Cyrille Martinez

Cyrille Martinez has written a magical-weird realism song to, of course libraries themselves, books, books as objects, the written word, words, literature, and, to this reader, what is a creative work becomes. I can only compare it to Murakami but instead of lonely men, cats, jazz, and animal-men or men in animal suits we have books and weird librarians. The Dark Library is story from a writer confronting what reading and libraries and books mean as culture throttles forward unrelentingly into online culture. Once captured digitally and distributed online are books and the ideas and stories free? Once captured in this way what even is a library? Gratefully filled with more questions than answers The Dark Library is a mysterious engaging read.… (mehr)

A satiric mediation on the fate of libraries in a world that has reduced the library to the information contained in the books. In short, the physical book, the tactile process of reading, cannot be distilled down to scanning words in digital formats. It's like comparing eating a meal at a fabulous restaurant, and looking at a picture of delicious dishes. This author knows the soft spots attacking the library, including, in many instances, the librarians themselves, and thus his critiques hit home with regularity. I did think the ending was a tad off, but even that offered the hopeful message that whatever the push to digitize everything, the physical library will spontaneously re-emerge because, in the end, it touches the soul in ways that mere reading of bloodless digital text cannot: While many live their lives acquiring books, even to the point of bibliomania, no one has ever, or will ever, collect digital files with similar hunger and satisfaction. Nor should they.… (mehr)