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Sloan makes the old new again
Book Review
By Derryll White
Robin Sloan (2012). Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore – A Novel
One of the good things about working in an independent bookstore such as Lotus Books, is when someone says, “You should read this book,” one can do just that. So when one of my daughters phoned me and said “Dad, you work in a bookstore and NEED to read Robin Sloan’s book” – that’s just what I did.
San Francisco is my favourite big city. I discovered City Lights Bookstore in the 1960s, and have found dozens of such establishments there since – at street level and both above and below as well. I have always loved the fact that bookstore operators in San Francisco, an amazingly liberal town for America, have tended to call me ‘comrade’ as soon as they find out I am Canadian. Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore is fittingly located in the Bay City.
This novel beautifully takes the familiar, the beauty and grace of the known, and directs it toward the unknown. Wizards walk among us, trying their very hardest to fulfill their destinies. A barista at Hot Shots, a photographer embracing her camera – all wizards striving to be their very best. Robin Sloan does that in this novel, takes a bookstore clerk and liberates him, empowers him to embark on his personal quest.
Gathering friends from the world we all know, and embracing the digital world that we come to know more insightfully in this story – the rogue clerk succeeds. Sloan turns the book form into a vehicle that, already familiar to authors such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, transports the reader into new realities.
What is truly delightful here is that within the story the book itself becomes the vehicle, the magic transporter to the kingdom that I know as knowledge (although others may know it as belief, image, magic.)
Sloan is gentle with his language, and poetic. Even the ultra-competitive world of digital corporations is given some grace. He takes the reader on a journey of wonderment, of possibility. And the message, in the end, is that what is old is new again.
This is the best book I have read so far this year, and I encourage everyone to give ‘Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’ a try. Come into the store and tell me if you don’t agree.
Excerpts from the novel:
AMERICA – I was unemployed, a result of the great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century, leaving bankrupt burger chains and shuttered sushi empires in its wake.
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco’s architectural style didn’t really make inroads anywhere else in the country, and even when you live here and you’re used to it, it lends the vistas a strangeness: all the tall narrow houses, the windows like eyes and teeth, the wedding-cake filigree. And looming behind it all, if you’re facing in the right direction, you’ll see the rusty ghost of the Golden Gate Bridge.
AGE – But when people are past a certain age, you sort of stop asking them why they do things. It feels dangerous. What if you say, ‘So, Mr. Penumbra, why do you want to know about Mr. Tyndall’s coat buttons?’ and he pauses, and scratches his chin, and there’s an uncomfortable silence – and we both realize he can’t remember?
CREATIVITY – He works with crazy intensity, feeding hours like dry twigs into the fire, just absolutely consuming them, burning them up. He sleeps lightly and briefly, often sitting up straight in a chair or lying pharaoh-like on the couch. He’s lie a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.
BRAIN – We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.
….Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade.
DREAM JOB- I’ll cut to the chase. Neel Shah is the world’s leading expert on boob physics.
He developed the first version of his breakthrough boob-simulation software at Berkeley, and shortly after that he licensed it to a Korean company that was developing a 3-D beach volleyball game. The game was terrible but the boobs were phenomenal.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
