The Librarianist: A Novel
A book about a retired librarian.
“He had been amassing books since preadolescence and there were filled shelves in half the rooms in the house, tidy towers of books in the halls.” Page 19.
Books, of course, being one of the staples of what I was raised with, on. The bookstore itself, where I found the novel? A magnificent, opulent, almost decadent store tucked away in a small mall in Santa Fe, NM. No way to easily check but I think the name has changed since I was last there.
There’s something about a book, too, and the slightly elegiac tone of this novel, and its material, set in, and around, a retired librarian? There is that.
It is a right and proper bookstore with piles and piles of new, used, out-of-date, and current texts, almost haphazardly stacked everywhere. But that leads to a voyage of discovery, and that’s how I happened upon a title that the algorithms hadn’t suggested yet.
The writing itself is delicious, slow, pedantic, but tastefully constructed to delicately string together thoughts, and a story about a retired librarian, love, loss, love. In part, a way to see it as a romance, but more modern, as failed romance?
Stating at the end. Better yet, stating at the middle of the end? Looping, loping, laconic, and yet fraught with a distinguished air about it. Wry, with a hint of of being self-deprecating, when, in fact it is not.
Comic but seldom laugh-out-loud comedy, more a west coast collection of drawing room manners.
Can a whole life be cataloged and delivered as carefully curated moments?
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