The Librarianist

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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by Okay, but if she starts freaking out, can you try to get her through the doors?” The cashier made a corralling gesture, arms out. “Once she’s in the parking lot she’s out of my domain.” I’ll admit another disappointment - not enough book talk. For a novel about a book lover, someone who devoted their life to books and was a voracious reader, there aren’t any actual titles mentioned (besides Crime and Punishment, twice). We’re just told he reads a lot. So don’t go expecting a book about books. This is about a solitary man who doesn't realize his life is impactful. A third section of the novel takes us even further into the past when Bob is 11, which gives us even more insight into the forming of his character. As a reader, I wasn’t sure this section was really necessary to the overall story arc.

Also, this is my own personal preference, but there just weren’t enough literary references. The book is entitled The Librarianist. My assumption is that the target audience is bibliophiles, but it didn’t have enough to make me happy. Bob is not some loveless, angry Houellebecq character; his aloneness doesn't read as a failure to him or to the reader. Quietude and reading are his life, not an escape from it. Instead of taking solace in his ability to turn pain into art, using books to justify his loneliness, Bob turns to literature to recognize himself in others, and to not be alone. His reading is described as "a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end"—a beautiful portrayal that makes this lifetime activity sound closer to the creation of art than what people often call the "consumption" of it... continued Memorable characters and a strain of burlesque comedy swirl through this story spanning the life of a retired librarian ... deWitt takes us on a waltzer of a ride, twisting through Bob's life Bob Comet, a retired librarian ... brings to mind John Williams' Stoner and Thoreau's chestnut about 'lives of quiet desperation,' but it is telling that deWitt chooses to capture him at times when his life takes a turn. A quietly effective and moving character study.

I absolutely adored it. I loved Bob - his position over to the side of charisma and horribleness, out of the game, his notions and his demeanour ... This beautiful book took me far away from all my concerns. It's so wonderful, soothing and heartbreaking Bob Comet is the non-humorous Leslie Jordan of a Wes Anderson film, and I was determined to give this book five stars based on the first half of the book alone. Sadly, the third part of the story saw my enthusiasm falter, and the last part ended with my expectations battling the reality of life and fiction.

Many thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. This novel is due to be released on July 4, 2023. Is it a spoiler if there’s no plot to be spoiled? Anyway, I won’t reveal the character’s identity but deWitt could’ve ended the story there because nothing that follows adds to what we already know of Bob’s life and the entire final third is completely irrelevant. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Overall, I am actually a bit sad about this book because I felt that it has a bit of magic in it. It really did make me stop and think. However, it was just too slow paced and had too many unnecessary characters.Well, then, let us accept that we shan’t be alone, as was our hope. In brighter news, however, it does appear the boy is mute, perhaps deaf into the bargain, and so we can easily pretend to be alone if not actually live out the reality of aloneness.” It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges.

I enjoyed each of these sections, but was most intrigued by the stories of his brief marriage and his running away; and mostly because of the characters and their deWittian conversations (between his eccentric wife and their friends; between the oddballs Bob met, and who took him in, at a dilapidated hotel near the end of WWII). This is excerpted from a conversation between two old vaudevillian performers who discover the runaway Bob in their private train compartment: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.

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.” 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. 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 the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Comet's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. About another librarian, "She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease." 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).

How a nice quiet librarianist, who starts off helping a person, and then volunteers, and then becomes a part of something greater than himself, can actually be a sweet yet flawed imperfect, but readable story.