| Category: | Fiction - Literary |
|---|---|
| Author: | Peter Briscoe |
| Publisher: | Palo Verde Press |
| Publication Date: | August 1, 2025 |
| Number of Pages: | 144 |
| ISBN-10: | 0963489860 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-0963489869 |
Peter Briscoe’s Between Memory and Oblivion follows
Michael Ashe, an antiquarian bookseller navigating the shifting landscape of
book collecting in an era increasingly dominated by digital technology. After
losing his best library client, Michael embarks on a journey through Paris and
Mexico, hunting rare volumes and negotiating with librarians, most notably
Elizabeth Wyatt, whose embrace of digitization puts her at odds with his
reverence for the physical book. His struggle to save printed books takes a
unique turn when he uncovers the extraordinary story of Gabriel Naudé—the most
learned man in France and the visionary architect of a legendary library built
to safeguard knowledge from the relentless decay of time. This discovery
transforms Michael’s quest from a personal struggle for survival into a passionate,
public crusade to rescue the very soul of books from oblivion. Alongside
professional struggles, Michael’s quest for love leads to a passionate yet
contentious romance with Elizabeth. At the same time, Michael’s protest against
a university’s plan to digitize and dismember a collection he painstakingly
assembled, becomes a climatic point in the narrative. Can he succeed in his
fight to save books and to find genuine love?
Between Memory and Oblivion takes you to California,
Paris, and Mexico, but its true landscape is the world of libraries, rare
books, and the collectors and scholars who cherish them. Briscoe populates this
world with richly drawn characters: Michael, haunted by loneliness yet driven
by passion; María, his quick-witted assistant who finds her own awakening
through books; George, the scholar-librarian; and Elizabeth, the ambitious
digital resources librarian. Thematically, the novel explores the tension
between preservation and progress, memory and forgetting, analog and digital.
Briscoe’s narrative honors the tactile, serendipitous, and human aspects of
book culture, contrasting them with the antiseptic efficiency of digitization.
Through Michael’s battles—both internal and external—the novel asks whether the
soul of a library, or a life, can survive if reduced to mere data, and whether
the pursuit of perfection is itself a form of loss. I loved the gorgeous,
exquisite prose, the elaborately developed characters, and the conflict that
hits home powerfully, but it was what this book made me feel about printed
books that makes it a must-read.
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