Audible, in its infinite wisdom and comparatively brief acquaintance with me, suggested I might enjoy this Penguin novel by Michiko Aoyama.
What You are looking for is in the Library (Penguin, 2023)
Was it because I enjoyed, The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto? Or does Audible (Amazon) somehow know I’m a librarian? I don’t buy books on librarianship…
In any case, it’s not surprising that when this title came up as a new suggestion, I’d be drawn to it! Haven’t I spent 42 years hoping people would find what they were looking for in the library?
It’s an interesting idea: a series of individuals are drawn to visit a community library. It’s staffed by a nervous but friendly trainee and a mysterious, large, middle-aged former special-needs teacher turned librarian (with a penchant for Japanese honey dome cookies, and a felting obsession). We encounter each library visitor at a crisis point in their lives. A girl wanting a more challenging job; a woman demoted during maternity leave; a man dissatisfied with his work; an unemployed artist; and a newly-retired man each consult the librarian for book recommendations, receiving a couple of perfect choices, and an apparently random children’s book, along with a bonus gift.
In each case, the random book and felted object help them to realise three truths: that there is always more than one way of looking at a situation; there are always other choices of direction; and that everyone draws their own message from any particular book.
Whilst the characters seem unlinked apart from these common threads, the final chapter does gather them together loosely. It’s a gentle, thoughtful, sequential book rather than one with a grand denouement.
As such, the reader is left feeling less that it all came together in the end, than that each character had found a way to resolve something that had been troubling them. Less of a ‘Wow!’, more of a quietly satisfied, ‘Yes, I enjoyed that.’
Aoyama’s choice of characters is ingenious. The librarian and her trainee are deftly and likeably characterised as a bit oddball, but happy in their environment, whilst their searching patrons – all new library users – are defined in such a way that the reader is sure to relate to some aspect of their collective predicaments.
And the three truths that I mentioned? Well, as I said, the third was that everyone takes their own message from a book. You’ll have to read it!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 