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Product Description
Quill & Quire
As its title suggests, Martha Baillie’s fourth novel consists of a series of “incident reports” written by Miriam Gordon, a 35-year-old employee of the Toronto Public Library. Miriam is a “Public Service Assistant” at Allan Gardens Library, a fictional branch located in a real Toronto neighbourhood notorious for the socio-economic disparity of its residents. Highly sensitive and startlingly observant, Miriam thankfully takes liberties with the stylistic limitations of her reports. Though many describe daily interactions with library patrons, these are interspersed with accounts of her personal life, in particular a burgeoning romance with Janko, an émigré painter turned cabbie, as well as memories of a troubled childhood dominated by an eccentrically bookish and emotionally unstable father. “Intensified efficiency,” Miriam recalls, was the method by which her mother dealt with her father’s erratic behaviour. It seems that Miriam herself has internalized her mother’s coping mechanism and made it the basis of her vocation. Whether she is assisting children in assembling a seven-foot paper dragon, disposing of semen-soiled books on Middle Eastern politics, or helping a patron identify a certain 16th-century Italian portraitist, her professional interactions are governed strictly by the library’s rules and regulations. When these regulations are challenged – as they frequently are – she resorts to conduct prescribed by the “Manual of Conduct for Encounters with Difficult Patrons.” Miriam’s reports chronicle her professional interactions with harmless eccentrics, young families, students, and also an alarming number of patrons who are inebriated, abusive, and mentally unstable. The reader can’t help but be endeared to Miriam as her affectless description of the abuses and indignities she endures is paired with her acute sensitivity to the minutiae of daily existence. The private and the professional realms overlap when Miriam discovers a series of notes penned by a mysterious patron, who believes himself to be a character in a Verdi opera linked to Miriam’s early childhood memories. Unfortunately, this plot device feels contrived and is not as effective as the less overtly mysterious aspects of the narrative. In spite of this minor shortcoming, Baillie’s novel contains real tenderness, rendered in beautiful prose with compelling restraint.
Product Description
: In a Toronto library, home to the mad and the marginalized, notes appear, written by someone who believes he is Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester from Verdis opera. Convinced that the young librarian, Miriam, is his daughter, he promises to protect her from grief. Little does he know how much loss she has already experienced; or does he? The Incident Report, both mystery and love story, daringly explores the fragility of our individual identities. Strikingly original in its structure, comprised of 140 highly distilled, lyric reports, the novel depicts the tensions between private and public storytelling, the subtle dynamics of a socially exposed workplace. The Incident Report is a novel of gestures, one that invites the reader to be astonished by the circumstances its characters confront. Reports on bizarre public behaviour intertwine with reports on the private life of the novels narrator. Shifting constantly between harmony and dissonance, elegant in its restraint and excitingly contemporary, The Incident Report takes the pulse of our fragmented urban existence with detachment and wit, while a quiet tragedy unfolds. Previous books, with dates and publishers: The Shape I Gave You Knopf 2006 Madame Balashovskayas Apartment - Turnstone Press 1999Translations of Madame Balashovskayas Apartment:An einem Regentag in Paris Ebersbach 2001 (Germany)Madame B. titka - Kossuth 2003 (Hungary) My Sister Esther Turnstone Press 1995
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