I love deWitt's writing! Truly a gem and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was engrossed from the start and the thematic work resonated. My only issue is that it could have been longer!

"Bob wondered if her life was small in the way his was small."

Bob Comet is a quiet, unassuming man in his early 70s. Living alone and having retired as a librarian, he struggles to fill the time. One day at the convenience store, he comes across an elderly woman who is both confused and lost. He returns her to the senior centre in which she resides. And enjoying this visit to the centre, Bob decides to volunteer there on a regular basis. He makes friends with some of the other residents, and reads to them from some of his favourite books, even though they are mostly disinterested. And then he makes a discovery that turns his life upside-down. We flash back to when Bob was in his 20s, and married to a young woman named Connie. He also had a friend back then, a colourful, lively fellow called Ethan. And gradually we find out why the three of them are no longer in contact.

Bob is the hero of this story, if you can call him that. It feels like he's not even the main character in his own life, being as introverted as he is. But interesting things do happen around him sometimes. He's an easy guy to warm to, gentle and kind. And not bitter, even though he has every reason to be. I kept thinking of that Thoreau line ("The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation") as I was reading this, and my heart went out to Bob. And I was thoroughly enjoying the book for the most part, until we flashed back earlier to when Bob was a boy, and ran away from home. He ended up befriending two elderly woman and trained to perform in their stage show. And this section of the novel felt completely out of place to me: it didn't fit with the rest of the story, and I found those ladies kind of annoying. So I'm afraid I'm deducting a star for that unwelcome detour. This book works best when it focuses on Bob's later years: facing up to old age and loneliness, weighing up his life and wondering where it all went. He's the kind of guy who deserves a shot at true happiness and you end the story hoping that it's finally coming his way.

Favourite Quotes:
"Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it."

"Sometimes he could forget what had happened for an hour, and sometimes a month. But whenever the memory was returned to him, he never reacted with bitterness, but took it up as a temporary discomfort. Days flattened fact, was the merciful truth of the matter. A bell was struck and it sang by the blow performed against it but the noise of the violence moved away and away and the bell soon was cold and mute, intact."

"There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of others to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely."

"Melancholy is the wistful identification of time as thief, and it is rooted in memories of past love and success. Sorrow is a more hopeless proposition. Sorrow is the understanding you shall not get that which you crave and, perhaps, deserve, and it is rooted in, or encouraged by, excuse me, the death impulse."

"Maria understood that part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground."

Bob Comet is a retired librarian living a solitary life, until he calls in at a senior center and ends up volunteering there.
As well as following his current life we also see what happened to Bob in the past to bring him to the place he is now.
This is what I would call a 'quiet' book, where not a lot happens, or where even the major events are treated in the same way as everyday occurrences.
I did expect more about books, which there wasn't a huge amount and I don't think that the two parts of the story meshed together particularly well, but I enjoyed the book overall and would recommend it.

Touching reflections through a quiet life.

This will be my 5th DeWitt book. I come back to him each time I see a new title, not really recalling much from the last apart from the feeling that I enjoyed his writing and knowing I'll get something a little different.

As a former librarian, this title and subject hit me anyway, and the book might look unassuming but does take you emotionally back and forward through various life stages and make you consider your own eventual end. But it's not morbid, I promise.

Bob Comet (yes it's his real name), has retired from his lifelong career in libraries and isn't really looking for hobbies outside of his passion for reading when he comes across a confused elderly lady in a shop one day, and eventually brings her back to her care home safely. Meeting staff and residents there, he offers his services as a volunteer.

This is the start of Bob's own 'renaissance' and period of reflection on his life, the experiences of his childhood time when he ran away from home, a lost love and friendship, and his changing feelings for and relationship with the care home he's accidentally discovered.

It meanders between scenes and time periods, like memories unfolding, and makes you consider regrets and past actions as well as how suddenly things can change.

Bob isn't a dynamic or larger-than-life protagonist, he's as quiet as his story seems to be at the start. As the layers are peeled back, I certainly felt a kinship with Bob and felt his loneliness and how much he'd had to live through literature and his work.

I wasn't sure the order of the segments worked in its totality, putting his childhood towards the very end of the book didn't fit in my head, but the last act was very touching and brought his life and memories together rather nicely.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

This is Patrick deWitt's latest offering is a delight that will particularly appeal to book lovers, a beautifully written and ambitious novel, astute, full of humanity and compassion in its understated exploration of being an introvert, asking fundamental questions of what it is to be human and what constitutes a well lived life. It is 2006, Bob Comet is a 71 year old retired librarian in whose life books have played a central role, at a personal as well as a professional level, living in his deceased mother's mint green house in Portland, Oregon. He is guided by his daily routines, cutting a solitary figure seemingly comfortable on the surface with having no other person in his life. All of this is set to change when he bumps into a confused elderly woman, Chip, and returns her to her home, a senior centre.

There is remarkable depth and details in this story of a man whose reality of life are books, he has lived through them for most of his life, with only a brief connection to other people. In a narrative of wit and humour that goes back and forth in time Bob starts to volunteer at the senior centre, although his plans to read to the residents are thrown off course. However, there is the strangest of coincidences as Bob comes up against the shocking presence in the present of a past that has a strong personal connection. This leads to us learning of Bob's past life, how he came to run away when he was 11 years old, his short lived marriage to Connie, how he loses her and his best friend, Ethan, who is to later die in a hit and run.

deWitt excels in the creation of a wide array of larger than life and offbeat characters and wonderful dialogue in this perceptive, intimate and entertaining read that leads to Bob re-evaluating the direction of his life. It is made all the more enjoyable with the author's customary wit and comic touches. I think fans of the author are likely to love this too, as will readers who encounter deWitt for the first time. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

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.

This is his fifth and latest novel – and the only other I have read – and it retains something of the same offbeat humour and eccentric cast list (even including a Sheriff), but is a far more introspective novel and in fact is even blurbed as “a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition”.

The third party character at the centre of the novel is Bob Comet (de Witt seems to share with the writer of some sitcoms the belief that giving your fictional characters out of the ordinary names in itself generates a level of humour). At the book’s opening in 2005-2006 he is a 71-year old retired librarian living in Portland in the slightly odd old house of his long deceased single-mother; Bob himself we learn was once married (to Connie) who not that long after ran away with Bob’s best (and really only) friend – the self-absorbed ladykiller Ethan (who died less than two years later in a hit and run car accident for which Bob himself was briefly investigated by the police).

Bob was for his entire career a Librarian and in fact has largely lived his entire life through reading novels rather than (except for brief periods) interacting with other people. On one of this walks around the area he encounters an lady – Chip - who appears to be suffering from some form of dementia and returns her to the Senior Centre where she is a day-resident and finds himself drawn into a volunteer position first reading to and then (when that is unsuccessful) chatting to the cast of peculiar, day and permanent, residents. Then an encounter with Chip’s son reveals a bizarre coincidence which takes Bob back to his past.

And most of the rest of the book is set in that past – centring on two major times:

When and how Bob meets Connie (and her freaky Priest-hating father) and Ethan - really the only two people with who he ever forms a close bond – and how the dynamics of that off-the-wall set of relationships develop;

An incident set exactly at the end of World War II when the 11 year old Bob runs away from home for four days, fastening on to two idiosyncratic self-described Thespians who with their two equally unusual performing dogs are en route to stage a wacky show in a run-down ex-lumber industry town, and where all they stay at an unconventional near-collapsed hotel with its own left-field staff and residents.

Now as you may or may not have gathered – when I wrote this review I had two resources to hand: an electronic ARC of the book itself and an online Thesaurus where I had looked up synonyms of “quirky” – as this is a book which does not wear its quirkiness lightly. It is written also with a wry sense of humour which perhaps did not quite land for me (but humour in books rarely does).

If I had a disappointment it is that the book does not quite live up to what really first attracted me to the book and what I had hoped for from the early chapters (and some early reviews) as really capturing the life of someone who really (to take a quote from the end of the novel) believes that “the real world was the world of books [novels]: it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented” ¬to the extent that he prefers to engage with the world through that medium.

Connie, who had been Bob’s wife, had sometimes asked him why he read quite so much as he did. She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live?

Because although we are told (a number of times) that is how Bob views the world we are not really shown it; as we instead see Bob in a series of rather dramatic incidents (the elderly lady rescue and sudden discovery, the three-way relationship and rapid marriage, betrayal by and then death of his best friend, the cross-country runaway and then in the final section a hospital trip and closing revelations) which are more novelistic in themselves. By contrast we get very little information on the books that Bob reads – which means that for us our true impression is that Bob lives rather then reads.

But overall this was a pleasantly diverting reading experience in my own life.

The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt is about a retired librarian who reflects back on his life and the people and relationships in it when he starts volunteering at an old people's home.