Printed matter still matters
If you’re worried that books are, as young hipsters today would say, so-yesterday, here are two works of fiction to cheer you up.
Bookends as it were to the power of imagination and the printed word, Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library and Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry help bring hope back into a world where the digerati have nudged out the literati in libraries and where too many bookstores have reached their final chapter. A not-so-brave world where, as those who have grown up with old media like newspapers grow more despondent over the upheaval that technology has wreaked on our industry, hope casts a warm glow and shared sense of this: The story still matters.
Books still matter, and perhaps always will.
Libraries still matter.
Bookstores matter. Maybe they’re even, as one character in Zevin’s story suggests, holy places.
I chose these two titles quite randomly, the way sometimes the best books are read. Murakami’s was reviewed in the New York Times and Zevin’s was a featured book, with 40 per cent off the sale price, at Shopper’s Drug Mart. I found both books at my Windsor Public Library branch and plunged headlong into their weird worlds.
Though quite different in style and theme and tone, each book is like a clarion call for the power of the printed word.
The Strange Library is a short fable wrapped in a creative package, starting with flaps that open up and to the sides and lead you right into page one — literally the first page that you open. The reader learns of a young boy who gets caught in a house of horrors library where the Reading Room is “as quiet as a graveyard in the dead of night” and “Room 107” in the basement at the end of a gloomy corridor leads the protagonist into his nightmare.
He, and we, discover a mysterious young girl whose words appear in blue type and casts a spell on the young boy — “She was so pretty that looking at her made my eyes hurt,” he says and, “her smile is so radiant that the air seemed to thin around it.” Other characters that emerge include a Sheep Man (“You mean you really and truly came to read those books?” he tells the boy) and an Old Man, the latter of whom fattens his library patrons so he can eat their brains. (“Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy,” Sheep Man explains.)
The boy journeys into the past and fancies himself an ancient Turkish tax collector who is the subject of The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector — and how’s that for great reading material kids! — while dodging nightmares such as a “jar with ten thousand caterpillars.”
Throughout the tale, Murakami explores the mystery and meaning of mazes and knowledge and loneliness and love and maybe a lot of other things in such a dense, short space. You can read this book in one short sitting and the brief epilogue style ending will shake you with sadness and a gloomy kind of finality.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry also has its sad moments as well as its funny ones and there are one or two tantalizing twists.
It’s a charming tale of a book owner whose life story unfolds, as promised in the title. It opens with Fikry reminiscing about his dead wife — “God, he misses Nic. Her voice and her neck and even her armpits. They had been stubbly as a cat’s tongue and, at the end of the day, smelled like milk just before it curdles” which gives you a sense of the kind of quirky charm Zevin endows her characters with, especially their relationships. (During a proposal later in the book, after inadvertently tossing his ring box at his beloved and hitting her in the forehead, A.J. says sweetly, “When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time.”)
His life is turned upside down when his precious first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamarlane goes missing and then he finds a baby, Maya, in his bookstore along with a letter from her mother asking him to raise her in a world of books.
The small cast of characters in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry includes a police officer, Lambiase, whose literary tastes expand from crime thrillers to literary and young adult fiction, A.J.’s sister-in-law Ismay and her author-husband Daniel, and Amelia, a salesperson with Knightley Press whose “speciality” is “persnickety little bookstores” like Island Books on a place called Alice Island.
A.J. shared more than a love of books with Amelia and the introduction of the two females in his life — her and Maya — smooths out the rough edges in the miserable existence of the bookowner and help him discover the joy of love and life.
Zevin introduces each chapter with a short passage written by Fikry about some of his favourite works of fiction — ranging from Bret Harte to J.D. Salinger to Road Dahl– in which he gives his pearls of wisdom to Maya. They are a sort of love letter to a daughter, precious as a father’s written words in books he gives his child.
A sampling, of Raymond Carver’s 1980 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:
A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.* This is my favourite short story, Maya, and yet I cannot begin to tell you why.
(You and Amelia are my favorite people, too.)
*This accounts for much of the Internet, of course.
That sideways swipe at the Internet is a key theme in this book. For if there’s one thing that ties together The Strange Library and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry it’s that printed matter still matters and all the digital noise surrounding us is just that: noise.
Consider this outburst from Fikry, after receiving an e-reader from his mother at Christmas.
What is so great about the times?” A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat. First, it had been the record stores, and then the video stores, and then newspapers and magazines, and now even the big chain bookstores were disappearing everywhere you looked. From his point of view, the only thing worse in the world with big chain bookstores was a world with NO big chain bookstores. At least the big stores sell books and not pharmaceuticals or lumber! At least some of the people who work at those stores have degrees in English literature and know how to read and curate books for people! At least the big stores can sell ten thousand units of publisher’s dreck so that Island gets to sell one hundred units of literary fiction!
It is pronouncements like this (and, yes, maybe even the unrealistic idealism that unfolds at the end of the book) that help restore the reader’s faith in written works. Another is a story that Lambiase tells of one youngster he investigated once for cutting class: he discovered he was going to the library to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, because it’s quieter there than his home. Or Ismay, the school teacher, describing her favourite kind of book set in an exotic location like India or Bangkok where there are no cellphones, social networking or Internet.
Books become a metaphor for life in Zevin’s book — A.J. says at one point, “We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone” and concludes: “In the end, we are collected works.”
But books are also, of course, a precious commodity in and of themselves.
As the sign over Island Books proclaims: “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.”
And every bookstore — and library — is a special place. As Amelia says so eloquently of Island Books: “I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place.”
Amen, sister.
