- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Back Bay Books (April 8 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0316158461
- ISBN-13: 978-0316158466
- Product Dimensions: 14 x 2.2 x 21 cm
- Shipping Weight: 372 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #364,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Matthias Lane is the proud gatekeeper to countless objects of desire, the greatest among them being T.S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale. Now in his late 60s and archivist at an unnamed East Coast university, Matthias is--as one of his colleagues tells him--"exceptionally well defended." He's intent on keeping the Hale collection equally remote, and when a young poet first seeks access, Matthias rebuffs her with little difficulty. Still, Roberta Spire does remind him of his wife, Judith, who had also written poetry but had committed suicide 20 years earlier. And he is much taken with the student's self-possession: "Pleading never works with me," he concedes, "but authentic and angry self-interest does."
Betrayal figures heavily in The Archivist. For starters, Roberta feels betrayed by her parents, German Jews who had spent World War II in hiding and emigrated to the U.S. soon afterward, re-creating themselves as Christians. She has only recently discovered her Jewish background. The irony is that Matthias's wife had also been an Eliot adept and had felt violated by a false version of her own past and destroyed when confronted with the realities of the Holocaust. No wonder Roberta sees the Hale letters as a Holy Grail, the key to her questions about religious conversion and identity.
What holds this exceptionally ambitious and layered first novel together is the love all three main characters have for the pleasures of the text and the knowledge they share that time is, as Eliot writes, both preserver and destroyer. Eliot, after all, had wanted Emily Hale to destroy his letters (and in reality they are sealed until 2020, safe at Princeton University). Martha Cooley is deeply concerned, as are her characters, with questions of conscience, privacy, action and inaction, and security--personal and scholarly. If there is one parallel too many in this impressive work, perhaps that is more like life than some of us care to admit. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The reserved voice of 65-year-old Matthias Lane, archivist at a prestigious Eastern university, opens this remarkably assured first novel, a complex and beautifully written tale of loss, crises of faith and resolution. Then we read the anguished journal of his wife, Judith, a poet who committed suicide in a mental institution in 1965, the same year as T.S. Eliot died. This is just one of the many parallels between the life of the poet and those of Matt and Judith (Eliot, of course, committed his own wife, Vivienne, to an asylum). Grad student and poet Roberta Spire requests Matt's permission to look at the sealed correspondence between Eliot and a Boston woman named Emily Hale, to whom he may have bared his emotions. Roberta has more than an academic interest in this correspondence. She is immensely disturbed by her parents' belated revelation that they were Jews who fled Germany and converted to Christianity in the U.S., and she feels that Eliot's conversion to Catholicism may hold insights for her. She is unaware that Judith's mental breakdown was related to the Holocaust, but Matt is quick to see the relationship and to recognize the parallels between Eliot's reclusive personality and his own emotional detachment. As several wrenching surprises about the past are revealed, Matt is finally opened to his pain and guilt and to an affirmative act of connectedness and trust. With its sinewy interplay of moral, spiritual and philosophical issues, its graceful interjection of lines of poetry and references to jazz, the novel first engages the reader's intellect. Soon, however, the emotions are also engaged, and the narrative acquires unflagging suspense as it peels back layers of secrets. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who already has mastered the craft.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
WITH A LITTLE EFFORT, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
WITH A LITTLE EFFORT, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well worth the read,
By SW (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)
I loved this book. I read it in holiday and was totally absorbed by it. It is a first novel and sometimes you can tell as it is carefully planned and written but I couldn't put it down and yet at the same time didn't want to finish it. I felt the characters were 'real people' and I learnt a lot from the history and attitudes of the characters.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a poem, if you can handle it.,
By katk925 "katk925" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)
The first part of the book is the easiest to read, and really the most enjoyable, but the rest does leave you with alot to think about in a well done manner. This book is not meant to be a page turning thriller, but to read more like a poem, where one has to take the time to stop, re-read, go back, and ponder, and if a reader can handle through this style of reading, instead of expecting to go simply from point A to point Z without pause it is a great book. Contrary to most of the other reviews I found the middle third interesting once I got into it. Judith's diaries did not seem long at all. I thought they very consicley chronicled her time at Hayden, and her feelings toward everyone in her life. Cooley does an excellent job of staying concise yet fleshed out. She also does a very good job dealing with the big and small issues, WWII, The Holocaust, as well as in individual relationships of the characters and not making it seem pretentous. I disagree with those who say that the parallels were to distant and made too obvious. In life no parallel is total, just emotionally valuable. Matthias realizes this, and learns, and transforms from these parallels, though I felt this was more because the writer felt forced to adhere to the formula of an ending transformation for the protagonist, than because it fit the character. Matthias seemed like much too smart a man to act so frivilously and on the spot. The one problem I had with the book was the idea that Matthias has read the Emily Hale letters. Not that this is implausable, given his position, but so much is based on their content that at the end of the book I was left thinking "but wait, they really are sealed up till 2020, the author is making this up." This left me pretty deflated since most of the revelations the characters make seem focused on the fact that Eliot has revealed in those letters a lot about his conversion to Christianity, and his his relationship with his wife. For all we know he could have mailed Hale something as random as the phone book. For me this really took alot of the life out of characters that otherwise would have felt as real as the people next door. It is possible to write a book on history not yet discovered, look at books on the Holy Grail, etc. Cooley just doesn't do a good job of it. Next time I hope Cooley can find something more concrete to base all her characters actions on.
4.0 out of 5 stars
incisive dialogue,
By mark (seattle) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)
The strenght of this novel is its true-to-life dialogue. If you like to suck on the marrow of insight, you will enjoy this book.
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