Initially I had mixed feelings about this book. In the beginning, I felt the author was trying too hard to be literary. I frequently had to look up words in the dictionary (not that this is a bad thing, but it took me out of the story to do so).
The Archivist is a disturbing work with a great story of a twisted romance and the murder of the female in the relationship. In essence, Nadia Fontaine is the archivist working on the papers of Raymond West, a writer short-listed for the Nobel Prize. She and West fall in love and, in their heightened amorous state, co-author an Anais Nin type sexually-explicit book. Shortly thereafter, Nadia is found dead, presumably drowned while surfing. Emily Snow, another archivist, is hired to complete the cataloguing of the West papers. She soon comes to feel that Fontaine was murdered rather than drowned and embarks on the quest to learn the truth.
The Archivist is a dark work that required considerable effort to read. Then I stumbled into a sex scene that I considered putting up for The Guardian’s Bad Sex Awards and nearly quit. However, I persevered and, towards the last half of the book, I couldn’t put it down and stayed up at 4:30 a.m. to finish it. I enjoyed it too because it was about writing and how authors (and other artists) feed off each other.
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