The Secret of Lost Things
by Sheridan Hay
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sheridan HayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-11
ISBN: 030727733X
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Secret of Lost Things
Book Review: "I saw all the mirrors in the world and none reflected me."
Summary: 4 Stars
An illusive manuscript by the famous writer Herman Melville lays at the core of this intriguing tale that is steeped in literary tradition where books are revered, and even loved. Stretching all the way from the island state of Tasmania to New York, this novel is all about one flame haired girl's growth as she endeavors to discover her true path in life deep within the great metropolis of Manhattan.
When Rosemary Savage's mother dies, as a gesture against her all-embracing grief, her stoic best friend Esther Chapman gives Rosemary an airplane ticket to New York, knowing that a city would be the cure to the small life she had lived. An innocent babe in the woods, Rosemary has spent all her life ensconced in a provincial Tasmanian town, helping her mother run a small hat shop. Indeed, her only experiences of a really big city are when her mother sometimes took her on buying sprees to Sydney.
Although at first hesitant to leave her beloved home, Rosemary doesn't shrink from the challenge, landing in New York with only a present from Esther, a black and white photograph, and her mothers ashes in a miniature wooden Huon box wrapped in a silk scarf. Finding a room at a decrepit and rundown hostel, for woman, Rosemary is an 18-year-old innocent adift in the labyrinthine city, trying to cobble a life together, her situation and the death of her mother still weighing profoundly on her shoulders.
It isn't until she walks into the cavernous and dusty tombstone-like Arcade Bookshop and asks for a job that she feels as though she has finally come home, and it is here deep within the giant stacks of non-fiction and fiction that she meets the eclectic cast of characters, many of whom will shape much of her life to come and eventually awaken the dark and mysterious passions that lie within her.
A considerable number eccentric people are employed at The Arcade, a hodge-podge of variously failed writers, poets, musicians, singers, all marked with the clerkish frustration of the unacknowledged, the unpublished: the bad-tempered and curt owner Mr. George Pike, who loves money than the well-being of his staff; his legendry wealth a mirror of his frugality and stinginess; store manager and albino Walter Geist, every feature pallid, "his white ears like delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light;" Oscar Jarno, in charge of the non-fiction section, handsome in a poetic sort of way, with a magnetism in his face that immediately attracts the impressionable Rosemary.
Adding to the mix is the arcade's arresting cashier a pre-operative transsexual by the name of Pearl who operates the single register and is Pike's most trusted staff member on the main floor. After several weeks, the Arcade becomes Rosemary's home, and the city that houses it the larger world she wants for herself. Indeed, all of these characters come together, acting out their various insecurities with certain clumsiness and a single-minded reverence to the world of books.
But it is a letter that Rosemary reads to Geist that jump-starts her real journey into this world. A letter that perhaps indicates the existence of a lost manuscript of Herman Melville with the famous author's name linked to the great bookish philanthropist Julian Peabody. As Rosemary begins to delve deeper into the existence of this manuscript, she begins to read passionate missives that Melville has penned to fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in the process realizes that Melville had something to tell her about a story that also resembles her own. Acting with a type of paternal influence, Melville could actually reveal something about her to herself.
This novel is as much a story about the love of books than it is about one girl's coming of age. For Rosemary, working in The Arcade - and her secretive desires for Oscar that steadily grow as she becomes more confident in the job - is her way of searching for an antidote to catastrophe in a world that has been emptied of all its contents. Although this novel tends to be over written and dialogue heavy in places, and the narrative slows down throughout the middle section, this tale is mostly a charming account of the world where people seem to move through a world that is mostly based on a form of deception and where few questions asked about the actual provenance of books.
In a novel where the printed word takes on the attributes of "the uncanny leveraging of desire," Rosemary comes to see the value of a life in objects; in books its where it's all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things and where the talent is to manipulate the lust for things that retains or loses their value depending on whose hands hold them. In the end it is only books that seem to hold a special kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value. Mike Leonard May 08.
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