Coda

Abstract After a brief consideration of Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung (1935; translated into English as Auto de Fé), this chapter examines three twenty-first-century novels in which the library is used to investigate aspects of national politics and identity. Ukraine-born Russophone novelist Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian (2007; English translation 2015) presents life in the former USSR in terms of ‘libraries’ that operate like armed gangs fighting over talismanic books. Graphic and shocking, this novel in which a young male librarian becomes ‘Curator of the Motherland’ transcends satire to present the library as a powerful, if problematic, resource at the core of civilization. French writer Sophie Divry’s book The Library of Unrequited Love (2010; English translation 2013) masquerades as a monologue by a frustrated female librarian, but this is a pretext for a knowingly humorous commentary on French identity. France’s history, politics, philosophy, and literature are subjected to the coruscating gaze of a subaltern, the self-styled ‘cultural assembly-line worker’ in the library. Published in 2018, two years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Salley Vickers’s The Librarian features an idealistic young librarian in 1950s England who finds herself in a milieu where ideals become tarnished and the library becomes a metaphor for an impossible dream. By turns nostalgic for and critical of class-ridden post-war English society, Vickers’s novel reflects something of the confusion of a divided Brexit-era Britain.