IN DEPTH Librarians in fi ction part 2
Examining Perec’s masterpiece
Daniel Gooding opens the door to no. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, Paris to meet the librarians in Georges Perec’s Life: a user’s manual and fi nds out more about its author, known as a “virtuoso of manual information-retrieval systems”.
CONSIDERED by many to be Perec’s masterpiece, Life: a user’s manual is less a straightforward novel (or even an actual user’s manual), and more of a jigsaw puzzle comprising the hundreds of little pieces of characters and stories that make up a single apartment building at no. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris. There are in fact several librarians whose names crop up in the telling of these tales (Jakob Van Deeckt, librarian at the Rotterdam Local Archives who may or may not be a real person; or Carel van Loorens, the explorer and polymath who ends his days as librarian for the Governor of Ceuta), but only two who are reported to have lived in the block at one time or another.
Bonhomie itself
First of these is the jovial Monsieur Echard, a retired librarian who shares a fl at on the fourth fl oor with Madame Echard, his daughter, and their son-in-law. Described as “bonhomie itself”, Echard acts as peacemak- er in the ongoing battle of wills between the young couple and his “untamed shrew” of a wife. Deep in the basement of the building lies the fruition of Echard’s life’s work, a CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES RELATING TO THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER IN HIS BUNKER ON APRIL 30, 1945. Convinced to the point of obsession that Hitler survived the war, Echard has spent 15 years compiling every news item or report in the French press relating to the Führer’s supposed death, and system- atically disproving each of them as “based on dispatches of unknown origin.” His planned follow-up, to include sources from other European countries and the American
44 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Daniel Gooding (
D.P.Gooding@
bristol.ac.uk”
D.P.Gooding@
bristol.ac.uk @dp_gooding) is Library Assistant at Bristol University’s Arts & Social Sciences Library (@BristolUniLib), and Chair of CILIP’s Library & Information History Group (@CILIP_LIHG).
media, remains unfi nished and is also to be found in the cellar in card-index form.
Far from fascinating
The second of these characters is Grégoire Simpson, a part-time assistant sub-librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra; described as “far from fascinating”, Simpson’s job consists of collecting press cuttings of operatic perfor- mances and compiling these in a specialist archive known as the Astrat Collection, funded by the legacy of a wealthy opera fan. Simpson’s job is short-lived however, when a visiting auditor decides that the library can probably manage with fewer members of staff ; despite the protestations of the sub- librarian, “a shy lady of fi fty with sad eyes and a hearing aid,” Simpson is let go, and his clipping duties assigned to the security guard who watches over the two rooms. Drifting between a variety of equally short-lived jobs, Simpson eventually shuts himself away in his room on the top fl oor, emerging only to wash his pink plastic bowl and responding to
December-January 2017/18
Libraries in fiction2
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