The thing that people noticed about this book whilst I was reading it was the fact it has part of the cover missing.
Probably a marketing thing, I wonder if the paperback will sport the same "chewed" front cover.
Firmin is a rat, a literary rat , unusual in the "rat" world.
When I'd finished this book I remember my creative writing lecturer at uni saying that internal monologues from and animals point of view "don't work". They obviously do.
Now for the bumph!
Firmin is the runt of a litter of rats born in the basement of Pembroke Books, a ramshackle old bookshop run by an equally shambolic owner, Norman Shine. Forced to compete for food, Firmin ends up chewing on the books that surround him. Thanks to his unusual diet, he acquires the miraculous ability to read. He subsequently develops an insatiable hunger for literature, and a very unratlike sense of the world and his place in it. He is a debonair soul trapped in a rat's body.....
But a literary rat is a lonely rat and , spurned by his own kind, he thinks he recognises a kindred soul in Norman. Firmin seeks solace in the Lovelies of the local burlesque cinema and in his own imagination. But the days of the bookshop and of the close community around it are numbered. The area has been marked out for urban regeneration and soon the faded glory of the bookshop, the low-life bars, loan sharks and pawn shops will face the bulldozers.
Brilliantly original and richly allegorical, Firmin is brimming with charm and wistful longing for a world that treasures it's seedy theatres , one-of-a-kind characters, and cluttered bookshops.
Definitely different, Firmin is a book you would either hate or love.
http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/MP-43504/Firmin.htm
Labels: General fiction
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