The Bookstore of Belonging

A review of Claude Lalumiere’s The Door To Lost Pages (ChiZine Publications, 2011)
By Derek Newman-Stille

In The Door To Lost Pages, Claude Lalumiere once again shows his ability to add a hint of the mythic to the underpinnings of reality and challenge the hegemony of the real by suggesting that there is more to the world than what we deem to be real. Lalumiere creates the ideal bookstore, the one that every person who has been a social outsider dreams about, a place to escape from the humdrum world around them and find a place to belong and a place that acknowledges that reality itself may be more diverse than mainstream society accepts or portrays it to be.

Lost Pages is the ideal bookstore for those who have been cast as “weird” to find themselves. It captures the ability of bookstores to create a place of escape and comfort for many of us who are social outsiders. Lost Pages is a place OF the strange and FOR the strange. It is a physical embodiment of the fringe, existing on the edge of reality and changeable, only really noticed by those who need it. Lalumiere illustrates that stories and myths themselves are places of belonging, as uncomfortable, weird, and simultaneously homey as the people who read them. The space between words is one where one can discover a place of belonging, discover one self, and be able to be comfortable and even revel in being weird, different, socially abject.

As with many of his stories, Lalumiere’s The Door To Lost Pages evokes in the reader a desire to question that reality is just what we see or make of it. He plays with intersections of multiple realities, duplicates, changeable worlds, and diversity of perception. He acknowledges that for a world of diverse people, the way we see the world, the way we define reality, is itself diverse, multiple, and changeable. We do live in a world of multiple realities and every person has their own reality, their own way of viewing the world and we neither can nor do see what others see, but we need to learn to try.

Claude Lalumiere evokes the dreaming mind, the subconscious, unconscious, superconscious, and the semi-permeable barrier between dream and reality becomes the space between one page and the next.

You can read more about Claude Lalumiere at his website at http://lostmyths.net/claude/ . To explore The Door To Lost Pages, you can visit ChiZine Publications’ website at http://chizinepub.com/ .