The Quiet Librarian Worthy of Its Hype

 

 

 

The Quiet Librarian (2025)

By Allen Eskens

Mulholland Books, 305 pages.

★★★★★

 

The Quiet Librarian has been highly acclaimed and deservedly so. It is moving, tragic, and deceptively titled. Its main character, Hana Babìc, is indeed a cardigan-wearing cataloger living on a farm outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, but she’s so much more. Her colleagues like Hana and assume she prefers a quiet life, but even that’s not quite right.

 

This new novel from Allen Eskens takes us back to the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved and independent nations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Srpska emerged. You might think that growing up Yugoslav would bind citizens no matter what flag they flew, but that’s not what happened. The former Yugoslavia exploded amidst sectarian violence defined largely by religion and ethnicity. Some of the worst violence took place in 1995, when Serbia (Eastern Orthodox) abruptly shelled Tuzla in Bosnia (Muslim), and killed 71 people; shortly thereafter the Serbs entered Srebrenica, rounded up more than 1,000 boys and men and slaughtered them. Eskens’ book is a work of fiction, but he adroitly revisits the sorrows of Bosnia thorough a powerful tale with teenager Nura Divjak as his foil. She grew up in a town of both Christians and Muslims, Serbs and Bosniaks. She attended a school that was primarily Serb, but few thought of her as a Muslim. Her little brother Danis’ played with a Serbian boy, Luka. In 1995, though, Bosnia and Serbia were at war and former neighbors Luka, Stanko, and Zorvic return to murder the Divjak family and burn down their home. Only Nura escaped by hiding in a crawlspace, though her arms were badly burned in the fire.

 

If you think the Serbs were brutal, they came to rue the wrath of Nura. She transforms herself as a veritable teenage Ninja to hunt down her family’s killers. At least that was the plan–before she becomes a spy and solider in a Bosniak unit. Such is her fierceness that she is known as “Night Mora” and a price is on her head. In Slavic mythology, Mora is a dark, beautiful woman who visits men in their dreams and then kills them. You might notice that “mora” is close to the English “mare,” as in nightmare.

 

Eskens employs an every-other-chapter structure of “Minnesota After Everything” and “Bosnia 1995 (or 1977or 1992).” So what’s all this have to do with a meek Minnesota librarian? Hana is drawn into her own nightmare when her best friend in the world, Amina, falls out of a window to her death. Or was she pushed? One witness says a man was at the window. Hana’s immediate concern, though, is for Dylan, Amina’s grandson, Dylan. Hana always promised to take care of him if anything happened to her. He is too young to remember his mother, who died six years earlier. It’s one thing to be a godmother in the abstract, but the independent Hana has never married and is vague on what raising a pre-teen means. Nor is she psychologically prepared to be drawn into an investigation led by Detective David Claypool.

 

As I have noted in other reviews, novelists often remind us that wars don’t simply end when a treaty is signed. (And isn’t it a pity that fiction writers understand this better than policymakers, generals, and conscience-challenged soldiers?) In a proverbial flash, Hana faces mourning, substitute motherhood, a creep who might have been Amina’s executioner, developing feelings for a detective, worries about her immigrant identity, and haunted by her own past. If you have read this far and are thinking romance, heart melted by a little boy, and being drawn into a world of violence, that’s not quite right either.

 

The Quiet Librarian is partly about trust, but it’s also a heart-pounding thriller, a mystery,  and a hall of horrors. Don’t even think of trying to read this book leisurely; it’s more like a two-day obsession, a proverbial page-turner. I suspect this book will be optioned for a movie very soon, but shame on you if you watch the TV version or wait for the movie. If it’s not on the shelf, ask your local (yes!) librarian to score an interlibrary loan copy for you.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Though July 27, 2025

 

I’ve not made an exhaustive study of this, but I suspect that Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is the most famous painter in Norwegian history. Who does not know “The Scream” (1893) or the slightly less famous “Ashes” (1894) and “Vampire” (1895)?

 

You’ve probably noticed that in museums these days that you can buy posters, postcards, coffee cups, t-shirts, and all manner of gear bearing images originally created by famous artists. There are those who call such things tacky, but in truth the horse left the barn as soon as it was technically possible to reproduce such works. A current Munch exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums explores the technical aspects of his “branding,” as it were.

 

Of course, in Munch’s time reproduction was technologically more difficult, no one wore art-shirts, and adorning something as practical as a coffee mug with a famous painting would have been considered crass. That said, if you look at what we do today it shares a characteristic with Munch’s reproductions: the quality varies tremendously in accordance with the materials, machinery, and tools used to create them–not to mention the original source used. (Was it a painting by someone trying to recreate the artist’s style? A line drawing? A copy of a copy in a book?  A chalk study? An earlier work that was altered in the final version?)  

 

The most common forms of reproduction in Munch’s time were woodcuts and lithographs; that is, one carves a wooden surface, inks the colors separately, and presses it onto another material (paper or linen usually), or etching a stone and doing the same. Each has its virtues–I sometimes like woodcuts better than the painting–but it’s hard to capture the exact colors the artist used with ink or prepare the surface carefully so it doesn’t smudge, run, or dry too fast.

 

Munch was like a writer who does multiple drafts. Consider “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” (1906-08). He originally did a painting in 1892 that was printed. The first painting was destroyed and he worked on a new version from 1906-08, but reversed the position of the man and the woman. Scholars believe he did so because he worked from a woodcut of the original. 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Seashore” isn’t one of Munch’s better known works, but if you look up the original you’ll see that it is of an old woman and a younger one on a beach. In the lithograph (probably unfinished) the older woman looks like Death and her features are indistinct. If you’re not sure what a lithograph looks like, here’s one and it’s a substantial chunk of rock. 

 

Speaking of rough drafts, Munch did this “Inger in a Red Dress” (1894) on a piece of cheap board. (Inger was a photographer and his youngest sister.) It’s quite different from the final painting. This one was done with wet-on-wet painting and was done when he was just beginning to make prints. You might (sort of) recognize this Munch lithograph. It looks a bit distressing, but the painting was titled “Madonna.” Not all versions of the prints looked all that that divine! Some had the child (embryo?) in the lower left and many did not. Munch made multiple versions as if he were tinkering with mood and subject.  

 

 

 

As x-ray radiology proves, “Winter in Kragero” (1915) was altered numerous times. Is finished? Unclear. Was it intended for some other purpose? Very possibly. It bears similarity to an earlier oil painting, “Old Fisherman on Snow-Covered Coast” (1910-11), though it too has been painted over and the fisherman bears resemblance to a woodcut he did of his neighbor. 

 

 

 

 

This self-portrait  gives pause for thought as well. It’s a woodcut; Munch did many of himself, but each has an unfinished quality about them. Did he do this for effect? Self-loathing? Did he just lose interest? Because the print would be more dramatic? Again, it’s a conundrum, but cheap reproductions–sometimes called “chromos”–were quite popular among the masses and it’s usually a good idea to follow the money! 

 

 

 

This Munch exhibit reminds us that past technology and that of the present also share similarities of intention and marketplace pressures. We claim that we can do a lot more things today–if we can find the time to do them. I suspect Munch would agree.

 

Rob Weir