A few times a day, a strange, pulsating sound fills the Boston headquarters of the National Braille Press. Thun-thun. Thun-thun. This is what employees of the nonprofit braille publisher call the office’s “braille heartbeat,” generated by an assortment of printing presses—50-year-old Heidelbergs and modern big-roll embossers alike—pumping away in the basement, producing books and other reading materials for blind readers.
NBP has been at the forefront of braille publishing since 1927, when it was founded by the blind Italian immigrant Francis Ierardi—a classmate of Helen Keller’s at the Perkins School—as a weekly newspaper serving Boston’s blind community. Demand was so great that it went national after just three months. Since then the organization has expanded far beyond a single publication. Today, NBP produces and distributes braille books, reading materials, and technologies for the nation, with clients ranging from individual blind readers to the Library of Congress.
Literary life rarely offers such splendid spectacles today. Open book-review pages, and you are more likely to see writers describing each other and their work with such words as “lyrical”, “brilliant” and “insightful” rather than, as they once did, “tiresome“, “an idiot” and a “dunghill”. On literary pages there is now what one writer called “endemic” grade inflation. An editor for BuzzFeed, a news site, even announced that its books section would not do negative book reviews at all. This was wonderful news for writers (and their mums) everywhere. It was much less good news for readers. The literary world may no longer need to mourn spurned poets; it does need to mourn the death of the hatchet job.
One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.
This happy, if slightly astringent, dose of realism is what makes Athill’s lone novel something special, in our time, but hers as well. She was not a fool — and in her book there’s no higher compliment.
But while the book is, as the subtitle says, a story of crime, it’s also, on a quieter level, an exploration of archiving and ownership. At the height of his infamy, Breitwieser viewed himself as an “art liberator.” He believed he could protect and appreciate historical treasures in ways that museums couldn’t. Breitwieser was delusional, obviously, and reckless. He crowded his plunder in a couple of secret attic rooms at his mother’s house, and much of it was later damaged or destroyed. But while he might not ask this explicitly, Finkel, through meticulous research and extensive investigation of trial and interview transcripts, does nudge us to consider: What is the best way to preserve the past? And how should we make it accessible?