This quick page-turner and heartbreaker of a novel by British author Mark Haddon gave the same contrasting tragic and lifting sentiment with a short peak to the life of its main protagonist and narrator, Christopher—who somehow reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.
TCR is my favorite novel as of writing, and it’s not easy to be able to compare another work of fiction with my personal top choice. Both books are quite depressing, fantastically smart, and truly funny in critical places. Mark Haddon's book can also make you think about the way you perceive other people and the world that surrounds them. You’d think sometimes that just because you’re breathing the same air and seeing the same moon as everyone else mean things are pretty one dimensional in some aspects of our human lives.
Take Christopher from Haddon’s first novel. He is 15 and he is special. He has autistic spectrum condition and he doesn’t understand the world the way that most of us do. He can’t understand metaphors and he turns to complicated math equations to silence the noisy world around him. His truths are so foreign and unique from my truths, and it made the story even much sadder that I am that naïve and indifferent towards people like Christopher. We can’t deny that people like him or quite similar to him could face really cruel treatments from the world that they live in—a world that’s far from the one they picture in their head as the ideal world. Of course we all have this desires sometimes—a perfect world to live our perfect lives.
Christopher and Holden in both books are geniuses in their own rights. And as terrible as it may sound, even geniuses wake up to a kind of brutal reality that they try to deduce and solve with as much mind power as they have. There is a heaviness and a lightness in Christopher’s life and as soon as I finished reading his unfinished story, I wanted to run next to him and try to make him feel as safe as possible without ever having to touch or hug him. Apparently, he doesn’t like human contact and he panics when someone touches him. How sad was that—so truly sad indeed.
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