This is the first of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading this month. Though I actually finished it second, the review was easier to write. My appreciation as always to LibraryThing and the participating publishers.

Holding the book Firmin as it is now, with its novella-like thinness and its stylized bite out of the side (makes for uncomfortable reading, being right where your thumbs would normally go), it’s easy to confuse it for something it’s not.

“Is this a children’s book?” was my first reflection. It has a crude drawing of a rat on the cover. It’s about a rat who lives in the basement of a Boston bookstore and reads and reads and reads and wants to be, Pinnochio-like, human. How charming. It’s a book whose actual shape is a gimmick. Let’s class it as a stocking-stuffer, a modern fable perhaps to be wrapped up with Coehlo’s The Alchemist and foisted off on some relative looking for some comforting but tepid philosophy.

Except, you’d be wrong. I was wrong.

Within a few pages, Firmin is clawing out his story: a desperate and raw dirge. His metaphorical yarn bemoans the traditionally ominous inhuman machines of progress as they triumph over sloppy–but much more meaningful–things like literature and love. This is a fable, sure, but it is one of viscera and coitus, redemption and meaning.

Born by chance in a bookstore, Firmin reacts to the innately marginal position of his species by (inexplicably) learning to read. His littermates follow in the primal footsteps of their alcoholic mother, all teeth and primitive drives, but Firmin finds the vaunted world of literature and is transformed by it. He reads everything, and loves it, except, if you don’t yet believe he isn’t cute:

“The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones.”

It’s not for kids. It’s not even for especially sensitive adults. It’s tone sometimes reaches mildly hopeful only to be drop-kicked down into a very dirty alley full of specters and sadness. Firmin is a sociopath, or at least delusional. He sees meaning where there is none and experiences interactions that don’t actually occur. He is, fundamentally, alone. And that’s where the sadness really festers.

Here is a rat who obsessively reads books on sign language, wretchedly trying to learn to gesture the phrase “What do you like to read?” Absent digits and opposable thumbs, the best thing he can learn to shudder out is “goodbye zipper,” which gets him about as far as it sounds like it would.

Behind this, a story about the demise of Scollay Square in Boston (wherein is located Firmin’s bookstore), with the expected lamentation about the boarded-up storefronts and abandoned buildings. It’s not a poor choice of backgrounds, but against Firmin’s story it seems jarringly anthropomorphic, occasionally distracting.

Firmin leaves a haunting miasma behind. It’s not an easy book, despite its length, and one has to take care to find the hope in the hopelessness. But it is a thought-provoking one, one for savoring and considering, perhaps remembering.

LibraryThing Tags: