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Lädt ... The Librarianist: A Novel (2023. Auflage)von Patrick deWitt (Autor)
Werk-InformationenThe Librarianist von Patrick deWitt
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book as I hated his book The sister brothers. This is a story of several very well developed characters who are quiet, shy, outgoing, weird, eccentric, friendly, aggressive, autocratic or alcoholoc. These characters revolve around Bob Comet, a retired public librarian who is alone and happy in his little house where he was born near Portland, Oregon. One day he escorts a lost, confused geriatric patient back to her residence. He encounters the manager and decides that he would like to volunteer. This decision allows him to engage with several residents and they become friends. Bob recounts his lonely childhood and his decision to run away from home at 11 where he encounters several more odd characters. Much hilarity happens with June and Ida on the train, Mr More at the hotel. The theme of the story: it’s ok to be alone and happy and one never knows where you might find friendship, companionship, accept and embrace eccentricity. This is the story of Bob Comet, son of a single mother who had a relationship with her boss for many years to the point of the boss purchasing her house for her and Bob. When she dies, Bob inherits the house in his early twenties. Bob is an introvert, who does not have any close friends or family when we meet him at retirement from the Portland Public Library where he has worked for 45 years. He leads a quiet life, going for long walks each day and reading. When he finds a woman staring at the soda cooler in a convenience store, his life changes. She is called Chip. He takes her back to the senior center where she lives and decides to volunteer to read to the folks who live there and also come there on a daily elder-care basis. The story then moves back and forth from Bob's middle life, early life, and present, telling his life story--how he met Connie, who he married and Ethan, his first real friend. Unfortunately, that did not last long since Connie left Bob for Ethan, who was previously a philanderer. In the present, Bob makes friends with a number of the senior center residents as he volunteers there. This is a cataloging of a life lived to the side of the masses. At first I was prepared to be charmed by this whimsical account of the life and times of Bob Comet. A misfit at school, he became a librarian - of course he did. Then he continued - quite contentedly - his largely friendless existence, living in the house where he'd been born, now his alone since his mother's death. He meets a young woman - also a social misfit, completely under her father's thumb - at the library. Reader, he marries her. At about this time, he also comes across the man who becomes his only male friend, and - no, spoiler alert. We are introduced to Bob at the point when he's long been separated from his wife. And, so far so good. But we plunge back into his younger life and the book loses its way, especially when we spend far too long in the time when he ran away from home as an eleven year old. It's not hugely relevant to the story or to the man he became. A bit of a curate's egg of a book then. Good in parts. But I'm not encouraged to read more work by deWitt. I liked this, and was especially captivated by the author’s writing style. Yes, it somehow ends up feeling a little slight. When it came to the main character, perhaps there wasn’t any there there. But there is quirk and mystery in many of the side characters. It is often funny. And the prose, and the dialogue, sang. A good read for the right reader. Kind of an indie work, at heart. If it were a record, it would be by the Decembrists.
The Librarianist is unyielding in its defiance of our arguably too-set expectations about how novels should depict human interiority in times of flux, crisis, or transition. Bob Comet is no comet; he is a steady, low-voltage star, a pinprick of light who only partially awakens to the complexity of his own life. By the end, I came to admire Patrick deWitt’s commitment to the mission he has set himself: to render a figure who is not beaten up by loss or reformed by insight, a man who remains, nearly always, resolutely himself. Patrick deWitt’s novel “The Librarianist” offers a quirky, affectionate portrait of a retired librarian who discovers friendship and community late in life...“The Librarianist,” a quirky, affectionate portrait of an introverted loner who makes some surprising connections late in life, DeWitt tames the outlandishness without sacrificing his offbeat humor. His bemused sense of compassion for his characters recalls Anne Tyler, with whom he shares a soft spot for misfits, along with a firm conviction that even supposedly ordinary people lead extraordinary lives. .. The title character, Bob Comet, is a former librarian in deWitt’s hometown of Portland, Oregon.... DeWitt’s great achievement is in creating, perhaps for the first time, a character whose very ordinariness is his defining feature. Of course, the section at the Hotel Elba goes to show the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, though this comes at a cost on the level of emotional resonance. The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
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 façade 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. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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"And I suppose you're a fiend for books?"
"I suppose I am."
"I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me."
"See, for me it's just the opposite."
During a hospital stay, Bob decides:
"After decades of rejecting the television medium he experienced a period of not just watching TV, but watching with enthusiastic interest. All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind's finest inclinations were represented. And this must have been true at some point in history, but now he understood the species had devolved and that this shrill, base, banal potpourri of humanity's worst and weakest and laziest desires and behaviors was the document of the time. It was about volume and visual overload and it pinned Bob to his bed like a cat before a strobe light. "
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