A library patron somehow falls asleep and stays overnight in the library to be awakened by the narrator of this novella: a lovesick librarian who decides to use her surprised audience as a sounding board for her thoughts on her job, myriad subjects of interest and - of course - the graduate student she’s secreting pining for.
Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love is unusual in that it’s a book-length character monologue but, as easy to read as it is, there wasn’t enough to it for my taste.
Over the course of the book we learn about the Dewey Decimal Classification, French history (mostly the Revolution/Napoleon), library politics - both the people who frequent it and run it - Maupassant, and something of her personality too. She’s a tad snobbish about intelligence and sneers at the customers who come into the library only to rent DVDs, and you also get a sense of the despair she feels at her loveless lot in life and the professional choices she’s made, so Divry did alright to capture something of her character through her dialogue alone.
It’s relatively short and well-written, so you’ll fly through it, but I wanted there to be more to the story than what we got - after all that talk, I would’ve liked to have seen some action to follow it. But then that’s usually the case with people who talk a lot, isn’t it - that’s all they tend to do?
Ultimately too slight and unsatisfyingly insubstantial, The Library of Unrequited Love doesn’t quite scratch that literary itch of a good story.
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