Our narrator is Soren Johansson, who lived a perfectly reasonable and ethical life but nonetheless awakens in Hell after his death. At orientation, Soren is informed by a demon that Hell is actually temporary, and he will eventually get to Heaven if he completes an unusual task.
Soren’s Hell is a vast library filled with shelved books as far as the eye can see. Soren’s task is to go through the books and find the one among them that chronicles his life on earth. There are others in the library working on the same task along with Soren.
The setup for a vast library of this nature filled with mostly nonsensical and irrelevant books was borrowed by the author from a 1941 short story from an Argentinian librarian and author Jorge Borges called “The Library of Babel,” but Peck’s version is more of a smart, humorous, and tragic science-fiction meditation on the pitfalls of living forever.
Can the residents of the library work together to use process of elimination to find their biographies? How big is this library, anyway? There’s adventure and sorrow and romance in these pages wrapped in some serious Big Ideas making this one of the finest short novels I’ve ever read. Highest recommendation.
Get the book HERE.
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