The Dark Library
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Libraries are magical places. But what if they’re even more magical than we know?
In Cyrille Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He’s tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops.
Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary?
The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.
"French writer and librarian Martinez explores the purpose of libraries amid sweeping societal changes in this whimsical novel … satire with wit and quirky characters. This will delight fans of absurdist fiction." —Publishers Weekly
"The caustic and often hilarious story of the misadventures of a library, all the concerns and issues facing the professions … The fantastic with a hint of irony of Cyrille Martinez’s writing is reminiscent of Marcel Aymé." —Livres Hebdo
"Over a documentary base that it itself worth reading, he composes a passionate fiction, almost fantastic, showing the defeat of the printed word by the digital." —L’Humanité
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French writer and librarian Martinez (The Sleepworker) explores the purpose of libraries amid sweeping societal changes in this whimsical novel. An unnamed narrator visits his unnamed country's Great Library to find something new to read. Before arriving, the narrator explains the library's four towers: one for novels, one for sciences and humanities, one for rare items, and a fourth for "unclassifiables," the intention for which is "obscure... and their language bizarre." The narrator happens upon a title called the Angry Young Book, which literally begins speaking to him and tells a story about the Historian, one of the most dedicated literary minds in the country who donated his entire collection to the library, and then disappears. The Angry Young Book also shares its frustration over a general decline in readership and bemoans the gimmicky methods the library's management has been using to lure visitors. The dutiful, unnamed Red Librarian takes over the narration when a horde of "contractual readers" hired by the library appear and begin requesting titles at a breakneck pace as part of a secretive, and ultimately shocking, plan to save the library. Martinez tempers his satire with wit and quirky characters. This will delight fans of absurdist fiction.
