This book starts with a death, then proceeds to a mystery: Bluma Lennon, a professor at Cambridge, is walking down the street while reading, and she’s struck by a car and killed. A few months later, the narrator of the book (who’s taken over Bluma’s office and courseload, and who’s not entirely disinterested—he was her lover, in addition to being her friend and colleague) gets a package addressed to her. It has no return address, but the stamps are from Uruguay, and inside is a book. But it’s not just a book: it’s a book with a crust of cement on its covers, and on the flyleaf is a note from Bluma to its previous owner: the book was a gift from her to a man named Carlos. The inscription in the book mentions a conference in Monterrey where it seems that Carlos and Bluma met, and the narrator decides to use this information to track Carlos down to find out why the book’s coated in cement and why he’s sent it back to Bluma. He learns that Carlos’s full name is Carlos Brauer and that he is indeed from Uruguay, and figures he’ll shift around his usual once-every-three-years trip to Argentina to visit his mother so he can visit Brauer, too. But when he gets to Montevideo, he finds that Brauer is no longer there.
Books—the one Bluma was reading when she died, the one that arrives in the mail—start off the action of the story, but they’re also central to the rest of the plot, and to the atmosphere and tone: this is very much a book about books (and occasionally a send-up of academia, publishing, bibliomania, and life in general) and a lot of the humor and pathos of it comes from what our narrator and other characters say about books and reading and their place in our lives. After Bluma’s death, the narrator thinks of other people he’s known who’ve been injured in bookish pursuits (a professor hit on the head by a falling encyclopedia, a friend who broke a leg while standing on a stepladder trying to reach a book) and we get this, which made me giggle:
Whenever my grandmother saw me reading in bed, she would say: “Stop that, books are dangerous.” For many years I thought she was simply ignorant, but the passage of time has shown just how sensible my German grandmother was. (2)
In part because he’s a literature professor, the narrator’s adult life remains full of books, sometimes too full. He talks about the “panic” he sometimes feels about all the books he owns: he talks about how he gives “at least fifty” books away every year, but still “the books are advancing silently, innocently through [his] house” (12), and then there’s this:
It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us. I have noticed that many people make a note of the day, month, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known some book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. (14)
This all ends up being significant: the acquisition of books, the uses and meanings of books, the concern about not knowing where a given book is. But back to Brauer: in Uruguay, the narrator hears some of Brauer’s story from a fellow book-collector who’d been his friend: Brauer had more than twenty thousand books; his passion was becoming a burden; he was becoming increasingly eccentric. Brauer’s books, it seems, were taking over his house and his life much more than the narrator’s books are taking over his. Brauer eventually decides to leave Montevideo: he builds a shack by the coast in the middle of nowhere and moves there, bringing his books. And then, once he has his books with him in the middle of nowhere, he builds a house out of them, getting a laborer to coat them in cement, turning the books into bricks. As the narrator learns more about Brauer, and wonders about Brauer’s fate, he’s increasingly haunted by the whole situation; mysteries lead to other mysteries, and there is much strangeness and uncertainty. This short book is a quick read, but a satisfying one, a cautionary fable, but one that doesn’t quite let itself be wrapped up neatly.
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