the Dewey decimal system

I bought this book in Princeton bookstore mostly because it was a such beautiful object! I had never heard of Nathan Larson nor of the Dewey Decimal System when I grabbed the book and felt the compulsion to buy it!

The book published by Akashic Books is indeed a beautiful book: the paper is high quality, a warm crème colour, the cover has inside flaps, the printing makes reading very enjoyable, the pages are cut in such a way that looking at the book from the fore edge makes it look like a Manhattan skyline… Truly a beautiful thing!!!

Once I had opened the book, I also got trapped by the story, an unusual style along with a great post-apocalyptic plot (not The Road, of course!, but what can compare with The Road?!) and a love of New York City that permeates the pages for sure! A magistral début for a new author. While the action takes place in an unpleasant future New York City, with disease and ruin on ever street corner, slowly recovering from a mega 9/11 style attack, the central character relates very much to Chandler‘s private detectives, but also, as mentioned in another review, to Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Seidel! The main character, only known as Dewey Decimal for his maniac idée fixe of ordering the books in the New York Library where he lives, is bordering on the insane and his moral code is rather heavily warped, witness several rather gratuitous murders in the book,  but the whole city seems to have fallen very low in terms of this same moral code… As well as being under the rule of Eastern European thugs (to the point of the hero speaking Russian and Ukrainian). The blonde fatale found in every roman noir is slightly carituresque (“plastic surgery in any amount just makes me want to puke. Call me judgmental, but it indicates a certain set of accompanying goals, fashion choices and behaviors. It’s trashy and it means you don’t like yourself.“), with whiffs of ethnic cleansing activities in Serbia and she remains a mystery till the end of the novel. As are most other characters, in fact. This may be the low tide part of the book, that everything is perceived from Dewey’s eyes to the point of making others one-D and hard to fathom… But the overall scheme of following this partly insane detective throughout New York City makes the Dewey Decimal System quite an unconventional pleasure to read and I am looking forward the next story in the series.