This novella has made the rounds the last couple of years, and I see why: a man is sentenced to a temporary hell due to following the wrong religion. He'll get out eventually, but first he must find the book of his life in Borges's Library of Babel. For those unfamiliar, each book in this library has 410 pages, 40 lines, and 80 characters per line with random latinate letters, spaces, and punctuation. As an exercise in x-treem combinatorics, the number of books in this library is so large, it would engulf metropolitan Denver if typed at 12-point font. It is over one million orders of magnitude larger than the number of electronics in the observable universe. Luckily, you can eat whatever you want, all wounds are healed the next day (including "death" insofar as it exists in hell), and other people exist in the library who all speak your language. You'll just have to spend so long finding your book that "billions of years" would be like finishing as soon as you began to search.

Peck masterfully shows you just how long eternity really would be - and in comparison to forever, spending googols of years in the Library is indeed a "short stay". What got to me was that dropping down the central shaft so you can start your search from the bottom-up would take you over 1,200,000 light-years down given Borges's specifications - and our narrator does take that fall. It really brings to mind the horror of eternal life - and the horror of that realization is occasionally explored in the story.

My main complaint is that it was too short and the concept too big to be a novella; the story ends after three distinct time gaps following the protagonist's roughly one thousandth year in the library, which seemed arbitrary. It feels like it ends before it starts, and it doesn't just have to be an emphasis on eternity. Perhaps that's due to the more people-centric focus as opposed to the social movements and Big Picture that Borges's original story focused on.

One thing that made me laugh and then made me very scared: the demon who sends the protagonist to hell quips about how "this is a correct-you-a-little hell, not the hell of your Christian faith - do you have any idea how long eternity is?". Indeed.