The Archivist [Hardcover]

Martha Cooley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1998

A young woman's impassioned pursuit of a sealed cache of T. S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel -- a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Archivist was a word-of-mouth bestseller and one of the most jubilantly acclaimed first novels of recent years.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Matthias Lane is the proud gatekeeper to countless objects of desire, the greatest among them being T.S. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale. Now in his late 60s and archivist at an unnamed East Coast university, Matthias is--as one of his colleagues tells him--"exceptionally well defended." He's intent on keeping the Hale collection equally remote, and when a young poet first seeks access, Matthias rebuffs her with little difficulty. Still, Roberta Spire does remind him of his wife, Judith, who had also written poetry but had committed suicide 20 years earlier. And he is much taken with the student's self-possession: "Pleading never works with me," he concedes, "but authentic and angry self-interest does."

Betrayal figures heavily in The Archivist. For starters, Roberta feels betrayed by her parents, German Jews who had spent World War II in hiding and emigrated to the U.S. soon afterward, re-creating themselves as Christians. She has only recently discovered her Jewish background. The irony is that Matthias's wife had also been an Eliot adept and had felt violated by a false version of her own past and destroyed when confronted with the realities of the Holocaust. No wonder Roberta sees the Hale letters as a Holy Grail, the key to her questions about religious conversion and identity.

What holds this exceptionally ambitious and layered first novel together is the love all three main characters have for the pleasures of the text and the knowledge they share that time is, as Eliot writes, both preserver and destroyer. Eliot, after all, had wanted Emily Hale to destroy his letters (and in reality they are sealed until 2020, safe at Princeton University). Martha Cooley is deeply concerned, as are her characters, with questions of conscience, privacy, action and inaction, and security--personal and scholarly. If there is one parallel too many in this impressive work, perhaps that is more like life than some of us care to admit. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly

The reserved voice of 65-year-old Matthias Lane, archivist at a prestigious Eastern university, opens this remarkably assured first novel, a complex and beautifully written tale of loss, crises of faith and resolution. Then we read the anguished journal of his wife, Judith, a poet who committed suicide in a mental institution in 1965, the same year as T.S. Eliot died. This is just one of the many parallels between the life of the poet and those of Matt and Judith (Eliot, of course, committed his own wife, Vivienne, to an asylum). Grad student and poet Roberta Spire requests Matt's permission to look at the sealed correspondence between Eliot and a Boston woman named Emily Hale, to whom he may have bared his emotions. Roberta has more than an academic interest in this correspondence. She is immensely disturbed by her parents' belated revelation that they were Jews who fled Germany and converted to Christianity in the U.S., and she feels that Eliot's conversion to Catholicism may hold insights for her. She is unaware that Judith's mental breakdown was related to the Holocaust, but Matt is quick to see the relationship and to recognize the parallels between Eliot's reclusive personality and his own emotional detachment. As several wrenching surprises about the past are revealed, Matt is finally opened to his pain and guilt and to an affirmative act of connectedness and trust. With its sinewy interplay of moral, spiritual and philosophical issues, its graceful interjection of lines of poetry and references to jazz, the novel first engages the reader's intellect. Soon, however, the emotions are also engaged, and the narrative acquires unflagging suspense as it peels back layers of secrets. This is an auspicious debut from a writer who already has mastered the craft.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316158720
• ISBN-13: 978-0316158725
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,833,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a literary feast, June 23, 2000

By 

M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)

My only minor complaint about this book is the somewhat ponderous middle section devoted to Mattias' wife's letters as she slides deeper and deeper into depression. I think the author probably did that on purpose, but after the very lively first hundred pages that snag the reader into a terrific story about the world of libraries and archives, it was somewhat of a dramatic change to be stuck in the middle. I enjoyed the meta-critical style of this book -- stories about stories woven into other stories: T.S. Eliot's letters, his wife's mental breakdown, Mattias' wife's breakdown and her letters, etc... I'm surprised that people called this book pretentious -- clearly Cooley is a sharp reader of Eliot's. Unless it's really overdone, I hardly ever complain that a book is TOO literary -- I feel lucky enough that she includes some of his finest poems like The Four Quartets. The judith section, though ponderous, is haunting. She can't get beyond the fact that the Holocaust happened and people did not want to acknowledge it. Because of her background and her poetic sensibility, she just can't get over it. The character's are tightly drawn and convincing. The main characters struggle to express his emotions brings back shades of The Remains of the Day. I don't want to spoil the ending, so I hope these brief comments are enough to get you to read this fine book. I read it all in one night.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Passion in still corridors of poetry, October 25, 2005

By 

Richard Stoehr "Idle Rich" (Bremerton, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)

The intellectual has a heart, and it beats beneath the skin as surely and as powerfully as that of the emotional romantic. This is the reminder in Martha Cooley's fine novel, "The Archivist" -- that there can be passion even where there is restraint, that there can be hatred even if it is never given voice, that there can be love even when it must be denied.

"The Archivist" is a simple story, a man who works in the archives of a prestigious library, maintaining collections of the rarest of rare materials, including a series of hundreds of letters written by the poet T.S. Eliot to a woman named Emily Hale. This collection of Eliot's letters is a bequest, meant to be held onto and not released to anyone for many years to come. These letters also act as the fulcrum of the story that unfolds, both thematically and literally.

Matthias, the archivist, has his routine disturbed by a young woman named Roberta, a poet who is determined to see Eliot's letters. In talking with Roberta and getting to know her, Matthias is drawn inexorably down the road of his past, remembering his wife, also a poet, who killed herself. These two intersections of time, Matt's past with his wife and Matt's present as he gets to know Roberta, are further tied to revelations about T.S. Eliot himself, his own wife Vivienne, and the unique relationship he shared with Emily Hale.

It is this level of intricacy, one layer of story peeling back to not only reveal further layers, but to intertwine with them, that gives "The Archivist" such a magical tone throughout. Though the basic story idea is simple (no massive conspiracies or plots here -- just a lonely man, his work, and his memories), Cooley turns it quickly into something rare and fragile, the sort of story where one misstep could cause utter failure. But she never missteps or errs in what she tells or how she tells it. These characters, how their past and present are tied together in their love for the same poet and the regrets left over after World War II, how their lives come to intermingle, fray apart, then come together again, is nothing short of remarkable.

Cooley's subtlety and restraint throughout "The Archivist" is admirable, and calls to mind "The Remains of the Day." Both are novels in which the reader can sense the passions and deep feelings of the characters running just under the surface, but unlike other authors she never overplays it. It never comes bursting out in a final rush of unbridled emotion -- instead, it flows steadily but cautiously forward and leaves the reader to enjoy the trip.

In too many novels, the author will focus on either the mind or the heart. Either the story is heavily intellectual while almost devoid of real emotion, or it goes the other way, giving free rein to emotion while downplaying or just ignoring the capacities of reason. "The Archivist" skillfully mixes both aspects, and tells a deceptively simple tale of a man, two of the women in his life, a poet, and a culture at war with itself.

Truly, a remarkable novel.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cooley writes of an archivist of life as well as books, December 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Archivist: A Novel (Paperback)

I came upon this book by chance and was thrilled to find a book written in many layers, giving food for thought beyond the obvious story line. I agreed with the reader from Leipire Fork, TN but also felt that Matthew was not stoic but standing at the sidelines of life, even his own; archiving interactions more than participating in them.

This book is for the reader that loves words, subtlety and the invitation to think past his own space and time. The current zeitgeist demands we look at the aftermath of WWII not insofar as economy or political structure but in regard to psychological impact, guilt, and emotion. "The Archivist" certainly accomplishes this purpose.

From reviews I've read, "The Reader" deals with the same subject from a completely different perspective. Unfortunately I haven't read "The Reader" as yet and cannot make a comparison.