The Book Borrower: A Novel

by Alice Mattison

Book Overview

On the first page of The Book Borrower, Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw meet in 1975 in a New York City playground, where the two women are looking after their babies. Deborah lends Toby a book,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688177867
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Original, Captivating Story of a Friendship

I found The Book Borrower to be the most compelling book I've read in months. The terse, lovely style; the unflinching look at friendship between women; the strange and fascinating dialogue combined to make this an unforgettable book. I felt I understood more about the daily lives of real people after I read it. As soon as I finished it, I picked it up and started over again at the beginning.

Excellently written and captivating

The first several pages of "The Book Borrower" were a little difficult but I'm so glad I didn't give up. Alice Mattison weaves tales of wonderful women in various periods of American life. I loved the way the reader could remember a fact that the character had forgotten. Toby Ruben got herself out of the grief of losing Deborah by talking to her. The final scene with the book being placed in Jeremiah's screen door is just right. I plan to read more by Mattison.

A spellbinding novel from a trustworthy author.

At first I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. The style is sparse and mysterious, especially at the beginning, and I didn't think I wanted to embark on such a challenging journey. Yet something on the page beckoned; the fine writing pulled me in and seduced me, as did the characters. It was the same feeling I had while reading THE ENGLISH PATIENT and THE HOURS. A whisper... trust me, trust me. And so I did, and was not disappointed!

This book is hugely ambitious and stunningly realized.

Alice Mattison's The Book Borrower is both hugely ambitious and stunningly realized. It demands of the reader real concentration; those who give it will reap rich rewards. A novel of friendship, betrayal, love, loss, and redemption; a history lesson; a parable about literature itself-this work is flat-out amazing. I've only read it once; plan to read it again and maybe again.

From the Los Angeles Times

It is gratifying to read novels that interweave books into the lives of the characters. Sometimes the books scatter ghosts into the present, sometimes they haunt the characters. Michael Cunningham's tremendously popular novel "The Hours" reverberates off Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." In "The Book Borrower," it's "Trolley Girl," a book set in the 1920s and passed between two friends, Deborah and Toby, in a playground in 1975. "Trolley Girl's" story floats through this one--the story of a friendship between two mothers. It is gracefully done--the tone of the older book infects the tone of the present; details, exclamation points, oddities in thought and conversation have a Dickensian feel to them, even as Patty Hearst is acquitted in the background. But the really fine thing about Alice Mattison 's style is her sense of proportion. Taking a friendship that spans several decades, in which careers are pursued, children hatched and educated, husbands argued with and loved, dogs patted, she makes the friendship into the novel's sun, shining and absorbing light from those other details. When the friends are separated, all of the planets go spinning askew. It's a marvelous galaxy the author has created. Some of the atmospheric pressures between these friends are familiar--jealousy, different talents, different relationships--but many are private, as though the friendship had its own soul that lives on after it's over, even after the book is closed. *