- My Rating: 5/5
- Goodreads Rating: 4.12/5
- Year Published: 2011
- Page Count: 104
“How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning —that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.”
Synopsis
As a faithful Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong (Goodreads, 2026).
“Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.”
My Review (Spoiler-free!)
A 104 page novella just changed my entire perception of life. That may sound like an exaggeration, but I will be thinking about this story for years to come (I now hesitate to say forever… after all, forever is a very, very long time). Peck’s take on the The Library of Babel is an enthralling story, riveting from the first page, but with (sometimes disturbing) depth swimming throughout it.
The Library of Babel is a library, with infinite books, each one containing a random combination of letters. Every conceivable book exists, including accurate tellings of the future and the written story of your life, but 99.9% of the texts are complete nonsense. There’s a book that’s the letter A repeated over and over, but there’s also also the dictionary, the Bible, and Fifty Shades of Gray. It’s a weird idea.
I’ve never quite grasped the concept of infinity. Then again, infinity isn’t meant for our human brains to wrap themselves around. Our lives are finite. Every day beats with the thrum of the inevitable: it could be days, weeks, or years from now, but one day, this will all be gone. We will all be gone, sucked up into oblivion at the end of time (shoutout The Fault in Our Stars for bringing that terrifying ending to my 13-year-old brain’s attention). But how can a human be expected to understand infinity? How can a being infused with the knowledge of inescapable mortality comprehend a world with no end? A life with no stopping point?
At its core, when you put aside Peak’s wry voice and the deep loss that permeates every page of this novella, the entire point of this story is hope. Like Soren, we get up every day, we sort through nonsense, and we carry faith in our chests that we may one day experience a glimpse of perfection. We live for the hope of something better.
“But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable?”
Recommendation
Read it right now. It’s 104 pages, you have no excuse. Spectacular, heartbreaking, and so insanely thought-provoking. WOW!
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