Hot Milk - by Deborah Levy

Last month I visited my wonderful child in Chicago where we enjoyed a visit to the Bourgeois Pig which featured two of our favorite things: coffee, and a Little Free Library. The LTL looked like a little Gnome house and from it I picked Levy's book. I hadn't heard anything about it before, but the back cover description indicated that it had some dark humor. What the cover description didn't tell me was that one of the main characters was a librarian.

Little Free Library (zip code 60614)
Image from Yelp.

The story revolves around Sofia and her mother Rose (the librarian). The two have traveled to Spain in order for Rose to get treatment for a mysterious illness from Dr. Gómez, whose unconventional methods include taking the two women out to lunch and insisting that Sofia not utter word throughout the meal.

As Rose is no longer working (only partly due to her health) there is little in the book about her job. We do know that her "duties were to catalogue. index, and classify the books". It was made clear on each of the three occasions in the book in which Rose's occupation is mentioned that cataloging and indexing were her most essential duties. However, as Sofia reflects upon her mother she comes to the realization that working with words doesn't necessarily translate to an ability to use them well.

She cataloged a billion words but she could not find words for how her own wishes for herself had been dispersed in the winds and storms of a world not arranged to her advantage.

Librarians most certainly don't like things that are not arranged to their advantage. Rose was also very clearly a difficult person to satisfy. And that may be the closest we come to understanding why Rose would want to leave library work.