In the 26 years that she operated Village Voice books on the rue Princesse in Paris 6th arrondissement Odile Hellier earned a reputation for presenting the finest writers working in the English-language. (Sadly, she closed the shop and retired in 2012.) Her respect for their work, affection for America and indefatigable efforts to sustain her tiny, anachronistic, cultural outpost in a wilderness dominated by Amazon recall Sylvia Beach of the original Shakespeare & Co who toiled for little money to bring fresh English-language literary voices to Paris Anglophones in the twenties.

I have been a customer for over ten years and an occasional collaborator and it was with great pleasure that I collected her at her shop and walked down the street for a proper French lunch at Le Bistrot d’Henri where we settled in for a two-hour conversation about her life and career.

TG: Where were you born?
OH: In France, in the south, on the coast in Palavas des Flots near Montpelier but I haven’t been back since. My father was taken prisoner to Germany and escaped three times. The third time was the right time and he was about to go to Free France when my mother joined him from Nancy in Montpelier. I was born and we stayed there for a few months.

TG: Where was your father from?
OH: Brittany and this was where he went to join the Resistance and was killed with my grandmother.

TG: When did you first come to Paris?
OH: When my sister was a student in Paris and I was 12 or 13 she would invite me. I was studying dance with Irène Poppard who taught a style that combined classic with Isadora Duncan.and really wanted to become a dancer.

In the daytime I would roam the streets, go to museums and the evening I’d meet my sister and she would take me to the ballet, opera-everything.

This was my introduction to Paris although when we were kids after the war my mother went to Nancy and every summer we would go to Brittany. And my mother would always stop for a few days in Paris and we would go the Chatelet and the cafés-wow-we had a good time. So Paris was certainly where I wanted to be. I came back to do my post-graduate studies in Rennes with teachers from Paris. I studied Russian and went to Moscow for one year to study and do the equivalent of a Masters. I came back to Paris to take my exams and then I taught Russian literature and language at High School.

I later decided that I didn’t want to teach anymore-I wanted to translate so I took another exam and that took me to the school where you could be trained to be an interpreter and translator. That’s when I decided to go the United States because I needed to improve my English. I had worked very often in England during my vacations and I knew it well and I really wanted to go to America. America had become very important to me after Russia where I really learned to admire America.

I went to Amherst for one year and had jobs including being an au-pair, then I came back to finish my studies in France as an interpreter/translator but it didn’t work out because I was offered a job in Washington, DC with a multinational company where I stayed for ten years from 1969-1979.

I came back to work for another multinational but I soon realized that it could not be my life so I had to brainstorm with myself and visit bookshops and I realized that they were not at all like what I discovered in the states. The seventies in America were a brilliant cultural time. There were anti-war demonstrations. I saw Saul Alinsky and his organizational work in Chicago. I studied Frantz Fanon.

TG: You became a little bit “Red?”
OH: Almost. (A big laugh) I became very changed. Very Pink and now I’m almost whitish. I admired Saul Alinsky very much. I translated his book (Reveille for Radicals) into French. I read a lot and of course I was involved in the feminist movement. America was so alive and I was also making films with friends and I traveled all over the states but when I came back I saw the books on the tables of book stores and they were far removed from what I had seen in America and so, naively, I thought-why not open a book shop-another hearty laugh.

TG: When did you open the store?
OH: I started working on my project in 1980 and I opened Village Voice in July of1982.

TG: Who are your favorite English-language writers-historical and contemporary? And those that most influenced you?
OH: This is a difficult question. Each time I am reading a book it is that book that counts. I came late to American literature but someone who had an impact on me was definitely Faulkner-the writing, the atmosphere, the depth, the guilt. I will use a French word étouffersomething very stifling-stifling in the surroundings and stifling inside the person, something intense-external and internal, really in phase.

TG: What is your favorite Faulkner?
OH: I would say The Wild Palms It’s probably the easiest and it’s not as tragic as the others.

TG: Do you reread them today?
OH: No. I don’t have the time. The only book I reread is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I have it on my bed and I love to go back to one chapter and sometimes even when I can’t sleep to have the music of Tolstoy in my ear can calm me down. So I reread in Russian but not in English because every day I’m bombarded everyday with new work.

TG: What’s the greatest challenge facing you as the operator of an English-language bookstore in Paris?
OH: First of all, to keep calm and not let anxiety overwhelm me. It’s not easy because as you know the business has radically changed. It’s not any longer the little bookshop that one could have in a nice area and care for the neighborhood and have decent conversations with customers. It’s not a gentlemen’s trade anymore-it’s cutthroat. And even though we are small and we are hidden away from the Grands Boulevards yet we are in the center of Paris but small we have a certain reputation so our visibility goes beyond the rue Princesse.

But I have to say that every day we have to reinvent ourselves because every day something new causes us despair and while in the 90s we knew that Amazon would eat us up, swallow us alive, nobody believed us: ‘You have your faithful customers.”

But we knew that a system like that where you just had to push a button and the book will be there in two days, that doesn’t happen by the way, but the fantasy is that it does and people live on fantasy. Fantasy is 90% of people’s lives today. So, the fantasy is press a button and don’t go out which has changed the minds of people. They expect things from you that they did not expect before.

Now I feel like we are a carpet. We have to answer any kind of question, do anything. If we can’t get a book in seen days we are nothing, we are incompetent and we have to deal with that kind of negative feedback. We may have 20,000 books but we don’t have the one they want.

This being said we have always been a book shop with our own selection. To select means to read a lot, go through the catalogues, spend time with the reps and even though we can order less we still have to tailor our selections. This an interesting yet very difficult job because we are constantly bombarded by the media, emails, the publishers, but we have to stick to what we can sell to our customers who still have confidence in us.

TG: What has been your proudest moment at Village Voice?
OH: I have many strong memories of readings at the Village Voice. And I have many very, very beautiful memories. I remember a whole Sunday afternoon with Allen Ginsberg in 1982 and Carver but there is one
memory that is almost sacred for me. It was a meeting with Susan Sontag.

I had read Susan Sontag in the 70s and I immediately felt the richness that woman could bring. The way she would see the current events, the way she would analyze the era-the times she lived in, the books she had read, the people she attracted-this was a wealth for me.

And when she came to the Village Voice, mainly in December, she would come and browse and she would mostly buy Eastern European literature or if she had read them already she’d buy them for friends. And one time she came to me and said: “ Odile, you know I could do a reading here at the Village Voice.” I was stunned and I said: “Susan Sontag I’d never have had the nerve to ask you but it is with gratitude that I accept.”

For me it was an incredible moment and the evening was absolutely fabulous. It was packed but the ones where you had people lining up in the street were for Hubert Selby, (David) Sedaris and Michael Ondaatje. Other thrilling moments were when Cynthia Ozick spoke and Nadine Gordimer was in the audience and Mary McCarthy listening to Stephen Spender.