Another heartwarming story with humour and community spirit so lacking today, is Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.
The novel is meant for book lovers, the protagonist being a lonely, middle-aged widower, A.J. Fikry (of Indian origin), who owns a failing bookshop on an island. He stocks the books he likes, and manages with his meager earnings, living in small apartment above the bookshop.
Each chapter begins with his notes in books he likes; the book snob that he is, he tells Amelia, a publisher’s representative, whom he later falls in love with, “I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”
He has no friends, except for the local thriller-loving cop, and his sister-in-law; his life is peaceful if uneventful. Then, his priceless first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane is stolen, and a precocious child, Maya, is left in his bookshop. The two events have a life-changing impact on him and make for a book worth reading (pardon the needless melodrama that creeps in) ...a book about the transformative power of words. And, of course, love.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
By Gabrielle Zevin
Publisher: Algonquin
Pages: 258
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