Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

by Sam Savage

Book Overview

"I had always imagined that my life story...would have a great first line: something like Nabokov's 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins;' or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'... When it comes to openers, though, the best in my view has to be the first line of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: 'This is the saddest story...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566891817
• ISBN13: 9781566891813
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A renaissance rat

Firmin is the runt of a rat litter, brought into the world in a corner of a bookstore basement in the decrepit Boston neighborhood of Scollay Square. Unable to win the competition for his mother's milk, he finds nourishment from books - first by eating them and later by reading them. Poor Firmin - he has the sensibilities, love of literature and ideas, and fanciful dreams of a human, but he is trapped in the body of a loathsome rodent! Alienated from his own species and desperate to find human love and respect, he experiences disappointing relationships with two humans and builds an elaborate fantasy world to help him cope. Filled with delightful illustrations of Firmin's trials and tribulations, this book anthropomorphizes a rat in a uniquely touching, startling, and humorous way. Readers will recognize traces of Firmin in themselves, and will undoubtedly wish that they were as well read as he is. This is a fascinating and creative little story with a big homage to literature. Highly recommended. Eileen Rieback

A very tasty read

Firmin, the unusually literate rat who gives Sam Savage's little gem of a book its title, was born during the Kennedy administration in the cellar of a bookstore. Pembroke Books, the beloved charge of its Friar Tuckish owner Norman, sat near an x-rated theater in the squalor of Boston's blighted Scollay Square. The circumstances of Firmin's birth, both geographic and familial, largely defined his life. Born the 13th of 13 children to a 12-teated, alcoholic mother, Firmin was frequently compelled by virtue of his relatively diminutive size and strength to assuage his hunger by gnawing on books--a pathetic situation which, however, resulted in the singular fact and blessing of his life, his "lexical hypertrophy," heightened mental acuity coupled with an uncanny ability to read at super-human, let alone super-rodent speeds. At the same time, Firmin's early introduction to the "velvet-skinned beings" who featured in the local theater's midnight showings confused his sexuality and cemented his perverse identification with the humans whose literature he was devouring in both senses. Firmin being an anthropomorphized rat, you'll be tempted to think that Savage's novel is just another cute contribution to "rat literature"--a genre, by the way, which Firmin himself despises. Don't be fooled. Firmin is caustic and cynical, his story imbued with a sense of tragedy. Early on, for example, we learn that Norman--the first human whom Firmin ever loved--has somehow failed him. In the last quarter of the book the mood grows even more somber. Savage exhibits an uncanny ability to channel the inner life of our tragic narrator: Firmin is a very believable character, a creature of elevated sensibilities mired in the ugly realities of a rat's world. Savage's writing is exquisite, particularly in the book's first half. Savage's Firmin is a connoisseur of literature, having ingested more of it than you or I ever will. Firmin found books as a whole to be quite tasty: "My friend," he once told a man in a bar, "given the chasm that separates all your experiences from all of mine, I can bring you no closer to that singular savor than by saying that books, in an average sort of way, taste the way coffee smells." But it turns out, as Firmin discovered, that how good a book tastes is directly related to its literary quality: Jane Eyre is better than Emily Post is better than Stuart Little. That being so, you might want to give your copy of Firmin a nibble: it's a very tasty read. Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

Who would have thought a rodent might be so entertaining? Yet we've grown up on such tales of humanized mice and rats. Why not a highly literate one? Even while the ever clever and articulate Firmin declares: "The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured old Ratty in 'The Wind in the Willows.' I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones." Peppery vermin, isn't he? Such is Firmin's charm. Born the runt in a litter of 13 rats to poor, ignorant, inebriated mother rat Flo, he resorts to eating the tasty paper of book pages that Flo has used to make their nest, tucked away in the back shelves of a Boston bookstore. His siblings, who nurse first, have only disdain for him, and Firmin soon finds his own way in the world, maneuvering by story. From eating books, he evolves to insatiable consumer of books, reading through all the classics, all the sciences, current and historical events, children's stories, romances, plays. He reads it all. To be a literate rat makes Firmin painfully aware of his odd place in the world. He calls it his "vast canyon of loneliness." He suffers at his inability to fit into the world about which he reads, at his inability to express himself in spoken language. Author Sam Savage writes some of his most poignant lines in describing for us that vast canyon of loneliness in Firmin due to his inability to communicate: "Despite my intelligence, my tact, the delicacy and refinement of my feelings, my growing erudition, I remained a creature of great disabilities. Reading is one thing, speaking is another... Loquacious to the point of chatter, I was condemned to silence. The fact is, I had no voice. All the beautiful sentences flying around in my head like butterflies were in fact flying in a cage they could never get out of. All the lovely words that I mulled and mouthed in the strangled silence of my thought were as useless as the thousands, perhaps millions, of words that I had torn from books and swallowed, the incohesive fragments of entire novels, plays, epic poems, intimate diaries, and scandalous confessions--all down the tube, mute, useless, and wasted... I laugh, in order not to weep--which, of course, I also cannot do. Or laugh either, for that matter, except in my head, where it is more painful than tears." Savage has created in such memorable passages for us a rodent that is so human that we relate as one life form to another, for all creatures, surely, have suffered such isolation at some point in our lives, unable to express what weighs most on our hearts. The story of Firmin takes us by the paw through the bookstore and out into the streets of Boston, into the lives of various misfit humans, including the lonely science fiction writer Jerry Magoon who keeps the rat as adored pet without ever discovering Firmin's secret. If perhaps there is any part of this truly unique and e

Sam Savage is a masterful storyteller

Reviewed by Joanne Benham for Reader Views (2/06) When I read the first line of this book, "I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabakov's 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins'; or if I could not do something lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,'" my first thought was I was in for a long read with a pretentious writer. I couldn't have been further from the truth. This is a wonderful little book. This is the story of a rat named Firmin. A common, ordinary gutter rat but with one difference. Firmin can read. He begins the tale with his mother, heavy with her burden of 13 ratlets, scurrying to find a safe birthing place in the 1960s. She comes to an old bookstore in Boston's Scollay Square as it teeters on the brink of destruction and finds a deep hole where she shreds books to make a nest for her babies. After the birth Firmin finds himself in trouble. Mama only has twelve nipples for thirteen babies and Firmin is the runt. He has to resort to eating books to stay alive and this is how he learns to read, from the inside out. As the rats grow, they leave the nest and go to make lives of their own. Even Mama leaves once the babies are weaned, but Firmin stays behind to live out his life in the bookstore. Shunned by his own kind and hated by humans, Firmin retreats into his beloved books. With his books and a little help from the Rialto Theater down the block, Firmin can create wonderful worlds where rats can dance with humans while wearing Ginger Rogers's silk gown. Sam Savage is a masterful storyteller, immersing the reader in Firmin's world, awash with literary masterpieces and the music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin.