted with Saxon churches and Gothic towers whose bells seem to ring continuously for one reason or another. Behind trick walls lie a succession of gates and doors that reveal the University’s colleges, whose pristine gardens only a select few may amble. It is a city of minds in conversation with minds past and present. I often have the impression that I am walking through a slowly uttered spell.