A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
My rating: 4/5 cats
i wasn’t sure i was going to like this one. the concept is ripped from a borges story about a library containing an infinite number of books; every permutation of every possible arrangement of letters; shelves and shelves of endless volumes, many of which are pure gibberish.
and in this book, this is one of many possible hells.
it seems zoroastrianism was the one true religion. oops. sorry all you suckers and mormons and buddhists – you are all going to hell. but hell is not forever, all you need to do is locate the story of your own life in this library, and you are allowed to leave. that’s all.
but in the library of babel, that could be more difficult than you might think. and what is your “true” biography?
There’s a second by second account of our lives, probably in multiple volumes, a minute by minute account, an hour by hour, a day by day. There’s one that covers the events of our lives as viewed by our mothers, one by our fathers, one by our neighbors, one by our dogs. There must be thousands of our biographies here. Which one do they want, I wonder?
good luck finding even one of those. good luck finding a book in which you recognize a paragraph, a phrase, a word…. most of the books will just look like this: sdkfhsdihfdofgnlkdfgnodhgfgn
and so on and so on.
borges kind of leaves me cold. i find his stories to be interesting cerebral exercises, but their execution leaves me as a reader unmoved. but i liked this spin on borges very much. it was wonderfully sad and helpless, but it is also a testament to the indomitable human spirit and the hope that someday it will all get better…even in hell.
because, frankly, hell doesn’t sound that bad, to me. at first. you get to eat any kind of food you want, you get to meet new people, you can form romantic attachments that last billions of years, sleep and wake refreshed and renewed the next day, even if you “die” in hell. but there is also danger, violence, drunkenness, people who believe they have all the answers, mini-cults, and kidnappings.and you probably ain’t never going to find your book.
and then losing someone in hell is way worse than losing someone in the real world. losing someone on earth, you know it is finished. they are dead, and that is that and there is nothing you can do about it. losing someone in hell? well, they are somewhere and somehow you could still find them. and it is that hope that is the true hell, the crushing blow. because it is so vast, you could spend billions of years, knowing that they could be there, one story above you…. one more story… one more…..
heartbreaking.
there is a nice readers’ advisory angle to this, too. because how hard is it, when faced with all the books that are published today, to find one that you really want to read?? it is easier than hell, sure, because most of the books are not written in gibberish, but i have read some recently that may as well have been. and it is frustrating, and difficult to read book after book that just doesn’t do it for you. imagine that, multiplied by a zillion zillion.
good thing i have such highly developed RA skills.
i should be okay in hell.
provided i can find at least one book to read.
