I absolutely adored it. I loved Bob - his position over to the side of charisma and horribleness, out of the game, his notions and his demeanour ... This beautiful book took me far away from all my concerns. It's so wonderful, soothing and heartbreaking The Librarianist is deWitt’s fifth novel. Stylistically, there are certainly resemblances to his previous books – they’re all rather funny, in a quirky kind of way – but each one is unique. One might think of the Canadian author’s career as composed of a series of extraordinarily vivid tessellated patterns. If you’ve never read him, think of him as the literary equivalent of, say, the filmmaker Wes Anderson: deadpan tales of dysfunction and disappointment, heavy on the whimsy, light, bright, beguiling, perhaps a little solicitous, and yet also always somehow sad. For me, Bob's relationships with Connie and Ethan were the most interesting portions of the book. I also liked reading about his volunteer work (at age 71) with the residents of an assisted living center. Unfortunately, there is a long chapter about when Bob ran away from home as a kid that bogged the story down.

You know someone, and then you don’t know them, and in their absence you wonder what their life was made up of.”Bob Comet, a retired librarian ... brings to mind John Williams' Stoner and Thoreau's chestnut about 'lives of quiet desperation,' but it is telling that deWitt chooses to capture him at times when his life takes a turn. A quietly effective and moving character study. Also, this is my own personal preference, but there just weren’t enough literary references. The book is entitled The Librarianist. My assumption is that the target audience is bibliophiles, but it didn’t have enough to make me happy. We are told many a time that Bob loves books, that he's always preferred books rather than interacting with people. I never felt the passion unless it wasn't a true passion just a way of hiding from society? And the following, spoken by the proprietor of the rundown hotel, would seem to be the life advice that young Bob most took to heart: That introduction of a life infused with literature signals a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy or perhaps a satire of fiction’s erroneous influence, like Jane Austen’s. . . .

We all want to, and we are every one of us disappointed, and we shall die not knowing it,” June sighed. “I do wish it had announced itself. I feel rather nude, frankly. I hope we haven’t named any old scandals, or created any new ones.”From the best-selling author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. For example, we’re told early on that Bob’s wife ran off with his best friend when they were all young and he never remarried. Fine - but the entire middle of the novel is the story of how this happened. And guess what? Besides fleshing out the wife and best friend, to no effect, we get to read in excruciatingly dull detail what we already know. The wife and best friend run off and get married. So what’s the point? I really don’t know. You can just picture the Anderson staginess: the long establishing shots; the jump cuts to a close-up on her face, then his; the vibrant colours; the exaggerated faces. I got serious The Grand Budapest Hotel vibes.) This whole section was so bizarre and funny that I could overlook the suspicion that deWitt got to the two-thirds point of his novel and asked himself “now what?!” The whole book is episodic and full of absurdist dialogue, and delights in the peculiarities of its characters, from Connie’s zealot father to the diner chef who creates the dubious “frizzled beef” entrée. And Bob himself? He may appear like a blank, but there are deep waters there. And his passion for books was more than enough to endear him to me: