3:39
The story has three main characters: Odile, an aspiring librarian in 1937 Paris; Lily, a young girl who lives in 1983; and Mrs. Gustafson who largely lives alone. Janet writes, “Numbers floated round my head like stars. 823. The numbers were the key to a new life. 822. Constellations of hope. 841. In my bedroom late at night, in the morning on the way to get croissants, series after series 810, 840, 890 formed in front of my eyes. They represented freedom, the future. In England, while Henry VIII was busy chopping off his wives’ heads, our King François was modernizing his library, which he opened to scholars. His royal collection was the beginning of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Now, at the desk in my bedroom, I prepared for my job interview at the American library” (1).
This novel, fraught with characters some loveable, some dramatic, some helpful, and another frightfully annoying. Brookner began, “Dr. [Ruth] Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. // In her thoughtful and academic way, she put it down to her faulty moral education, which dictated, through the conflicting but in this one instance united agencies of her mother and father, that she ponder the careers of
Anna Karenina and
David Copperfield and
Little Dorrit” (7). I am sure my faithful listeners will notice my love of novels flooded with literature.
Ruth’s mother, Helen, was a noted actress who used her dramatic skills at every opportunity. Anita wrote, “‘Darling heart’ called her mother, as she outlined her eyes with blue, watching her mouth uttering the words. ‘Yes, darling,’ called George [her husband] admiring the fit of a new jacket, tying a silk scarf at his neck. To the grandmother, they were fools” (17).
I’m Jim McKeown , welcome to Likely Stories, a weekly review of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Every-once-in-a-while I come across a novel by Emily St.
3:30
Hannah begins the story, “Elsa Wolcott had spent years in enforced solitude, reading fictional adventures and imagining other lives. In her lonely bedroom, surrounded by the novels that had become her friends, she sometimes dared to dream of an adventure of her own, but not often. Her family repeatedly told her that it was illness she’d survived in childhood that had transformed her life and left it fragile and solitary, and on good days, she believed it. // On bad days, like today, she knew that she had always been an outsider in her own family. They had sensed the lack in her early on, seen that she didn’t fit in. // There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Else had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked. The hurt had become so common place, she rarely noticed it. She knew she had nothing to do with the illness to which her