Book Twenty Three: The Secret of Lost Things

Book Twenty Three: The Secret of Lost Things
Finished: April 30
Pages: 349

I must be on some kind of Australian kick. This novel is the story of Rosemary Savage's search for identity and her father, who leaves her native Tasmania after the death of her mother, and travels to New York City. She finds work at a mystical-seeming used and rare book store called the Arcade. The story revolves around a lost manuscript of Herman Melville, and if I was going to be honest with myself, I would not have read this book because I do not care at all for Melville or his huge crush on an author I dislike even more: Hawthorne. Rosemary seems to collect strange and unusual characters, her landlady who ran from Argentina after her son became one of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared" who protested against the corrupt Argentine government; the halfway-through-a-sex-change Pearl, who longs to be an opera singer; Walter Geist, an albino who falls in love with Rosemary, but only gives her the creeps.
It seemed as though the author bit off a bit more than she could chew, and each character suffered for not being exposed to enough light. Her prose was at times delightfully complex and at other times flat and lifeless, as if she were trying too hard.

Here is a quote I found delightful:

"The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become. And when I think of my few acquisitions, I have to admit how fiercelythe autodidact struggles for her educastion, and how incomplete that education remains. How illusory is any accumulation of knowledge!" (106)

All in all, I wouldn't bother with it, unless you were interested at all in Melville.

Good Reading,
Caitlin