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Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

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Who would have thought a rodent might be so entertaining? Yet we've grown up on such tales of humanized mice and rats. Why not a highly literate one? Even while the ever clever and articulate Firmin declares: "The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured old Ratty in 'The Wind in the Willows.' I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones."

Peppery vermin, isn't he? Such is Firmin's charm. Born the runt in a litter of 13 rats to poor, ignorant, inebriated mother rat Flo, he resorts to eating the tasty paper of book pages that Flo has used to make their nest, tucked away in the back shelves of a Boston bookstore. His siblings, who nurse first, have only disdain for him, and Firmin soon finds his own way in the world, maneuvering by story. From eating books, he evolves to insatiable consumer of books, reading through all the classics, all the sciences, current and historical events, children's stories, romances, plays. He reads it all.

To be a literate rat makes Firmin painfully aware of his odd place in the world. He calls it his "vast canyon of loneliness." He suffers at his inability to fit into the world about which he reads, at his inability to express himself in spoken language. Author Sam Savage writes some of his most poignant lines in describing for us that vast canyon of loneliness in Firmin due to his inability to communicate:

"Despite my intelligence, my tact, the delicacy and refinement of my feelings, my growing erudition, I remained a creature of great disabilities. Reading is one thing, speaking is another... Loquacious to the point of chatter, I was condemned to silence. The fact is, I had no voice. All the beautiful sentences flying around in my head like butterflies were in fact flying in a cage they could never get out of. All the lovely words that I mulled and mouthed in the strangled silence of my thought were as useless as the thousands, perhaps millions, of words that I had torn from books and swallowed, the incohesive fragments of entire novels, plays, epic poems, intimate diaries, and scandalous confessions--all down the tube, mute, useless, and wasted... I laugh, in order not to weep--which, of course, I also cannot do. Or laugh either, for that matter, except in my head, where it is more painful than tears."

Savage has created in such memorable passages for us a rodent that is so human that we relate as one life form to another, for all creatures, surely, have suffered such isolation at some point in our lives, unable to express what weighs most on our hearts.

The story of Firmin takes us by the paw through the bookstore and out into the streets of Boston, into the lives of various misfit humans, including the lonely science fiction writer Jerry Magoon who keeps the rat as adored pet without ever discovering Firmin's secret. If perhaps there is any part of this truly unique and engaging tale lacking, otherwise exquisitely written, then it is the episodes of Firmin's "lowlife" penchant to hang out at the old theatre, Rialto, into the wee hours of the night, sitting amongst drooling old lechers, even while openly acknowledging his own "perversions," and watching what he refers to as his "Lovelies." It is perhaps a bit too much for my sensibilities and suspended disbelief to imagine a rat so craving the human female species the way that he does... oh, shudder... but then, I suppose, that is what makes Firmin a rat, after all, and the men in the dark theatre gaping alongside him, eyes aglow, rather rat-like, too.

Regardless, this is a tale not to be missed. It is a gem: unique, literary, smart, and surprisingly moving.

Firmin is the runt of a rat litter, brought into the world in a corner of a bookstore basement in the decrepit Boston neighborhood of Scollay Square. Unable to win the competition for his mother's milk, he finds nourishment from books - first by eating them and later by reading them. Poor Firmin - he has the sensibilities, love of literature and ideas, and fanciful dreams of a human, but he is trapped in the body of a loathsome rodent! Alienated from his own species and desperate to find human love and respect, he experiences disappointing relationships with two humans and builds an elaborate fantasy world to help him cope.

Filled with delightful illustrations of Firmin's trials and tribulations, this book anthropomorphizes a rat in a uniquely touching, startling, and humorous way. Readers will recognize traces of Firmin in themselves, and will undoubtedly wish that they were as well read as he is. This is a fascinating and creative little story with a big homage to literature. Highly recommended.

Eileen Rieback

Firmin, the unusually literate rat who gives Sam Savage's little gem of a book its title, was born during the Kennedy administration in the cellar of a bookstore. Pembroke Books, the beloved charge of its Friar Tuckish owner Norman, sat near an x-rated theater in the squalor of Boston's blighted Scollay Square. The circumstances of Firmin's birth, both geographic and familial, largely defined his life.

Born the 13th of 13 children to a 12-teated, alcoholic mother, Firmin was frequently compelled by virtue of his relatively diminutive size and strength to assuage his hunger by gnawing on books--a pathetic situation which, however, resulted in the singular fact and blessing of his life, his "lexical hypertrophy," heightened mental acuity coupled with an uncanny ability to read at super-human, let alone super-rodent speeds. At the same time, Firmin's early introduction to the "velvet-skinned beings" who featured in the local theater's midnight showings confused his sexuality and cemented his perverse identification with the humans whose literature he was devouring in both senses.

Firmin being an anthropomorphized rat, you'll be tempted to think that Savage's novel is just another cute contribution to "rat literature"--a genre, by the way, which Firmin himself despises. Don't be fooled. Firmin is caustic and cynical, his story imbued with a sense of tragedy. Early on, for example, we learn that Norman--the first human whom Firmin ever loved--has somehow failed him. In the last quarter of the book the mood grows even more somber. Savage exhibits an uncanny ability to channel the inner life of our tragic narrator: Firmin is a very believable character, a creature of elevated sensibilities mired in the ugly realities of a rat's world. Savage's writing is exquisite, particularly in the book's first half.

Savage's Firmin is a connoisseur of literature, having ingested more of it than you or I ever will. Firmin found books as a whole to be quite tasty: "My friend," he once told a man in a bar, "given the chasm that separates all your experiences from all of mine, I can bring you no closer to that singular savor than by saying that books, in an average sort of way, taste the way coffee smells." But it turns out, as Firmin discovered, that how good a book tastes is directly related to its literary quality: Jane Eyre is better than Emily Post is better than Stuart Little. That being so, you might want to give your copy of Firmin a nibble: it's a very tasty read.

Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

From Firmin:

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard. It begins, like all true stories, who knows where. Looking for the beginning is like trying to discover the source of a river. You paddle upstream for months under a burning sun, between towering green walls of dripping jungle, soggy maps disintegrating in your hands. You are driven half mad by false hopes, malicious swarms of biting insects, and the tricks of memory, and all you reach in the end - the ultima Thule of the whole ridiculous quest - is a damp spot in the jungle or, in the case of a story, some perfectly meaningless word or gesture. And yet, at some more or less arbitrary place along the way between the damp spot and the sea the cartographer inserts the point of his compass, and there the Amazon begins."

I never thought I'd be moved by a rat. A rat! That most slithering, scheming of nocturnal creatures. They spread the bubonic plague, and who knows what else besides. They're dirty, they eat garbage and humans have a natural fear of them. They make my skin crawl. I didn't think a rat could ever move me nearly to tears.

Meet Firmin, a most unusual rat. He was born inauspiciously, as rats generally are, one of thirteen babies born to an alcoholic mother. The runt of the litter, he's the only one born with his eyes open, a fact that's significant. Firmin and his siblings are born in the basement of a bookshop. The room is packed, unsurprisingly, with books. His mother chooses one, in this case Joyce's Finnegans Wake, to shred for their bed. On this book Firmin cuts his literary teeth, and that's no exaggeration.

After weeks spent fighting for a spot at his mother's teats, constantly pushed aside by his bigger and stronger siblings, Firmin starts chewing on books:

"I must have put away whole chapters by the time I was old enough to toddle on wobby fours out of our dark corner and into the flickering bigness. I am convinced that these masticated pages furnished the nutritional foundation for - and perhaps even directly caused, what I with modesty shall call my unusual mental development."

Unusual, indeed. From a source of fiber to fill his aching stomach, books soon became more than a nutritional interest. Firmin trains himself to read (suspend disbelief, Savage makes it work). Soon he's digesting books in the metaphorical sense, consuming them at an ever-increasing rate. He reads everything, from fiction to philosophy and beyond. He can even tell an author by the way his or her books taste. In the outside world, rifling through garbage, he'll come upon a taste that reminds him of Emily Dickinson, or James Joyce, or any of the other writers whose books he's tasted. He comes to acquire a very discerning palate, one influenced by literature.

After a certain point he naturally becomes curious about what more there is in the world, so he explores tunnels through the building built by former rats. Eventually he comes upon the bookshop itself, and soon after he sees the owner, Norman, for the first time. Firmin grows to love the sight of the man, imagining he could bring him around to becoming a friend. But there's an obstacle. Firmin can't talk, so he keeps adoring him from afar, going so far as to retrieve a yellow rose from the streets (a rose stomped on by a rejected lover who's just broken up with his girlfriend), leaving it in Norman's coffee cup one morning. Rather than beguiling Norman, it frankly creeps him out. It starts to become obvious this friendship doesn't have a really great chance. But still Firmin looks upon the man with a misty-eyed sort of love and respect. At least until something happens that disillusions him and breaks his little rat heart.

Through Norman, Firmin (which rhymes with "vermin," of course, the author reminds us) meets a writer named Jerry, who lives in the same building as the bookshop. Jerry, coincidentally, has written a book with a rat as a main character. He's basically an aging, unsuccessful writer, but Firmin doesn't see that. He sees a struggling artist, trying hard to further his craft but only being beaten down by society. Jerry takes care of Firmin, taking him in after he'd broken an ankle on the streets, left to die the death of an anonymous rat. He nurses the rat back to health. They listen to music together, and share food. For a while they live a relatively happy life, though Firmin can see the unhappiness of the writer. He can see it in the alcoholism that reminds him of his mother, and in the periods of deep depression in which Jerry forgets the rat even exists.

Eventually things change, as they always do. The neighborhood falls further and further into disrepair, threatening Firmin's haunts and driving the bookshop into debt. Firmin himself ages, becoming less able to take his own tunnels in and out of the building, in order to find the bookshop and the places he's assured of finding exotic foods like popcorn and Snickers bars. But in the end, we have no doubt of the dignity, and difference, in this rat. He's struggled hard, and against overwhelming odds. He's loved, most often in an unrequited sense, and he's lost. Ultimately he feels despair, but also a sense of triumph. This is an educated rat, a rat who's fought and scratched his way out of the literal and proverbial basement. He's gone places, and seen things, and along the way he's read a whole lot of books. Firmin is a rat above the rest, and if you're not cheering for him by the end, and possibly swallowing down a big lump in your throat, then I would be very surprised.

I loved Firmin. Pure and simple.

"You laugh. You are right to laugh. I was once - despite my unpleasant mien - a hopeless romantic, that most ridiculous of creatures. And a humanist, too, equally hopeless. And yet despite - or is it because? - of these failings I was able to meet a lot of fabulous people and a lot of fabulous geniuses too in the course of my early education. I got on conversational terms with all the Big Ones. Dostoevsky and Strindberg, for example. In them I was quick to recognize fellow sufferers, hysterics like me. And from them I learned a valuable lesson - that no matter how small you are, your madness can be as big as anyone's."

If you have never been around Boston, you probably have never heard of the infamous Scollay Square. If you are familiar with Boston, but are my age (not mentioned here) or younger, then you probably have heard of Scollay Square (Pronounced: Skuly Skwaya) but it did not exist in your lifetime. It was a place where you could get mugged, killed and robbed at the same time by four different people. There were bunches of low-life bars, strip joints and establishments where there were ladies of negotiable affections. Just a short distance away, near the once and now again, gentrified downtown crossing close by the Pilgrim Theater where the famous Fanny Fox performed nightly when she was not in Washington, DC dealing with the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (the Honerable Wilber Mills) in the Tidal Basin in the wee hours of the night.

This book takes place in that famous Scollay Square prior to the destruction and the crooks were driven out and is today known as Government Center where the daily work is the same as before but on a much higher level.

The hero of this book is Firmin, an intellectual rat who was born (along with 12 siblings) in the basement of one of the numerous bookstores in the area (there were some businesses of quality there along with the rest). Firmin is quite a student and is self-educated using the stock in the bookstore. Being a rat, he was unable to communicate with his intellectual equals (for the most part, humans).

This is a funny/sad book. I never thought that I would have sympathy for the life that must be led by a rat, but Firmin is somewhat lovable for a rat and he is a great jazz pianist as well.

Firmin is a Boston rat in a Scollay Square bookstore, but he has a singular distinction - he can read. The story follows him as he explores the somewhat run-down district; as the owner of the bookstore tries to get rid of him (he realizes he's been eating rat poison when he reads the box) and eventually becomes the pet of an eccentric older man who writes science fiction. Savage characterizes Firmin so well, creating almost an urban Watership Down. When, at the end, they begin construction on Government Center, you really feel badly for Firmin, but somehow you know he'll make it. This is a book for anyone who loves animals, Boston, books, or any combination of the three. I love Firmin!

Firmin, the brainy and lovable rat, is born in a brood of many in a Boston Used Book Store. Starting life without the proper nutrients of life (his siblings are better at milking their mother), he devours and reads many high brow classics in the used book store where he takes residence, starting with Finnegan's Wake, no less. Gradually, he scouts parts of the town, including the local marque theatre, where he develops a taste for Fred and Ginger, and various "Lovelys" of the old time silver screen. His learning becomes overwhelming, and he desperately seeks the friendship of the store owner. Unfortunately, the owner views this rodent as a pest, and Firmin changes his opinion quickly. Even so, Firmin is taken up by a frustrated sci-fi writer, and these two cruise about town in some of the book's best and most eccentric scenes. The drawings are fine as well. Almost perfect, but perhaps some of the R-rated scenes could have been dropped, so the book's appeal and interest could be for all ages. Would make a truly zany cartoon movie!

Although humanized, the rat Firmin cannot talk, and his interaction with humans is limited by his lack of social conditioning. Firmin assumes, for example, that little gifts will comfort the owner of Scollay Square's Pembroke Books, the shop where Firmin's mama relieves herself of a litter of thirteen. Fortunately or unfortunately, mama Flo only has nipples for twelve, so Firmin quickly discovers that paper in the form of books is quite nourishing. Through the consumption of books, Firmin learns to read and finds out that Boston's Scollay Square is about to be demolished. Norman of Pembroke Books does not return the concerned rat's love, but like a regular human wants rid of the gift giver and leaves him rat poison.
Trying to escape, Firmin makes another big social blunder. He fancies that women, the gentler sex, will be kinder to him, and a very harrowing scene follows. Rescued by a scroungy would-be writer, Firmin dreamily indulges in his two pleasures--reading and porno movies--and waits for the destruction of the famous square.
This short, poignant autobiography is related in first person and contains many references to a range of literary works. The rat Firmin also shares many characteristics associated with the artist--loneliness, alienation, isolation, poverty, as well as a fascination with beauty and the written word. Sam Savage, the actual author, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University and possibly uses a noble rat to point out the destructiveness and failings of humankind.

Perhaps the single complaint I have is a certain difficulty in guaging spans of time over the life of this rat, but really that is a secondary concern. The language is richly descriptive without ever being obtuse or long-winded. The book reads like a conversaion with a close friend, both candid and revealing. It is an insightful study of a unique personality: life through the eyes of a true dreamer. I read the whole book in a day. It is a masterpiece of creativity.

I emphasize the title of this review, and the term "Literature." This is not meant to be elitist or snobbish, just direct - so you don't waste your money on this book or time writing negative reviews when you had no business reading it in the first place.

This book is for you if you've willingly read and enjoyed works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hemmingway, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald. It's not because you need to have an extensive vocabulary, but because people who do enjoy reading these works tend to share mental characteristics.

Don't pick up a book because it's critically acclaimed. Know yourself and your tastes. There's a reason why it's a favorite with critics, because critics are readers, if not always failed writers ;)

Read this book if you get goosebumps from the vicarious situations in books, tickled by the phraseology of authors, and enjoy pondering the ambiguity of morality and the implications of the protagonists actions (or inactions).

Longing to be something more than what you are, but racked by a psychosis of fatalism, as well as real life constraints, that lead to a meandering depression describes Firmin: He's a rat that wants a destiny like the protagonists in the books he's read. He wants to communicate with people verbally with the same eloquence of his thoughts, but he can't speak. He feels isolation, but his species is incapable of tears. He wants the embrace of beautiful women, to wear a suit, the everyday comradery that humans experience by being a part of a community, but at best he's condescended to as an amusing pet. All this, and the only place he's ever called home is going to be demolished.

His love of literature comes about from an attempt to supplement his diet. He's the runt, the scraggler who can't get at a teet, so he chews on torn out pages from books, before realizing he can read them. Not only disadvantaged physically to compete in his world, he can't come to terms with the way other rats think.

If you've never felt this way, put this book down, walk away and consider yourself fortunate.