I got Patrick deWitt’s ‘The Librarianist‘ as a Christmas present from my friend. I’ve never heard of Patrick deWitt before – he is a new-to-me writer. So I was very excited to read this book.
Bob is a retired librarian. He doesn’t have family, doesn’t have friends. He used to be married once upon a time, but that was a long time back. He is a deep introvert. He keeps his house running, cooks his own food, and goes on walks so that he can meet people and enjoy their company at a safe distance. He also reads a lot. Not surprising, because he used to be a librarian after all. Reading is his thing. His house is filled with books. Someone tells him once that he was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. (My dad used to tell that to me all the time. Some of my friends also used to tell that to me sometimes. If you are a passionate and prolific reader, it is hard to make people understand why reading is important to you.)
One day Bob meets a woman at the store, who is standing motionless in front of the refrigerator. The store person is worried about her. Bob notices that she has an identity card hanging from her neck and with the help of that he discovers that she is from the Senior Center. He takes her there. The person who manages the center thanks him and later shows him around. Bob likes what he sees and decides to volunteer at the centre. One thing leads to another and before we know, the present and the past collide and secrets from Bob’s past come tumbling out. What is the nature of those secrets and what happens after that forms the rest of the story.
I enjoyed reading ‘The Librarianist’. The title itself was interesting and unusual – we’ve all heard of ‘librarian’, but what exactly is a ‘librarianist’? I loved the depiction of Bob as an introvert character. It made me think of my other favourite introvert characters in literature, like the main characters in ‘The Wall’ by Marlen Haushofer, ‘Glaciers’ by Alexis Smith, ‘A Whole Life’ by Robert Seethaler, ‘The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman’ by Denis Thériault. I also loved the depiction of Bob’s work as a librarian, the quiet beauty in it, the joy of being with books all the time. I don’t think I’ve read a book before in which the main character was a librarian. So it was nice to read about the life of a librarian.
There is a love story in the book. There are also stories of many friendships in the book, some of them fleeting, some of them stretching over time. Sometimes minor characters, who come for a few pages, are cool and stylish, and have the best lines. There is a sheriff who comes only for a few pages in the end who was one of my favourite characters from the book. There is also an owner of a hotel who is a minor character, and whenever he says something, that conversation is filled with humour and makes us smile. Patrick deWitt’s writing is beautiful and smooth and the story flows like a river and the pages fly.
There is a big surprise in the middle of the story and the whole story revolves around it. I won’t tell you what it is, of course. It is for you to find out. But I didn’t see that surprise coming.
I’m glad I read ‘The Librarianist’. Hoping to read more of Patrick deWitt’s books. Maybe I’ll try his most famous book ‘The Sisters Brothers’ next.
Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.
Quote 1
Linus : “Do you know the word schadenfreude?”
Bob : “Yes.”
Linus : “You know what it means?”
Bob : “Yes.”
Linus : “It means when people wish you poorly and are happy for your suffering.”
Bob : “I know what it means, Linus. Schaden translates as ‘harmful’ or ‘malicious, Freude as joy.”
Linus : “All right, egghead, take it easy…”It’s a powerful thing, like witnessing extreme weather. By that I mean that it’s frightening but also also beautiful, somehow. It follows a natural social order. I should think that schadenfreude existed before there was such a thing as German, or any language for that matter.”
Bob : “Envy is one of the seven deadlies.”
Linus : “But schadenfreude is not merely envy, Bob. It’s envy plus-the revenge component. It was thrilling for me to see people come into their own as purveyors, as owners of ha- tred. Certain of my enemies actually said the words, put clear language to the idea that I’d been given too much, and that it wasn’t fair in their eyes, and that it was their intention to level the balance.”
Quote 2
“He graduated high school with an A average and not a close friend, on campus or off. And why? There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of oth- ers to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely. From an early age he had a gift for invisibility; he was not tormented by his peers because his peers did not see him, his school teach- ers prone to forgetting and reforgetting his name. He would have been a highly successful bank robber; he could have stood in a hundred line-ups and walked free from every one. Of course, he’d had instances of minor camaraderie, even ro- mance, through his school years; but none of these achieved any definition or meaning to Bob. The truth was that people made him tired.”
Quote 3
“The work itself was not ever difficult, at least not for Bob. He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper, and erasers and scissors and staples, paper clips, the scent of books, and the words on the pages of the books. Sometimes he thought of the women and men who’d composed these documents sitting at their desks and aiming for the elusive bull’s-eye and almost always missing but sometimes not, and Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing. His colleagues weren’t unfriendly, but vague in the face, and with not much to say. Some among them complained of the tedium of the profession, and Bob always expressed his sympathies, but really he had no comprehension of the sentiment. He understood that the people who knew boredom in the role of librarian were simply in the wrong profession. He didn’t judge them for it but felt a relief at not being like them.”
Quote 4
Ida : “How did you lose your arm, Mr. More?”
Mr.More : “I lost it in the First World War, Ida. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Ida : “I must have, and yet I’m surprised to think of it. What a thing that must be, to lose an arm.”
Mr.More : “Very much a thing, yes.”
June : “May I ask if it was your good arm?”
Mr.More : “Anyway it was not a bad one. I think the truth is that once an arm is taken from you, you can’t help but recall it as the arm to end all arms.”
Ida : “Where do you think they put it?”
Mr.More : “I don’t know. Some pit somewhere. But it’s not like I wanted it back later. What am I going to do with it? Swaddle it? Wear it like a stole? I do hope that our conversation isn’t moving in the pacifistic direction?”
Have you read ‘The Librarianist’? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Patrick deWitt book?
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