Gérard Bessette (1920–2005)

A middle-aged failed teacher in francophone Quebec who is suffering from extreme ennui, gets a job as a clerk in a bookstore. The small community of St. Joachim suffers from social pressure, Catholic priests that serve as intellectual censors, a boarding house with a sexually lonely middle-aged woman, and a bookstore owner who professes liberal ideas so long as it is in private and no one in the community knows. I thought this sounded like an interesting setup; the room of censored books, sold only to customers of discretion and taste, and the subsequent sale of a book by Voltaire to a thoughtful high school student, is an interesting premise, but the suffocating ennui of the narrator failed to generate much sympathy for the story. And maybe that is the point.… (mehr)