The Glister by John Burnside

of a Godzilla movie and he hasn't even noticed. To begin with, I thought he was wrapped too tight for the Innertown, but I more or less like him now. He loves books, and he knows everything there is to know about music. That's all the life he has.
    When I first met him, though, I have to admit that he got up my nose. I'd been browsing the shelves, looking for something new and coming up stumped. I'd read all the Dostoyevsky they had, the complete fucking works in some ancient edition with red-and-yellow dust wrappers, so they looked like boxes of cheap sweets. I'd read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which was the only book of hers they had managed to acquire. Not much happened, but I liked the way she looked at things, and I'd have liked to read more of her stuff. I'd have enjoyed knowing what she thought of the Innertown; that would have been an amazing book. I read Nostromo and Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and I'd try to imagine what it would have been like to have Joseph Conrad as a mate, or maybe an uncle, when you were a kid. I'd read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and I'd almost cried at the end, around about the point where Gatsby's dad turns up. I'd read fucking Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and wondered why nobody ever bought the guy a dictionary. I'd read Diary of a Nobody, and all the Charles Dickens stuff they had, and they were great, but I couldn't get on with Trollope. I'd read the anthology of poetry from 1400 to 1945. I'd read some history books, some biographies, and a book about English folk music that looked like it had been used as a doorstop for fifty years. By the time John arrived at the library, I was running out of stuff to read, next step sniffing glue and juvenile delinquency. Or worse still, celebrity memoirs.
    That was when I found Marcel Proust.
    It was a nice edition, almost brand-new and nice colors, all dust-wrapped and smelling of the printers. Blue on the cover, like some French song about la mer. Weird titles. When I saw the complete set on the shelf I almost cried, it was so beautiful. I grabbed the first four volumes, the limit of books I could borrow on my ticket, and carried them off to the checkout desk. That was when I met John. He had just arrived, to take over from the stuck-up cow who used to be head librarian, and he was working what budget he had for the Greater Good of all. That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it. And every now and then, you get to pass something on.
    John looked at me a bit snooty, that first time, when I wandered over to the checkout desk clutching my prize. I think he was a bit of a snob; he probably figured he'd ended up working in the Innertown library because of some cruel twist of fate. “You'd do better to read these one at a time,” he said, picking up the first volume, which was intriguingly called Swann's Way. “It's slow, but satisfying reading. Definitely not Rider Haggard.”
    Of course, I'd never heard of Rider Haggard, though it was a pretty good name for a writer. Too good really. Maybe he'd made it up. “Is it good?” I asked.
    “Good?” He looked at me over his wobbly glasses. “Yes. It's good. It's better in French, though, it has to be said.”
    “French?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you have it in French?”
    “Why?” He smiled slightly. “Can you read French?”
    “Not really,” I said. I was doing languages in school, but I was pretty sure Miss Lemmon's French classes hadn't quite equipped me for this yet. “Un petit peu,” I added, hopefully.
    “Not much point, then,” he said.
    I was a bit annoyed by that. “So,” I said, “have you read it in French?”
    He nodded. Smug fucking bastard.
    “What, all of it?”
    “It's a real page-turner.”
    “I thought you said it was slow.”
    “Definition of a page-turner,” he said. Then he grinned, and I knew he was just mucking about, and I kind of