I don’t wish to appear as an elitist—and I am more than happy to admit my fondness for heavy metal music, horror movies and very bad TV—but I also can’t deny feeling very anxious at one of the transit areas of the Charles de Gaulle Airport about 24 hours ago, after realising that most of the bookshops at the main airport of one of the world’s indisputable literary centres boast piles of Fifty Shades of Grey (in English and in French) alongside aisles of self-help wickedness and trauma-inducing tomes on business and money.

I had already read the book that I had brought with me for the trip—Francis Wheen’s very entertaining biography of Marx—and was desperate to alleviate the harrowing boredom of my long return flight back to Melbourne (which was lengthened thanks to Air France pilots’ strike or, more precisely, thanks to the precarious conditions that have resulted in their strike). Determined that I would rather watch re-runs of The Office and play Pac-Man on the in-flight entertainment system than waste my remaining euros on books that I am more or less allergic to, I had decided to blow the above-mentioned euros on an outrageously overpriced café au lait, before coming across one more bookstore/gift shop/Eiffel Tower paraphernalia dispensary. And here I found, to my immense surprise, an affordable (English) copy of Günter Grass’s infamous political novel, The Tin Drum.