The House Of Twenty Thousand Books (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘White Nights’ (1848). IN THE LATE 1950s, Mimi’s mother, Bellafeigel Nirenstein, had often sat stony-faced and angry-looking in the front room of Hillway. Her health spiralling downward, she had had to move out of her own home and she spent the last few years of her life living with Mimi and Chimen. The solemnity of my great-grandmother’s features in photographs from those years is almost a metaphor for the front room itself. This was, I think, an austere chamber, a room lacking whimsy. Whereas the dining room, gorgeously lit by the sun coming in off of the garden and through the glass rear-wall, was frivolous enough for Chimen, in his old age, to dance around with plastic cups balanced atop his head, and whereas the kitchen was a place for endless gossip and informal chatter, the front room was in general a serious place. It became weighed down by its own contents: by its overstuffed armchairs and its books – volumes cascaded off of the shelves and onto the coffee table, the floor, onto every available surface and ultimately, in combination with a collection of heavy potted plants, blocked off access to the fireplace.
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