Sunday, June 01, 2008

Quiet triumph of the bookish book

Novels with literary themes are delighting the reader's reader, writes Jane Sullivan in The Age.

ROSEMARY is an innocent young thing from Tasmania, alone in the world and grieving for her dead mother. Suddenly she's plunged into the heart of New York.
But in case you're thinking bright lights, big city, it's more dim lights, big bookworms. Rosemary ends up working in the Arcade, a huge second-hand bookshop, peopled by strange mole-like booksellers - all misfits, all in their different ways a little creepy and unhinged.

The one thing that unites them is their love of books and Australian writer Sheridan Hay's first novel, The Secret of Lost Things, is that very popular phenomenon nowadays, a bookish book. There's a mystery about a lost Herman Melville novel and lots of quotes from Melville's letters. Characters quote Shakespeare, Auden, Browning and Rilke at the drop of a hat. Naturally the Argentinian receptionist at Rosemary's hotel is a Borges fan. The story ends with Rosemary unwrapping a book-shaped parcel with as much anticipation as if it were diamonds or a designer frock - as if she were that kind of girl.

But she's not that kind of girl, is she? There's something vaguely unhealthy about this obsession with old books - you can practically smell the must and mould rising from the pages - but if you're a book nerd like me, it's also charming and oddly exciting, and Rosemary is an appealing heroine.

I'm not sure if a general declining interest in books is making us readers celebrate the artefact with renewed love and nostalgia but the bookish book is doing very nicely. It might be the influence of recent bestselling novels such as Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, with its romantic view of libraries as the hiding places of secret treasures. Books are also dangerous: we've had novels where they've conjured up Dracula, or Satan himself.

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