The Archivist
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Mathias is a librarian, a man of ordinary ways, responsible for safeguarding a sealed cache of T. S. Eliot’s letters. Roberta is a young poet with an unabashed and oddly intense interest in the letters. What begins as a battle of wills soon evolves into an unlikely friendship – a relationship that not only unsettles Matthias’s solitary life but forces him to confront long-buried memories of his wife, her mental breakdown, and the dissolution of their marriage. Propelled by startling truths hidden and revealed, this extraordinary novel draws richly upon the poems of T. S. Eliot and the intellectual and social climate of post-war New York City as it explores the redemptive power of art and the challenge of forging a moral and meaningful life in the modern world.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
This impressive first novel tells the story of Matthias, an archivist in a university library whose life is bound by books. The library is where he has “inhabited a secure realm”. A rather dry person, one thinks, more interested in scholarship and the life of the mind than anyone or anything else. However as the tale proceeds, we come to an understanding of a more complex character strongly influenced by his relationship with his parents, his wife (whose stay in a mental hospital is touchingly conveyed through her diary). There are strong parallels between his life and that of the poet T.S. Eliot whose poetry deeply interests him and is a major theme in the book. It is through an interest in Eliot that he meets the young poet Roberta. Through her life as well as that of Matthias and his wife Judith are explored many themes – obsession, guilt, inability to cope with reality, desire to escape (from the past, from the holocaust, from family). Judith’s adoptive parents are strongly and humorously portrayed. Matthias at one point remarks that he has learned more from books than reality. This book certainly teaches us something about ourselves.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)