Keri's thoughts

There were a lot of things that made me think while reading this book. I found it easy to identify with Rosemary and often felt like I could understand the things she felt and said. One thing in particular was when she mentioned she "loved to be called 'dear girl'"...something Mr. Mitchell called her. I too love to be called by terms of endearment, and have a few patrons in the library who call me sweetie or dear.

I liked the way the author wrote and had many things I wanted to underline, but used sticky notes instead since it wasn't my book (next time I'll buy the book and make notes in it). Here are a few of my favorite passages.

1 - "...my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear. I didn't know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself."

2 - "Our business is to find homes for books with the hope that they will be loved as we have loved them. My heart is broken every day I make a sale; then renewed again by the arrival of an unexpected replacement. I keep learning to love again...my relationship to books remains mysterious to me, but I know from my own collection that ownership is the most intimate tie we can have to objects."

3 - "I wasn't looking for consolation. I wanted most of all to feel. To experience loss and restoration together, at once, like snow appearing to counter never having seen it before."

4 - "I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves."

5 - "...I thought that what Lillian and Pearl had in common, apart from me, was their unimaginable experiences: experiences painful enough that, when seen in another's face, they amounted to real recognition."

Curiosity was a theme that seemed to reoccur and could be applied to all the main characters. Rosemary was curious about all the people around her - wondering what made Lillian so sad, whether or not Oscar would like her, how George Pike made his calculations for the book prices, etc. In regards to Geist, she mentions "It wasn't compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn't reckon with his humanity." She later mentions, while visiting Peabody's Wunderkammern, "I felt a deep disquiet, yet I was fascinated, understanding fully and for the first time how much a part of curiosity is uneasiness." This quote really speaks to her feelings toward Geist - he always makes her uneasy, yet he piques her curiosity repeatedly. But by the end of the book, once Rosemary has realized all of Geist's motives and seen his humanity, he is no longer a curiosity. It was "the end of guessing at clues, of puzzling at Geist's motives and actions. He'd become too real, and had broken out of the cabinet I'd kept him in. He was a man, after all, and not a curiosity. He had demands. He wouldn't be explained away or...investigated out of his humaness."

I thought the book was sad, but in a way ended happily enough. I do wonder what happened to Oscar and why he disappeared so completely. It makes you wonder if anything he said about himself to anyone was ever true. I liked the character of Pearl and wanted to have a picture of her so that I could see what she would look like. She was a good influence on Rosemary and a good friend. I'd like to think that her surgery went well and she lived happily ever after with Mario...remaining friends with Rosemary of course. :)

To answer Aunt Annette's questions:
1 - I found the character of Melville most interesting. Though he wasn't technically a character, his name and history and writings were a constant presence in the book. I've never read any of his works and didn't know much about him, so I found it very interesting to learn more. I particularly found interesting his letters to Hawthorne. They were intensely passionate and could hint at more than friendship, though people wrote and spoke more passionately about friends back then, so perhaps not. I marked one part of his letter, a postscript actually that really stuck with me. "I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand - a million - billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is upon you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question - they are One." It makes me kind of sad that people don't speak like that anymore...but then again I'm not sure exactly how I'd respond to someone who wrote something like that to me...perhaps I'd think them a bit insane, as they thought of Melville?
2 - I would most like to have lunch with either Pearl or Mr. Mitchell. I really enjoyed both characters and their fondness for Rosemary.
3 - I never really wanted to throw anything at any of the characters, but I found several of them unsettling. George Pike was a bit irritating in his holier-than-thou, overseeing-everything yet truly knowing nothing little stage. He was lost in his own little world of pricing, never seeing the people who worked for him for what they were. Oscar was intriguing at first, but ultimately lost in his own world as well. He was curious about everything and everyone around him, so long as he didn't have to be close to them. He was very closed off from people, yet drew them in with his interest and curiosity. Ultimately, I thought he could belong anywhere, because he had no true meaning to anyone. A little bit like what Lillian said to Rosemary about Borges "We are like those things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us." Except that he did have meaning to Rosemary and she probably would remember him...but she never really knew him. And of course, Walter Geist was not likeable at all to me. He was sad, lonely and though I'm sure his being an albino made some people act a certain way he was more than capable of acting in a way that could help people see past it. He was desperate to do something to help his fate, and it kept him from seeing how wrong he was...but it was very like what the ambrotype said about Melville. "It was intended to illustrate the principal of remorse, and to demonstrate that there is, very often, less real virtue in moral respectability than in accidental crime. Some men save their conventional reputation by living up to a decent average of legalized vice, always simmering up to that point but never boiling over; while some are entirely virtuous and truthful all their life, until some sudden and uncontrollable impulse carries them at one bound over the height, and they perish eternally."