Books I've read; The Librarianist

I bought this book after meeting the author at the Writers Programme of the recent Festival.  I was a big fan of his book The Sisters Brothers, and was excited to read this new one, despite not having read anything else he's written.  Especially after discovering what a lovely and amusing person he is!

The book is about an older man, Bob Comet, who has lived his life for literature as a lifelong librarian.  When he comes across a confused older woman in a store, he takes her back to the home where she lives.  Hoping to fill the long lonely hours of his retired days, he volunteers to help out at the home and quickly becomes entangled in the lives of the residents.

When his own past rushes up to slap him in  the face as a result of a strange coincidence, Bob is forced to take a good had look at himself and what has brought him to the place he finds himself today.

And what a life it is.  For someone who seems, on the surface, to be a simple, possibly boring man, comes a life-story to rival anything in the books he has so lovingly curated over the years.

There's his adventures as an 11-year-old runaway, the love story between he and his wife and the tragedy of having love torn from him.  There's his struggle to make friends and the power of the friendships he eventually manages to foster.

Bob is an introvert and this book explores what that means in a world that focuses so much on those who make the most bluster and noise.  And as Bob moves through his own quiet world, he observes these people, and finds himself often surrounded by them and the his own life becomes inextricably tangled and changed by them.

I really enjoyed this book.  It really shows how you can't truly understand the depths in people without digging deep.  Bob appears like such a nothing person at the beginning of the book, but by the end, you get a real sense of the people and events who have made him the person he is in the present.  And it's a slyly funny book too.  Bob has a knack for surrounding himself with outsized characters whose often bizarre behaviour have a profound effect on him.

So I'd definitely recommend this one.  It's funny, poignant, literate and a very enjoyable read.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

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.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert's condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.