The Dark Library by Cyrille Martinez

Author:Cyrille Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The problem is that the Library’s readers were so caught up in the Affair that they had neglected the rest of the collections. That which didn’t concern the Affair seemed uninteresting. Consequently, the number of consultations and loans fell. This felt harsh and violent. Especially for the Popular Books, who boasted about being constantly on loan, who said they were proud to contribute to the library’s quite decent turnover rate, and who even went so far as to take the title heart of the collection for having a large and captive readership.

Even if this drop in the number of loans was bad news, I have no desire to cry over the fate of the Popular Books. To be frank, I have no affinity with them; we have nothing to say to each other, and their false modesty annoys me. And I’m not just saying that, I speak from experience – I’ve had the opportunity to rub shoulders with a few since my arrival at the Library. I remember one novel in particular who, built for success, spent his time methodically counting his readers and who, at the end of the week, offered the numbers with a hypocritical detachment:

‘Oh man,’ he yawned, ‘what a week! I didn’t have five minutes to breathe. I thought they’d never put me down. More than a thousand readers in seven days, that’s crazy! Look, I’m not complaining about having so many readers, and loyal ones at that. There are so many books who dream of being in my place. It’s gratifying to be read a lot, but we should also recognize that it’s exhausting in the long run. Oh, if you only knew, it’s not always so easy being popular, but what do you want me to do, I can’t prevent people from liking me. Anyway, luckily I have Sunday to rest up. And you, how’s it going? Did you have a good week?’

And suddenly, overnight, readers no longer paid the slightest bit of attention to the Popular Books such as this one. They didn’t look at them, they no longer touched them. A terrible experience for these books, who had ended up believing what they’d always been told: if you are popular it’s because you are the best, and because you are the best it’s normal that you are popular. All of these books were accustomed to being fought over, to placing readers on waitlists, all of these books who were previously subjected to a rhythm of frenetic reading, with material degradation and premature aging as the cost of success, and now they were spending most of their time in the cool of the stacks. Except for one or two passing workers, they encountered no one.

The Popular Books discovered what it’s like to be a book who is touched by only a handful of readers: the exclusion, the sidelining on the pretext of illegibility or irrelevance. They experienced unemployment interspersed with short assignments, a reader who takes you and reads you in two hours, and then nothing for weeks.

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