Firmin: Adventures Of A Metropolitan Lowlife

Sam Savage
Coffee House Press (2006)
ISBN 1566891817
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.

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