One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight. She begins to talk to him, a one-way conversation full of sharp insight and quiet outrage.
As she rails against snobbish senior colleagues, an ungrateful and ignorant public, the strictures of the Dewey Decimal System and the sinister expansionist conspiracies of the books themselves, two things shine through: her unrequited passion for a researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love for the arts.
A delightful divertissement for the discerning bookworm...
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[WAKE UP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING LYING THERE?] ***(Maclehose Press, 2 January 2014, first published 2010, 91 pages, paperback, borrowed from my library)
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This is my first time reading the author.
I love books (duh!) and I love libraries (double duh!) so thought this book would be a treat. It was the opposite.
I'm sorry to say I enjoyed nothing about this book.
The reader locked into the library did not serve any purpose. The book is a monologue by the librarian speaking to this person but they never appear on screen. They may as well not have been there. This character could have been completely cut and it would have made no difference.
Some of the librarian's complaints and insights were amusing but the style of the book just made her seem whiny, griping about nothing in particular, rambling on and on to the point of tedium. Oh, spare me!
The book, short as it is, is one long paragraph, a monologue by the librarian. The author does at least use punctuation. However, it irritated me that the text has no paragraph breaks which after less than halfway through made the book tedious.
The Library of Unrequited Love could have been a treat if there had been some interaction between the 'reader' and the 'librarian' and if the book had not been 91 pages of almost unbroken text. God, no, not again.
