Reading between the lines of a lonely and loveless life

The Library of Unrequited Love, Sophie Divry (translated by Sián Reynolds), Maclehose Press, £6.99; Kindle, £2.57

One morning, in a small town outside Paris, a librarian arrives a little early for work and discovers a man sleeping in the basement. Instead of releasing him, she holds him captive until the library’s official opening time, hiding behind the rules, because to behave otherwise would be unprecedented.

The story on offer here has less to do with plot than portrait. Nothing at all is revealed about the stowaway and his reasons for being here, because this is not his story. Instead we get a glimpse behind the façade of a middle-aged spinster, a low-ranking employee who does her duty hidden away in the building’s depths, the uninspiring geography section, and is grudgingly tolerated as an eccentric by the chain of command.

Her loneliness is palpable. There is hardly space for a taken breath as the narrative tide, having been for so long dammed into silence, suddenly breaks its wall. The subjects that flow by include the Dewey filing system, the French Revolution and its aftermath, architecture, and the work of writers like Maupassant and Simone de Beauvoir and the inherent problems that mark them out as great.

“You don’t shut yourself up for ten hours a day to write, if everything in your life is absolutely hunky-dory,” she announces. “Writing only happens when something’s wrong.”

She’s not writing, but books have become her world. And something is wrong. A lot of things, in fact. After suffering from one brief but brutal broken heart, life has passed her by. There is the sense of waiting for an end, and a realisation that her peak has been long ago left behind. Her shining moments now limit themselves largely to the days when Martin, a man researching his thesis on the “nothing reign” of Louis XV, comes in to sit and study.

She has fallen for him, and she stands at her counter gazing at the nape of his neck, wishing he had sideburns and dreaming of things to say. It is a fantasy, of course. In the meantime, books have napes too, and they are far less judgmental, and selfish, and hurtful.

Delivered across 92 pages as a single stream-of-consciousness paragraph, The Library of Unrequited Love is a strange and delightful species of book, a deceptively easy read that holds as much in common with a theatrical monologue as with a piece of confessional prose, and whose novella-length defies the scope of its ambition and invention.

For a debut work, it is stylistically daring and impressive in its assurance. By taking a stereotype and imbuing it with all the unflinching flaws and glories of human nature, Miss Divry succeeds in revealing the life, and the fire, that exists within even the most hidden of hearts.