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The Archivist is an American novel by Martha Cooley, first published in a hardcover format by Little, Brown and Company in 1998.〔(''The Archivist,'' by Martha Cooley. ) ''Caboodles Book in a Bag: Author Biography.''〕 The story makes extensive reference to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and it dwells on themes such as guilt, insanity, and suicide. The book was reprinted in 1999 by Back Bay Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. ==Plot Summary== Matthias Lane is a widower in his sixties. He works as an archivist at an unnamed library and is told to preserve a set of letters that T. S. Eliot once wrote and sent to Emily Hale. Roberta Spire, a graduate student in her thirties, appeals to Matthias for a look at Eliot's letters. Emily Hale donated T. S. Eliot's letters to the library and gave specific instructions that they were not to be shown to the public until 2020. Her decision to donate the letters at all, however, went against the wishes of T. S. Eliot himself, who wanted Hale to destroy the letters after she had read them. Both Matthias and Roberta are highly familiar with T. S. Eliot's poetry, as well as Eliot's personal background. The novel briefly retells the story of how Eliot placed his first wife, Vivienne Eliot, in a mental institution, and how she eventually died. It is gradually revealed that Matthias, similarly, placed his wife Judith in a mental institution, and she eventually committed suicide. Judith's death occurred twenty years before Matthias first meets Roberta. Roberta reminds Matthias of Judith, because both women are of Jewish ancestry, both read and write poetry, and both have done research on the Holocaust. When Judith was in the mental institution, Dr. Clay forbade her to read newspapers. Yet Judith's parents, Len and Carol, smuggled newspapers into her room, so that Judith could keep up with the aftermath of the Holocaust. After Judith's suicide, Matthias assumes that the newspapers contributed to Judith's insanity. However, later, when Matthias speaks to Roberta about his wife, he admits that his attempts to cut his wife off from the real world were what really made her sick: She kept trusting me...I was like a paralyzed man. It's clearer to me now, what she need from me. But I got it all wrong. I tried to shield her from the present, from the city...I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them. That's what got to her, more than anything else. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear that I, too, was silent. At the end of the novel, Matthias takes the Hale Letters out of the library and burns them. He believes that respecting the last wish of T. S. Eliot - that the letters be burned and not shown to the public - is a step toward atoning for Matthias's personal mistake of sending his wife Judith to a mental institution. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Archivist」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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