An aging archivist meets a young woman who wants to read the letters that T.S. Eliot wrote to a woman named Emily Hale during Eliot's stormy marriage. The letters are sealed for years to come and stored in the archives. Her request brings back memories of the archivists own marriag with surprising parallels to Eliot's. The archivist must then decide what to do with Eliot's letters. Beautifully written and abounding with Eliot's poems. ( )

Martha Cooley's "The Archivist" is splendid. ( )

The plot involves an archivist who is responsible for holdings that include works relating to T.S. Eliot, his wife, who died long before the main action of the book and whose story is told in flashbacks and journal entries, and a woman English student determined to get access to Eliot's letters. The story of Eliot and his wife Vivienne, who he had put away in a mental institution, parallels the story of the archivist and his wife. The wife's journal entries are rather heartbreaking, and in the end help drive an act by the archivist that will change history forever. ( )

I have a special fondness for novels with a central theme of books, bookshops, libraries or authors, so with a sigh of contentment and a frisson of anticipation I settled in with "The Archivist" as my first book of 2009... but, alas, I'm afraid my habit of refusing to read reviews or summaries (the former resembling the latter too often for my tastes) before beginning a book bit me on the backside this time.

This is the sort of novel I would ordinarily strive to avoid, a bleak tale of stunted emotion, hopelessness, helplessness, betrayal, loss, failure, and spiritual pain. This is just not my sort of thing, and it takes a compelling read indeed to overcome this admitted prejudice in me (off the top of my head, "We need to talk about Kevin" would be a brilliant example).

But it's a well-written book, and people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. For me, it was not entirely without redeeming value, despite my bias. The bright spot and most vivid character in this story is Judith, whose voice struggles to pierce a fortified prison of neglect, numbing tranquilizers and paralyzing mental illness; her thoughts as revealed via journal excerpts are the bright, bloody needles stitching meaning into an otherwise leaden tale. I suppose this is the author's intent, as she makes it a point to weave in Eliot's quote, "the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living" more than once.

Ultimately, though, Judith's role is a prop for the somewhat heavy-handed paralleling of Eliot's emotional/relational history, and we are left with the eponymous archivist - a creature so enervated, arid and lusterless that I spent the whole book wanting to poke him with a sharp stick.

Bertrand Russell once described T.S. Eliot as "exquisite and listless"; unfortunately and frustratingly, I found the archivist Matthias Lane merely listless. ( )

this book made me sad because of the life's not lived. It also introduced me to the poetry of TS Eliot and the beauty of it. ( )