Martha CooleyRezensionen

Started out engrossing. Lost me for the entire middle as story shifted to diary entries of the mad wife. I wanted to see how it ended and was very disappointed by the end in which the archivist destroys TS Elliot’s letters to his long time mistress. The story did not coherently lay out the case for the reason in the act. His entire mea culpa regarding his wife was that he was incapable of bearing witness to truth (the horrors of wwii) Or at least to stay firm next to her while she at least faced the truth. So the culmination of the novel is to destroy personal letters? To decide what is whose business? As if it fucking matters 100 years after everyone is dead? If this is true, what is the point of archives? Who draws the line on art or records and none of your business? Would he destroy hitlers love letters? Why not? Stupid novel. Too long.

I am too young, too gentile, and too unfamiliar with TS Eliot to understand even half of what is discussed in the wife's portion of this book. And I don't know what the heck the deal is with the archivist and the grad student who are somewhere in limbo waiting for their story to continue. The thing is,I absolutely don't care about any of them. And I have given up trying to care about whatever grand statement the author might be trying to make.

I can't even say I've "lost interest" because I never had any, so I'm shelving this as "Hated it." And that's kinda true because I am so pissed off I persevered for 187 pages trying to get to the dazzling book described in blurbs on the dust jacket.

Set mostly in the 1960s, this is a story of three people: Matthias Lane, an archivist at a prominent northeastern US university, Judith Lane, wife of Matthias, confined to a mental institution, and Roberta Spire, a graduate student working temporarily at the archives. The archive contains a collection of letters written by TS Eliot to his paramour, Emily Hale, while his wife, Vivienne, resided in a sanitarium. Hale has donated the letters to the archive. Roberta asks to see the letters, but they are to be kept private until the year 2020 (which was well into the future when the book was published, in 1998).

This is a character driven novel focused on relationships between detached men and depressed women. Matthias forms the focal point for the convergence of three storylines, all with interrelated pieces and parts, leading up to a personal revelation. The poetry of TS Eliot is used sporadically throughout the novel to illustrate key points. Each of the main characters has unresolved personal conflicts related to identity, accountability, guilt, relationships, and religion. I had one issue with an action that seems out of character for an archivist. I appreciated the delicate hand of the author and found it easy to become immersed in the story.

An extraordinary novel including references to real people. It is about the
archivist at a university library to which T S Eliot's late mistress has
given all her letters from him, not to be opened for 20 years. Great ethical
question as to whether this prohibition should be observed, a researcher is
keen to read them. In fact the mistress, Emily Hale, really lived and did
indeed donate the letters to Princeton Un Lib, with that prohibition. But
the novel does give a fate for these letters - really strange.½

Pretty solid "meh" from me.

I am too young, too gentile, and too unfamiliar with TS Eliot to understand even half of what is discussed in the wife's portion of this book. And I don't know what the heck the deal is with the archivist and the grad student who are somewhere in limbo waiting for their story to continue. The thing is,I absolutely don't care about any of them. And I have given up trying to care about whatever grand statement the author might be trying to make.

I can't even say I've "lost interest" because I never had any, so I'm shelving this as "Hated it." And that's kinda true because I am so pissed off I persevered for 187 pages trying to get to the dazzling book described in blurbs on the dust jacket.

While this has been well reviewed by others, I found its structure slightly dissapointing and distracting. It's a good book and definitely one for people of a bookish persuasion. However, the central third of the novel is one woman's diary of her experiences as a Jew in post WWII New York and her guilt driving her mad. It takes away from the central (and titular) narrator, who is/was her husband, who helms the front and back third of the book.

Not perfect, but well worth the read.

I did not know what to expect from the novel, but certainly nothing as emotionally charged and reflective as it was! Quiet Matt is a terrific foil to his two fiery women, Judith and Roberta, as both struggle in their own ways with their identities and their religion's meaning. I found it was a very human and astute way to look at how religion (in this case Judaism and Christianity) shape world views and sensitivities.
Judith's slow descent into insanity, as she starts to feel the world too much, absorbed by it and its cruelty, is mesmerizing and believable.
It was a bit of a tough read for me (I was looking for something lighter) but I did not regret my efforts.½

This many-leveled novel is hard to put down. Matthias is an archivist at a university library where among the treasures he is responsible for are letters from T. S. Eliot to an American woman with whom he (Eliot) was very close. Matthias is a widower whose wife, Judith, suffered from mental illness which may, in part, have come from her difficult childhood. The story begins with Matthias' story then moves to Judith's journal which forms the middle of the book. We also meet Roberta, a graduate student who comes into Matthias' life because she wants desperately to read the Eliot letters (which cannot released until 2020) because she is struggling with her recently discovered jewish background and wants to see how he dealt with religious conversion. Judith also struggled with her jewish heritage particularly in relation to the holocaust. The author manages to weld these themes of love, mental illness, and holocaust into a seamless whole which is challenging and delightful.

This is a sandwich novel: a long middle section of diary entries by Judith Lane written during her "incarceration"--how she experienced her (in)voluntary stay at Hayden, a mental hospital during the late 50s & early 60s-- that breaks and connects Parts I and II which concern Judith's husband Matthias, an archivist at a major university library; Roberta Spire, a graduate student who wants access to T.S Elliot's letters to Emily Hale, sealed until 2020; and T.S. Elliot's poems and marriage. Overwrought. Heavy-handed parallels between T.S. Elliot's marriage (his wife Vivienne died in a mental institution), Matthias's marriage to Judith (she committed suicide at Hayden) and between Judith and Roberta, both haunted by the Holocaust and their Jewish family histories. I often dislike psychological novels with tormented characters whose personal struggles are also religious struggles. And this novel provides such characters in spades. After Part I, I was gritting my teeth, but then was rescued somewhat by the middle section of the novel. Not that Judith is a less tormented character than Matthias and Roberta; her mental agony is acute, but she recognizes the face of her tormentor as that of History. I found particularly interesting how mid-twentieth century psychiatry, in the guise of Dr. Clay (definitely, he has feet of clay), recognizes only childhood traumas and relationships with parents as sources of mental breakdown, but doesn't recognize that one can be driven crazy by History. Judith is obsessed with the Holocaust and with the willingness of others to "carry on" in the face of such horrific knowledge. She is equally obsessed by the guilt that she feels she, all her family members (Matthias, Uncle Len & Aunt Carol) and humanity in general must expiate and is drawn to the Kabbalah with its notions of Repair. She can't separate her personal story from the News, from History. At Hayden, she is supposed to learn how to be happy, to calm down, to make distinctions between then and now, there and here. But Judith can't do this and she doesn't want too. But others want it for her, so that she can return to a "normal" life with Matthias and get back to writing poetry. The 50s and 60s were an era rife with self-destructive artists, such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Charlie Parker & Bud Powell. Bud Powell functions as Judith's doppelganger in a sense, as African-American jazz musicians and poets express a knowledge of the world that echos that of post-war Jews. Judith, knowingly, and her aunt and uncle more instinctively, find solace and a home in Jazz.
Part II of the sandwich story is even more insufferably overwrought than Part I. I found the Roberta Spire character annoying and I think that it is regrettable that the author lingers incessantly on Matt's attraction to this woman 30 years his junior. The narrative is overloaded with descriptions of his reactions to her physical attributes, gestures, the look in her eyes, etc. If the author felt it necessary to create this kind of energy between these two characters (and I think the story would have been better off without it) a few subtle hints now and then would have done the job. As it is, it reads as unconvincing melodrama. The novel would have been better served with Roberta as a more neutral character. She could still have provided the impetus for Matt to reexamine his marriage and Judith's mental breakdown and suicide. The parallels between his marriage and that of T.S. Elliot and his wife Vivienne certainly would have sufficed. In fact more emphasis on the literary characters might have saved this novel from its two star fate.

This was a book about shifting personal realities, about the impossibility of understanding other people until it is too late, and about disillusionment. I found it depressing and difficult to read. It really wasn't about archives or T.S. Elliot, though both provided shading to the story's backdrop. It does provide an interesting glimpse into the lives and personal struggles of Jews (by both descent and faith) after the realities of World War 2 started to become known. I would not recommend this book to people who read for escape, but if you're interested in the many shades of grey within the human soul (my, doesn't that sound existential!), this might be a book for you.

Matthias Lane, a reclusive widower in his 60's, is an archivist at a university library. The jewel of his collection is a set of letters that T. S. Eliot wrote to his friend Emily Hale over a 20-year period -- letters that Hale bequeathed to the library, provided that they be kept sealed until the year 2020. This is his story and that of his wife and family. Although The Archivist takes place on an intimate stage -- no more than two or three characters are typically present in a scene -- the narrative poses large questions. Should art and religion seek to console us for the world's evils or to sharpen our awareness of them? Where do we draw the line between our obligation to remember a terrible past and our desire to rid ourselves of its burdens? Once one has become aware of the existence of radical evil, how should one conduct one's life?
Most of the novel is narrated by Matthias, and with utter persuasiveness Cooley captures his cautious, scrupulous, restrained and intelligent voice. This is a brilliantly imagined tale of an archivist whose interest in T. S. Eliot and her family's history dovetail into a sad but fascinating story. Some of the best writing about mental issues that I have ever read.½

Spoilers, if it can be -- I was pretty disappointed in this book. It was hard to care. The characters didn't feel alive, and the dialogue wasn't well constructed when it was used for explication.

Wow ... the prose is gorgeous. The story is a little dense, a little intellectual, but simultaneously compelling. There are many excerpts of TS Eliot's poems, and I have only recently become slightly familiar with The Four Quartets, and I found the characters' intense devotion to Eliot's work illuminating. In the back of my mind, even though this story slightly pre-dates the life and struggles of Sylvia Plath, I see many parallels in the solace of poetry for those who wrestle with the truths of the world.

Chronically dull and plodding. The writing's beautiful but I spent all my time waiting for something, *anything* to happen. Full of thoroughly miserable characters and a central mystery that's never really resolved.½

I can definitely echo y2pk's review and say that the book was very heavy with depression. Is it true that anything out of the heyday of psychoanalysis (the '50s and '60s primarily) is tangled up irrevocably with psychoanalytical ways of thinking--and of writing? Not necessariily, but in this book it is.
It's impossible to escape the fact that anybody who lived during one of the Great Wars had their life wrecked in one way or another. Nobody escaped unscathed. Plain evidence indicates that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. So the survivors of the conflict in Europe, when they come to America, are unable to protect their children from the trauma. Of course in this book, Judith's parents compound the difficulty by deciding to go back to Europe, with disastrous consequences. So, since it is not an excessively long book, you can get through the "tortured, self-absorbed, dysfunctional" elements in under one day, hopefully. And then come out of it and get back to normal, happy life.

I'm participating in a twenty-four hour read-a-thon. I chose this as my first read (or half-read, as I was already up to page 175 when I started the read-a-thon).Thoughts about the book: This book reminds me in many ways of one of my all-time favorite reads, Possession. The novel has several storylines: Matt and Judith, Roberta and her boyfriend, Roberta's parents, Judith's parents, and Eliot and his wife and Emily Hale. As a librarian, I was intrigued with the idea of saving or not saving written work. In some fashion, Matt blamed Judith's fall into insanity on his destruction of her survivor files and her poems. Judith had relied on Matt to keep these, but he felt their presence was exacerbating her illness. The saving of Eliot's letters to Emily went against Eliot's wishes, and the novel concludes with Matt's thoughtful destruction of the letters.The other theme of the book was Judaism vs. Christianity. All the characters of the novel wrestled with religion. Several converted from Judaism to Christianity. Christianity was a refuge for those who had suffered as Jews. However, it caused great suffering for those who later learned of the conversions.I've had this book for over three and a half years. I'm happy to have finished it.

An aging archivist meets a young woman who wants to read the letters that T.S. Eliot wrote to a woman named Emily Hale during Eliot's stormy marriage. The letters are sealed for years to come and stored in the archives. Her request brings back memories of the archivists own marriag with surprising parallels to Eliot's. The archivist must then decide what to do with Eliot's letters. Beautifully written and abounding with Eliot's poems.

Martha Cooley's "The Archivist" is splendid.

The plot involves an archivist who is responsible for holdings that include works relating to T.S. Eliot, his wife, who died long before the main action of the book and whose story is told in flashbacks and journal entries, and a woman English student determined to get access to Eliot's letters. The story of Eliot and his wife Vivienne, who he had put away in a mental institution, parallels the story of the archivist and his wife. The wife's journal entries are rather heartbreaking, and in the end help drive an act by the archivist that will change history forever.

I have a special fondness for novels with a central theme of books, bookshops, libraries or authors, so with a sigh of contentment and a frisson of anticipation I settled in with "The Archivist" as my first book of 2009... but, alas, I'm afraid my habit of refusing to read reviews or summaries (the former resembling the latter too often for my tastes) before beginning a book bit me on the backside this time.

This is the sort of novel I would ordinarily strive to avoid, a bleak tale of stunted emotion, hopelessness, helplessness, betrayal, loss, failure, and spiritual pain. This is just not my sort of thing, and it takes a compelling read indeed to overcome this admitted prejudice in me (off the top of my head, "We need to talk about Kevin" would be a brilliant example).

But it's a well-written book, and people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. For me, it was not entirely without redeeming value, despite my bias. The bright spot and most vivid character in this story is Judith, whose voice struggles to pierce a fortified prison of neglect, numbing tranquilizers and paralyzing mental illness; her thoughts as revealed via journal excerpts are the bright, bloody needles stitching meaning into an otherwise leaden tale. I suppose this is the author's intent, as she makes it a point to weave in Eliot's quote, "the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living" more than once.

Ultimately, though, Judith's role is a prop for the somewhat heavy-handed paralleling of Eliot's emotional/relational history, and we are left with the eponymous archivist - a creature so enervated, arid and lusterless that I spent the whole book wanting to poke him with a sharp stick.

Bertrand Russell once described T.S. Eliot as "exquisite and listless"; unfortunately and frustratingly, I found the archivist Matthias Lane merely listless.

this book made me sad because of the life's not lived. It also introduced me to the poetry of TS Eliot and the beauty of it.

I loved this book, one of several I've read this year about Holocaust survivors. This one intrigued me because the story is so interwoven with lines from T.S. Eliot's works. The main story also resonates with Eliot's themes. I have neglected Eliot since college days--20+ years ago--but this book inspires me to dig into his work again. The theme of feeling an inescapable connection with history is the most immediate in this book, and it's what kept me reading.

V-e-r-y slow to take off. Rather unengaging on the whole with random bits that were more interesting. Not bad, but certainly not great. I don't think this will be a memorable read.