Behind this unassuming title lies Robin Sloan’s fantastic story that brings together mystery and adventure, and past and present, as a team comes together to solve a centuries’ old puzzle.
A victim of the widespread Silicon Valley lay-offs, tech worker Clay accepts the first available job - that of a clerk in an old bookstore with just a handful of customers. As the new applicant stands and looks up at the “absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall” rows of bookshelves that seem to go on forever, finally fading into a dark nothingness at the top, we too stand with him at the edge of an “old Transylvanian forest full of wolves and witches”.
While the front shelves with its “regular” books, form the bookshop portion of the store, it is the “waybacklist” at the back that’s the Library. That’s what holds life stories, a few centuries old. That’s where members of the Unbroken Spine go. That’s where the secret of the Codex Vitae of Aldus Manutius starts. And that’s where this quest of the rogue, the warrior and the wizard begins!
The story brings together two very opposite worlds, the very ancient world of the Founder’s Puzzle and the very current world of iPhones and MacBooks and android roommates. (Through Kat, an employee of Google, I actually learnt some very interesting things; example, Lisp, Erlang and Ruby are different computer languages; how much digital fonts cost and why “Gerritszoon Display” is so expensive; Google keeps everything in a Big Box - the box marked WWW is the entire web, YT holds all videos on YouTube, MX, all emails; and what Hadoop is!)
I also really liked all the characters very much; Neel, the narrator’s friend from the 6th grade, now very rich, but still loyal and large hearted; Kat the super smart Google employee, who truly believes the human mind could be preserved forever; Mr. Penumbra, who stands at the crossroads of a changing world; and Clay, the protagonist, who takes us all on a ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ adventure!
As far as the ending and the final solution goes - while part of it fell so brilliantly into place, I could not get myself to agree with the other, probably just because of my personal experiences … that said, the genuine enthusiasm of the denouement carried me seamlessly through to a wonderfully “feel good” moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment