Firmin by Sam Savage
Posted by: flairandsquare on: February 24, 2009
Firmin is a sad and lonely, self-loathing, hopeless and dreamy rat. Firmin is born in the basement of Pembroke Books and as the runt of the litter is quickly estranged from his rat family, who levae the bookstore in search of a more glamrous life of food and alcohol.
Firmin suffers from a kind of ‘biblio-bulimia’, in a home with very little in the way of food scraps, he literally begins to devour books, and one day he actually learns to read them… he becomes insatiable and a devoted lover of all the classics and of course the bookstore owner, for whom, he imagines a life outside the bookstore.
I found this book quite sad, but also quite funny, particularly when Firmin convinces himself that he might just be able to communicate with humans, and upon consulting a book on sign language, he attempts to gain the affections of the bookstore owner by quite hilariously performing the sign-language phrase ‘goodbye zipper’.
Don’t rush out to buy this one, unless you really like rats!
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