The Personal Librarian

 by Marie Bendict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This book is the fictional story of a real person Belle de Costa Greene who gets the job as the personal librarian for J.P.Morgan who is trying to build a library of early books to rival the Medici library that was developed in Florence.

Belle has a secret, she is really of negro ancestry but her mother has chosen to make a life for them where they are pretending to be white.  Belle's parents separate when the family moves from Washington to New York.  The father is the first black graduate of Harvard and is actively working for black civil rights.  He cannot agree with what his wife is doing.

Belle had been a librarian at Princeton.  She is recommended to Morgan by a young relative.  As time goes on Belle studies Greek and Latin and ancient art and literature and becomes not just a librarian to Morgan but also a confident and even a buyer for him, travelling the world to attend auctions and bid on items for the library.

All the while she is terrified her background will be revealed.  She keeps telling people her skin colour comes from a Porugese grandmother.

She becomes the toast of New York for her succes and eventually has an affair with a married man, an art historian and art dealer.  When she becomes pregnant he arranges for her to get an abortion in London but he is not there for her.  She is distraught at his treatment and eventually they carriy on a correspondence over the decades.  His wife is okay with their affair.  However, she finds that rumours are swirling around her and she has to lie to Morgan that she is not having an affair.  He seems to want  her for himself (not as a lover).   She feels he is treating her as his property, a slave, but she stays working for him.  When Morgan dies she receives a big bequest which helps her family's stability.  She has been supporting her mother, siblings and ultimately their spouses for years.

I found the book, especially the first half , really slow and uninteresting.  It was about her early years as the librarian which is okay but then had lots about balls and operas, etc.  I think most of that could have been shortented.  At times she was so stressed she started to drink too much and could have done something to damage her reputation but she managed to keep her secret over the years.  I don't know how or when the truth actually came out.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

 by Shehan Karunatilaka

This book won the Booker Prize this year.  I can certainly understand why it was selected.

It was a very creative, powerful, commentary on the conflict in Sri Lanka.

The main character Maali is killed. He is a photographer, a gambler, and a closet queen.   He can't remember how or why he died.He finds himself in a nether region where he is told he has seven days to do what?  Not sure? But his main goal becomes contacting two close friends to get them to display photos he has taken which he hopes will rock Sri Lanka.

Mention is made of going into the light.  What is the light... he gets different answers: heaven, rebirth, oblvion.

Maali was not a very principled person in life.  He gambled a lot, took photos for anyone in the Sri Lankan conflict who would pay him, the government, ngo's or the "terrorists".  He even took photos of things he knew were not true, for example some rural people are massacred and dressed in uniforms of one of the rebel fighters.

He is having a homo sexual relationship with a young man who asks him to be faithful and he says he is, but that is a lie. There is a young woman, a friend he lives with, along with the young man, who seems interested in him but he won't tell her he is gay.  He promises his lover to go away to a place where they can live safely, but he never follows through with that.

As Maali travels in the netherworld he finds he can fly on the wind and get to places he has been before including his family home, his own home, etc.  He meets ghouls and other ghosts and ghosts who claim to be there to guide and assist him.  Can he trust them?

As the days pass he comes to remember that he was killed by some thugs and his body dismembered with his head thrown into a river/pond (like others have been disposed of) and his body bagged and disposed of elesewhere.  

His friends and family report him missing and seek the help of two police officers who agree to look for him once some money crosses their palms. Eventually he is able to put ideas into his friends heads so that they can find the photos he has stashed away.  

At one point his girl friend is arrested by officials and is taken to a building where she is going to be tortured.  Through his intersessions he is able to get her out before she is hurt.

But the government officials take the photos from them.  Eventually he is able to tell them where he has the negatives for the photos and the friends make copies of the photos and put them on display.  Some photos he didn't plan to have displayed (of gay lovers) also end up on the walls.  People come to see the photos including goverment officials who take some of them away.  The pictures obviously do not have the desired effect he expected.

At one point in the book a person decides to take a bomb to the government building where people are tortured.  Maali doesn't want the bomb to be set off as innocent people as well as the bad guys will be killed but the explosion occurs.  It is around this time that Maali learns that the father of his lover, a goverment official, is the one who had him killed becasue he didn't want his son in a homosexual relationship.

As the seventh moon approaches Maali is given a choice to drink from one of several cups.  One would take him to the light, one would take him wherever he was needed, I can't remember what the options were.  He chooses to be where needed and becomes a greeter to the dead where he helps someone.  He is then offered another drink and decides to stay as a helper.

This book was very diffiult to read at times because of the violence but it was amazing the world of the dead that was created and how the author developed the story as Maali regained his memory of his death.  In the end he seems to have transitioned from a very unprinciped, unethical, totally self-centred waste of space to someone who truly cared about others and wanted to help them.