For the most part, The Librarian is a novel about a young man in quarter-life crisis named Alexei, who is thrust into the role of the fearless leader of a secret society that revolves around a collection of “magical” books.
Borrowing from many science fiction or fantasy novels, Mikhail Elizarov’s story, translated by Andrew Bromfield, begins with some world-building. In the tone of a dry, literary historian, the narrator relates the life of a fictional Soviet writer named Gromov. To the uninitiated reader, Gromov’s books are merely badly-penned propagandist fiction, in which “Good triumphed with excruciating regularity.” Under the right conditions, however, they cause readers to become enraptured, band together, and carry out alarming acts of violence.
Set in the tangible lunacy of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, where career paths resemble assembly lines, prison underlings gain the power of mind-control, and a Nurse Ratchet-character becomes the general of an army of geriatric superwomen.
This history is often hilarious, as much for absurd events as for the voice of the narrator. “By the beginning of the Nineties,” we are told, “collectors of Gromov had a list of six already tried-and-tested Books. They also had information about a seventh, which they called the Book of Meaning. It was believed that when it was discovered the True purpose of Gromov’s creations would be revealed. As yet, however, no one could boast of having found a copy of Meaning, and some skeptics asserted that no such book actually existed.”
The social web of this secret society expands steadily from the 1970s through the 90s, growing complex enough in structure and infighting to rival Game of Thrones. Book clubs look like Road Warrior-esque gangs, armed with “the items with which they had been familiar throughout their lives. The village women were equally skillful with an axe, a knife, a scythe or a flail. Those who had worked at transport depots… were issued with the familiar orange waistcoats, crowbars, sledgehammers, spades and picks.”
Just as the reader begins to wonder (60-odd pages in), “From what terrifying future is this history is being told?!” the narrator introduces himself.
As Alexei commences first-person narration of his Librarian-hood, the novel transforms into a more recognizable mode. At 27, Alexei believes mediocre artists have ruined his life. He then travels three days by train to the small Russian town where his Uncle Maxim has died, only to be kidnapped by knitting needle and antique bayonet-wielding book-lovers. He is forced (mostly out of politeness) into taking on his inheritance—a book and it’s rag-tag adopted “family” of readers—and embarks on saving them from the bloody, political turmoil that’s been thirty years in the making.
It is easy to consider The Librarian as a descendant in the lineage of Russian Literature. Here, the power placed in a written text is not the delusion of one madman in his Diary, but a widespread belief; beyond Gogolian absurdism, it’s closer to the dystopian fairy-tale magic of another contemporary, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.
Yet Elizarov’s novel is not entirely fantasy. The power at the plot’s core is recognizable to any person who’s ever been absorbed by a book: the people who insist a book has changed their life, those who are determined to read all of an author’s works, and those who’ve experienced the full-body hypnosis of turning a last page. In The Librarian, this existing “magic” is simply exaggerated.
After Alexei’s first reading, he knows that the memories Gromov’s work conjured were “No more than a glossy heap of old photographs, the crackle of a home movie projector and a lyrical Soviet song.” And yet he describes, “When the effect of the Book came to an end, I gazed for a long time at a cloud as dark as a liver, creeping across a stormy sky. And I realized then that I would fight for Gromov’s Book and my invented childhood.”
Books create for you what can’t be had any other way, purely through the contact of written word and reader. If that feeling can’t be described, if it isn’t tangible, is it any less worth fighting for in this digital age?
The Librarian eerily extends beyond commentary on post-Soviet art and society to the state of publishing—and readership—in general. The writer Gromov was barely read when he lived, and before anyone considered his books special, “They sank without trace in a bottomless abyss of recycled paper.” The books only came into being because, “The country that gave birth to Gromov could afford to publish thousands of authors that no one read. The books lay in the shops, their prices were reduced to a few copecks, they were carted off to a warehouse and handed over for pulping and more books that no one wanted were published.”
These descriptions of Gromov’s obscurity are grounded in the idea of books as objects, easily lost and forgotten, perhaps even a waste to begin with. But Elizarov reveals that their object-dom is the source of their power. Readers tell Alexei that memorizing the words or photocopying the pages is useless; only the original printing can produce the desired effect.
Thank goodness this book-magic can reach beyond original copies and original languages in the real world. Andrew Bromfield translated the controversial ‘first edition’ of War and Peace, noticeably 400 pages shorter than the tome most are familiar with. Comparing passages from the two versions of Tolstoy’s classic, Bromfield’s stands out for its heightened urgency and tactility: these are also the defining qualities of his translation of Elizarov’s prose. Sentences glide briskly through descriptions, delivering punch lines with quick, comedic aplomb.
The Librarian is original, delightfully weird and dark, and so frequently funny, this book will have no problem conscripting new English readers.