The Archivist: A Novel

Original Novel Title: The Archivist
Author: Martha Cooley
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.
Could this be a trend, two first novels, nearly a decade apart, with the same title? The similarities end there, as this novel, unlike its 1989 predecessor, is a contemporary romance featuring a librarian whose institution preserves letters of poet T.S. Eliot. The poet's life intersects not only with the librarian/archivist of the title, but also that of a woman poet who fervently hopes to see the sealed letters.
Terry Abraham, special Collections, University of Idaho, commented to the ARCHIVES mailing list: "I do not think this will be the book that will expand and improve the public's image of archivists."

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Amnesia: A Novel

Original Novel Title: Amnesia: A Novel
Author: Douglas Cooper
Publisher: Toronto: Random House, 1992 (paperback)
Public librarian Rhonda K. Kitchens describes this novel as the "best example of modern gothic today by a Canadian writer." She notes that "the archivist functions as a sort of confessor...or is he the perpetrator???"
Divided into four sections or chapters, the very first is titled "Archive". The narrator describes himself as "an archival librarian" who works with plans upon first meeting one Izzy Darlow. The narrator is getting married later in the day, but Izzy quickly convinces him to hear his confession. The novel contains only one or two references to the functioning of the archives such as this one:

   The entire city is mapped in the Archive. We can trace the horizontal evolution of every building and street in Toronto. In a sense, the Archive is very much like Rome in Freud's analogy to the mind: an impossible city in which everything exists simultaneously. A building that was torn down a hundred years ago coexists with the present building, occupying the same site. Nothing is ever destroyed. Everything is remembered. (p. 9)
   

Many more references abound to libraries and the profound impact certain books had on Izzy.
The narrator listens to Izzy's story, misses his own wedding, dismissess Izzy, then wanders about until he assumes Izzy's name and perhaps even his identity.

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Suggested by Rhonda K. Kitchens, 1997.07.28