Bob Comet is, at first glance, a lonely man. A retired librarian in Portland, Oregon, he has no friends or family to speak of. Instead, he engages with the world mainly by reading about it. This changes one day when he comes across a woman in a pink sweatsuit staring blankly into a 7-Eleven fridge. He identifies her as a denizen of the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and in an effort to find meaning in his golden years, he decides to volunteer at the old folks’ home. His way of giving back is by reading to them.
Hanging around Gambell-Reed’s eccentric inhabitants, Bob begins to reflect on his own quiet existence. The Librarianist, the fifth novel from Patrick deWitt, flashes back and forth in time to piece together Bob’s supposedly unremarkable life. In doing so, deWitt cobbles together a complicated but heartfelt treatise on introversion and the value of a life lived through books.
Humans lived there for thousands of years, until the community was reduced to unsustainable levels by poverty, neglect and loss.
The last remaining 36 St Kildans were evacuated to live in mainland Scotland in 1930.
The Lost Lights of St Kilda is a powerful evocation of this story and a well-turned novel that explores potent themes of change, endurance and resistance through a dual narrative from the perspectives of two individuals: Chrissie and Fred.
Group biographies are ambitious undertakings. To weave together divergent narratives, even about the most widely known figures, is a challenging feat; to make it coalesce, the writer has to find the right balance of substance and texture.