The Quiet Librarian

“When his eyes sweep her way, Hana holds still, a rabbit frozen in her tracks. She immediately feels foolish for reacting so. No one comes to the library looking for her. She has been invisible for far too long now, walking through the rows with her cart in her drab clothing.”

This passage, which introduces the novel’s protagonist, characterizes her through her desire to blend in and avoid drawing attention to herself. The metaphor “a rabbit frozen in her tracks” uses prey imagery to emphasize Hana’s fear and vulnerability. The words that describe her appearance—“drab” and “invisible”—highlight how she uses her clothing as camouflage to blend into her environment and avoid attention.

“Zaim was from Bosnia though. Hana remembers asking Amina if he had been in the war. ‘We haven’t talked about that,’ Amina said. ‘Questions like that open doors I’m not ready to walk through.’”

Amina’s reticence to discuss the war with another Bosnian émigré highlights the theme of The Lasting Impact of Wartime Atrocities. Wartime atrocities and trauma shaped post-conflict life for Amina. The metaphor of “open doors” portrays memory in spatial terms, and Amina was reluctant to cross the threshold into her past traumas.

“Hana learned long ago that it was better to be the hunter than the hunted. But she had been a very different person then, a girl forged by tragedy and rage, capable of acts that would stun her current coworkers. Still, the vestiges of that girl must reside within her somewhere, relics buried beneath thirty years of ash and rust.”

Hana’s early life as Nura was defined by the dichotomy of “hunter” and “the hunted”—she was forced to choose between the two roles during the war. Though her life as a librarian is very different from those wartime years, Hana thinks of her memories and skills from those years as “vestiges” that nevertheless are still part of her.