The Librarianist

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You can just picture the Anderson staginess: the long establishing shots; the jump cuts to a close-up on her face, then his; the vibrant colours; the exaggerated faces. I got serious The Grand Budapest Hotel vibes.) This whole section was so bizarre and funny that I could overlook the suspicion that deWitt got to the two-thirds point of his novel and asked himself “now what?!” The whole book is episodic and full of absurdist dialogue, and delights in the peculiarities of its characters, from Connie’s zealot father to the diner chef who creates the dubious “frizzled beef” entrée. And Bob himself? He may appear like a blank, but there are deep waters there. And his passion for books was more than enough to endear him to me: The Librarianist is deWitt’s fifth novel. Stylistically, there are certainly resemblances to his previous books – they’re all rather funny, in a quirky kind of way – but each one is unique. One might think of the Canadian author’s career as composed of a series of extraordinarily vivid tessellated patterns. If you’ve never read him, think of him as the literary equivalent of, say, the filmmaker Wes Anderson: deadpan tales of dysfunction and disappointment, heavy on the whimsy, light, bright, beguiling, perhaps a little solicitous, and yet also always somehow sad.

We are told many a time that Bob loves books, that he's always preferred books rather than interacting with people. I never felt the passion unless it wasn't a true passion just a way of hiding from society? Because although we are told (a number of times) that is how Bob views the world we are not really shown it; as we instead see Bob in a series of rather dramatic incidents (the elderly lady rescue and sudden discovery, the three-way relationship and rapid marriage, betrayal by and then death of his best friend, the cross-country runaway and then in the final section a hospital trip and closing revelations) which are more novelistic in themselves. By contrast we get very little information on the books that Bob reads – which means that for us our true impression is that Bob lives rather then reads. The Librarianist is about Bob, a seventy-one-year-old retired librarian. He's a placid, forgettable man, a loner, who supposedly prefers living life via novels All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented.” For me, Bob's relationships with Connie and Ethan were the most interesting portions of the book. I also liked reading about his volunteer work (at age 71) with the residents of an assisted living center. Unfortunately, there is a long chapter about when Bob ran away from home as a kid that bogged the story down.And the following, spoken by the proprietor of the rundown hotel, would seem to be the life advice that young Bob most took to heart:

Behind Bob Comet's straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life. Now, deWitt has published an exceedingly gentle novel about the hushed life of a retired librarian in Portland, Ore. Readers waiting for another book as irrepressible and strange as “The Sisters Brothers” will have to keep waiting. Which is not to say that “The Librarianist” is without charm, only that it presumes a reservoir of goodwill and patience.

BookBrowse Review

Between young Bob’s passive-sounding “Okay” (or silent shrugging) whenever anyone is speaking to him and his lifelong acceptance of happiness when it came (but reluctance to actively seek happiness or too keenly despair its loss), this seems less like “sadness” to me than a persistent character trait: Bob was made this way, and he doesn’t suffer for it. In what I thought was a really perceptive observation, deWitt writes that as an old man, sometimes Bob dreams of his days at the hotel and wakes with a vague feeling of having fallen in love (although those days were not romantic), and that feels like a really true description of nostalgia to me; and especially nostalgia for the most foundational experiences of what made us who we are (I'm sure there's a German word for that experience).

What makes a good story, the elements within or the teller? I lean more towards the teller. A good teller is able to bring the simplest story to life, is able to turn it around and examine its elements going deep and deeper if he wants, showing what makes up the whole, the nuances, the consequences. From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. Someday, Bob, when you’re an aged specimen like me, and you find yourself suddenly enamored of folding the laundry or edging your lawn, remember your long-gone friend Leslie More telling you to accept whatever happiness passes your way, and in whatever form.” Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.Weird and hilariously deadpan in just the way you’d expect from the author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit, this was the pop of fun my summer needed. There isn’t really a story, just a bunch of things that happen to the main character across certain points in his life that don’t add up to anything. Bob Comet is our main character. He’s a retired librarian who decides to help out at the local old folks’ home, curating a selection of his favourite stories to read to the residents - and then he finds out one of the residents’ identities, which holds great importance to him.