★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
This one will stick with me for a while.
Highlights
I looked at it a long while, enjoying the feel of the book’s weight and the deep satisfaction of finding an island of sensible text in an ocean of meaninglessness.
How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.
Somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.