The Librarianist

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Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... Connie, who had been Bob’s wife, had sometimes asked him why he read quite so much as he did. She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live? 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

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. In contrast to them all is Bob, a “steady, hand-on-the-tiller type”, a man possessed of a “natural enjoyment of modest accomplishment”, a man firmly set at a midpoint between extremes. The Librarianist, among other things, is an exploration of how a man might end up so determinedly mild and middling: “Bob had not been ­particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line, going out of his way to perform damage against the un­deserving but never arcing toward helping the deserving, either.” DeWitt’s great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight. 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.” 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.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. 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. I did enjoy my time with this book - there’s a warmth to the writing and it has an offbeat humor- and it does make me want to seek out the rest of deWitt’s work.

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. Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as thief, and it is rooted in memories of past love and success. Sorrow is a more hopeless proposition. Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave and, perhaps, deserve, and it is rooted in, or encouraged by, excuse me, the death impulse."

About another librarian, "She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease." 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: If you expect to encounter a lot of library and book talk given the title and the main character's job and reading habits, you'll be disappointed. I certainly was. As readers we are introduced to his ex-wife, Connie, and his best friend, Ethan, a fast-talking playboy who ends up stealing Connie away from him. We also see him in his job at the library, and meet the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss. Some of the excitement that takes place in this section remains peripheral to Bob and to the plot.

Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

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We have 4 read-alikes for The Librarianist, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member. Bob Comet, deWitt’s sepia-toned hero, is 71 years old, healthy, tidy and “not unhappy.” Since retiring from the public library where he spent his entire professional career, he’s enjoyed a life of almost uninterrupted solitude in the house his mother left to him decades earlier. “He had no friends, per se,” deWitt writes. “He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.” 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 This provides the author with an opportunity to construct funny dialogue involving quirky folks. We find the author a master at the way he gets his characters to talk at and with each other. May 8, 1945 is the day when German troops throughout Europe surrendered to the Allies, and is known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day). Millions of people rejoiced at the news that the war—which had lasted six years and cost millions of lives, including those of the six million Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust—was over.