The Library of Unrequited Love - Sophie Divry - translated by Sian Reynolds

‘One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight.

She begins to talk to him, a one-way conversation full of sharp insight and quiet outrage. As she rails against snobbish senior colleagues, an ungrateful and ignorant public, the strictures of the Dewey Decimal System and the sinister expansionist conspiracies of the books themselves, two things shine through: her unrequited passion for a researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love for the arts.

A delightful divertissement for the discerning bookworm…’

This utterly charming novella, a debut novella to boot, will take no time at all to read but the thoughts and philosophies contained within will likely stay with you forever. Especially if you are of that extraordinary species - the bookworm.

Sensitively translated by Sian Reynolds this presents, almost, as a monologue of spontaneous prose, stream of consciousness outpourings from someone, possibly on the spectrum somewhere, to a captive audience. You get a sense that the protagonist experiences a sense of relief at having verbalised all that she contains within herself. The observations are of an intelligent, yet dissatisfied, person determined to make full use of an opportunity to vent all her frustrations and longings. We never get to learn anything of her ‘audience’  - this reader locked in the library overnight! I’m sure there’s a follow up story there too! Eh? Sophie Divry?

But we learn much of our narrator from her passionate opinions. There are some pithy observations that hit the nail right on the head and no shortage of wit. And I defy the book lovers among us not to be nodding sagely at some of her comments.

‘Love, for me, is something I find in books. You're never alone if you are surrounded by books’

‘To all those men and women who will always find a place for themselves in a library more easily than in society, I dedicate this entertainment’

And as well as being a book for the bookworm I guess it’s also a book for the librarian -

‘Being a librarian isn't an especially high-level job, I can tell you. Pretty close to being in a factory. I'm a cultural assembly line worker.’

I would love to hear some feedback from librarians who have read this book.

I won this book in a giveaway from Maclehose Press. There are many ways to be a winner. Reading this book is one of them!