This little novel has been stuck in my head (and my heart) for months now. It presents questions about the sense and scale of time and size that I still cannot wrap my head around. It's about being wrong, cosmically wrong, and having to accept it. It's about love, too. And loss. It made me think of my girl and if I ever show you this review, Bethany, I would look for you in the stacks. Forever. ( )

How does one even describe this novella of only 100 pages? At first I found it somewhat tedious, but that only seems right considering the events in the story. Slowly, I found I couldn’t put it down. As a lover of books, I thought eternity in a library doesn’t sound like such a bad thing… until I learned the truth of those books. Then the truth of love found and lost, which seemed even greater punishment. A truer horror was the inevitability of some human natures. Though a simple idea, here, the author proves hell doesn’t have to contain hellfire to be torturous. A horror novel? No. And certainly not horrific. But insidiously horrifying. ( )

Imagine that Hell is an infinite library and the only way to escape is to locate your biography. A slow and unpromising beginning quickly spirals out of control into a nightmare of loneliness, tedium, and gore. This story will make you consider you life and choices through the lenses of space and time, of eternity. But do yourself a favor and read
Borges' The Library of Babel first. ( )

Although the yellow-eyed Zoroastrian demon who sends the dead off to Hell at the beginning of this book never says so directly, there are enough hints as to the kind of Hell you get: for each of us, something appropriate to our interests or obsessions while alive. So for Soren Johansson, who always read a lot and loved books, it’s a vast library.
    And I do mean vast because, though finite in size, the numbers involved here are so brain-frying this library might as well be infinitely big. This is in fact a novella-length reworking of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, and a Borges Library doesn’t just contain all the books ever written, it contains all possible books. Each volume is 410 pages long, forty lines per page, eighty characters per line and together they cover every possible combination of text, from “AAAA…” (i.e. 410 pages of nothing but capital As) to something like “////…” They’re arranged randomly on the shelves, so you’ve no idea where anything is; the shelves in stacks, the stacks on successive floors…endless floors… In this near-infinity it is Soren’s task (his punishment for not being a Zoroastrian I think, because he seems to have led a pretty blameless life otherwise) to search the stacks for the single volume which describes that life—finding it is what will release him from this hell.
    Steven L Peck’s task of course is to somehow convince us (and by “us” I mean LibraryThingers everywhere who likewise read shed-loads of books, who think about books and love books the way we all do here) that this library could be a hell rather than a heaven. He does it though, in spades—the number of possible books is jaw-dropping. Early on for example: “I found this book around the 23⁴³⁹th day of my stay in Hell…” Even a professional mathematician would have to think long and hard about how to put into words a span of time such as this (phrases like “trillions of universes passing, one after another” don’t even make a dent in it). Likewise the scale of the building needed to house this collection—you could describe it in millimetres, or in billions of light-years, because in effect it makes no difference whatsoever. This story is about eternity and the true implications of phrases such as “eternal damnation”—or the “eternal life” of many another fantasy, or “eternal love”.
    For Soren, no other escape is possible: he can’t kill himself, being already dead, and can’t even go mad—he’s kept horribly sane throughout. And yet, through it all there does remain the possibility of, somehow, finding that book of his life and being freed…perhaps with a more systematic search from the bottom floor up… So this is also about the extraordinary human capacity for hope, a hope that survives when all else has been lost, a hope that refuses to die—even in Hell.

[For anyone curious, the total number of possible books—all just 410 pages long, forty lines a page, eighty characters a line and using, say, about ninety-five keyboard-characters—is 95¹³¹²⁰⁰⁰. For comparison, the number of electrons in the entire visible universe is a “mere” 1.5⁸⁰. And the library itself? Roughly 7.16¹²⁹⁷³⁶⁹ light-years.] ( )

I was reading about the Borges "The Library of Babel" all about a huge (albeit finite) library containing every book that could ever be written (so long as it contains 410 pages containing 40 lines of 80 characters each), which reminded me of the short story A Short Stay in Hell, so I re-read it.

This is a thoroughly intriguing exploration of that same idea, wrapped in the idea that this is an afterlife (turns out the Zoroastrians were right all along). There are some interesting consequences to a library light-years across and the societies that develop therein.

It's well worth the read (or a re-read even). ( )