Firmin is the name of a rat who was born in a second-hand bookshop in a seedy and sleazy area of Boston in the sixties. Firmin was puny and weak, and he was usually left hungry as his other dozen siblings drank all of their mother’s milk.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and Firmin resorted to eating the old books around him which gave him a special power: the ability to read. And then he stopped literally devouring them and started to actually read them. Now the books offered not physical nourishment, but intellectual one. He read everything: from classics to pulp fiction, from religious tomes to erotic texts, from biographies to histories, from philosophy to humour. He just read and read.

Such wide reading contributed to his unusual mental development, but despite his formidable intellect and powerful imagination, he was unable to communicate with his intellectual equals – humans – since he could not talk. He did not have the right vocal cords to speak the humanspeak. As he says in the book,

“…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.”

When he spotted Firmin, the shop owner tried to poison him, and Firmin, who had grown very fond of him over time and felt deeply devoted to him – constantly observing him from his secret cracks and holes – could not stand this treachery, and lost what little faith he had had in the world to begin with.

No matter how much Firmin read, he could never make sense of the seeming randomness and futility of life. Attention-starved, spurned by his own kind for a freak and loathed by the humans whose companionship and respect he sought, Firmin led a life utterly alone – socially as well as intellectually. He lived his life as an outcast, a fine mind forever trapped in a repulsive body. All the beautiful words and thoughts he had in his mind, he could never share with anyone.

He was a hopeless romantic, a venomless cynic, and an endearing dreamer; he sometimes imagined himself as Fred Astaire, dancing and singing with the most beautiful women, he sometimes fantasized that he was a war hero, or a great writer or poet, a human being dressed in tuxedoes and hats and gloves, discussing great ideas with other humans. But that never happened, of course. He lived and died alone. His genius was both a blessing and a curse. And, symoblically, he dies in the very nest he was born in. Despite his shining intelligence and sparkling wit, despite all his escapist flights of fancy, he lived and died a rat.

It is obvious that the story is an allegory; it is not really about a rat who could read, but about any human being who has felt like a misfit in this world, a pariah, with only his runaway imagination as his friend; unable to find someone who would understand him and see him for what he really is, beyond the physical looks and beyond his societal standing.

Deeply moving, ruefully funny, heart-breakingly cynical, highly original and incisively metaphorical, this is an unforgettable tale of loneliness and underachievement and helplessness in the face of immutable circumstances. Liberally sprinkled with wise truisms, this is a novel which brilliantly uses a non-human protagonist to open a window to the human condition. My highest rating for this staggering work of genius.