The Canadian author of this novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011 for his second novel “The Sisters Brothers” (which also won two Canadian literary prizes and some other nominations) - an offbeat, eccentric-character-populated Western-based novel which to me read more like a Coen brothers film script. We are told many a time that Bob loves books, that he's always preferred books rather than interacting with people. I never felt the passion unless it wasn't a true passion just a way of hiding from society? Bob Comet, deWitt’s sepia-toned hero, is 71 years old, healthy, tidy and “not unhappy.” Since retiring from the public library where he spent his entire professional career, he’s enjoyed a life of almost uninterrupted solitude in the house his mother left to him decades earlier. “He had no friends, per se,” deWitt writes. “He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.” A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

About another librarian, "She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease." If you expect to encounter a lot of library and book talk given the title and the main character's job and reading habits, you'll be disappointed. I certainly was. Also, this is my own personal preference, but there just weren’t enough literary references. The book is entitled The Librarianist. My assumption is that the target audience is bibliophiles, but it didn’t have enough to make me happy.You know someone, and then you don’t know them, and in their absence you wonder what their life was made up of.”

Behind Bob Comet's straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life.Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. Because it’s a fool who argues with happiness, while the wiser man accepts it as it comes, if it comes at all.” All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented.” DeWitt does this, he has a simple story, a life, to some it might be quite a mediocre life, but it isn't. He examines that life and highlights and weaves and sees and while he is seeing he shows us because that is what we want with stories, we want to see, to understand, to connect and while connecting we feel seen too and that is the ultimate goal. We are seen, we exist.