A Short Stay in Hell
5/5
This review refers to the audiobook. I found A Short Stay in Hell a remarkable novella. The premise is relatively simple: when you die, unless you are a Zoroastrian, you will find yourself on a cheap folding chair facing a demon who decides your not-quite-eternal fate. Our hero ends up assigned to a hell that instantiates Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel where he must search for the book(s) that perfectly describes every second of his life. Peck's library is even worse than Borges since I am pretty sure he allows for some punctuation Borges didn't, but in essence the library is a collection of every book that could ever be written. At first glance, assuming you haven't read the Borges story, this could be awesome – one gets to spend (a near) eternity reading every possible coherent narrative (fictional, non-fictional, and poetic) and come across a google of seriously kick-ass stuff before you found your story. (If you don't break your glasses that is).
However, coherence was never specified and Peck's hellish library contains every possible combination of the 26 letters in the English alphabet and the punctuation found on a QWERTY keyboard. He does throw in a Borges limitation that each book contains only 410 pages where each page contains 40 lines with 80 characters per line, but even if you aren't a math person, you can probably see that there are going to be a lot of possible books. (Put it this way, if you were to try to write out the number of possible books it would literally take more digits than there are observable atoms in the known universe. Peck does provide an estimate – though I was on the audiobook so I didn't see how it was expressed – but in terms of just the space needed to house the number of books, we are talking light years of space). To get an idea of what a hell like this could be like, check out the very cool The Library of Babel and select a random page. Needless to say, the punished celebrate enthusiastically when they find any sort of coherent phrase – forget about an entire coherent volume. The demon makes a point when assigning his new inductees that Christians are very un-Christian when they talk about a hell that would exist for eternity, but as we find out in A Short Time in Hell, eternity is sort of relative at a certain point. It is exactly this sort of concept that Peck entertains in this novella and which is so very effective. Peck addresses many philosophical, existential, and to some degree sociological questions in A Short Stay. What does it mean to be human? Does morality have intrinsic value? What does it truly mean to have one's needs met? What is loneliness and what value does human connection bring to our experience of existence? And so on. The sociology is a little light – we do see the formation of societal groups, but Peck isn't concerned with creating a civilization or exploring man's relationship to social constructions (in my opinion), but instead focusing more narrowly on the experience of the individual connected to other individuals, not a collective. Despite the heavy-hitting themes, I thought the story was well-conveyed and I was never bogged down in overly philosophical meanderings or academic language. The plot, such as it was, moved right along – and I found it a very entertaining story -- and the novella format allowed Peck to introduce a lot of concepts that get the reader thinking without either providing all the answers or leaving the reader hanging. I loved this book and highly recommend it. The audio is also well done and I found Sergei Burbank gave perfect voice to the thoughtful Soren Johannsen. At turns both ironic and very human, the narration was top notch. Buy, Borrow, or Burn: Buy.
