When and how Bob meets Connie (and her freaky Priest-hating father) and Ethan - really the only two people with who he ever forms a close bond – and how the dynamics of that off-the-wall set of relationships develop; Reading Paulette Jiles' revenge western Chenneville, it's easy to remember she's a poet. She plays ... 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: 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. . . . Okay, but if she starts freaking out, can you try to get her through the doors?” The cashier made a corralling gesture, arms out. “Once she’s in the parking lot she’s out of my domain.”

Overall, ‘The Librarianist’ presents us with a rather interesting character in Bob Comet. He embodies an unspoken sadness that infuses the majority of the novel. If you want a summary of the book, there are a million places to read that over and over again. Therefore, I will not put it in my "review." I just want to spew my thoughts as they come...

Beyond the Book

A third section of the novel takes us even further into the past when Bob is 11, which gives us even more insight into the forming of his character. As a reader, I wasn’t sure this section was really necessary to the overall story arc. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. The Librarianist is about Bob, a seventy-one-year-old retired librarian. He's a placid, forgettable man, a loner, who supposedly prefers living life via novels A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. Bob Comet is the non-humorous Leslie Jordan of a Wes Anderson film, and I was determined to give this book five stars based on the first half of the book alone. Sadly, the third part of the story saw my enthusiasm falter, and the last part ended with my expectations battling the reality of life and fiction.

About another librarian, "She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease." This is his fifth and latest novel – and the only other I have read – and it retains something of the same offbeat humour and eccentric cast list (even including a Sheriff), but is a far more introspective novel and in fact is even blurbed as “a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition”. 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. However, some of that was buried in the next section. Bob runs away and meets a bunch of random characters that I didn’t connect with. This section seemed to drag on and on.May 8, 1945 is the day when German troops throughout Europe surrendered to the Allies, and is known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day). Millions of people rejoiced at the news that the war—which had lasted six years and cost millions of lives, including those of the six million Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust—was over. There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of others to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely." 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.” Many thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. This novel is due to be released on July 4, 2023.

Well, then, let us accept that we shan’t be alone, as was our hope. In brighter news, however, it does appear the boy is mute, perhaps deaf into the bargain, and so we can easily pretend to be alone if not actually live out the reality of aloneness.” Bob is not some loveless, angry Houellebecq character; his aloneness doesn't read as a failure to him or to the reader. Quietude and reading are his life, not an escape from it. Instead of taking solace in his ability to turn pain into art, using books to justify his loneliness, Bob turns to literature to recognize himself in others, and to not be alone. His reading is described as "a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end"—a beautiful portrayal that makes this lifetime activity sound closer to the creation of art than what people often call the "consumption" of it... continued Now, deWitt has published an exceedingly gentle novel about the hushed life of a retired librarian in Portland, Ore. Readers waiting for another book as irrepressible and strange as “The Sisters Brothers” will have to keep waiting. Which is not to say that “The Librarianist” is without charm, only that it presumes a reservoir of goodwill and patience. DeWitt does this, he has a simple story, a life, to some it might be quite a mediocre life, but it isn't. He examines that life and highlights and weaves and sees and while he is seeing he shows us because that is what we want with stories, we want to see, to understand, to connect and while connecting we feel seen too and that is the ultimate goal. We are seen, we exist.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.

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.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