Life is Beautiful!

Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

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.

I will not lie, this novel did not sit well with me at first. I found it quite hard to transfer
from one era to another and adapt my comprehension from one language to the next with every chapter shift and every language change. Cloud Atlas is a different animal for my limited book-reading experience.

But it can’t be denied, that this award-winning book is brilliant in its own way--the author more than anything. He did take me to six different worlds with six different lives that are in someway connected together. And that’s how it is from start to finish inside his own universe. The common themes: love and humanity; the prose: fantastic and almost romantic. If you get past the initial confusion and hard-labored reading of Zachry’s chapters, wherein David Mitchel managed to create a barbaric language befitted the post-apocalyptic world at the center of the novel, you’ll find that his envisioned world and history may not be far away from the timeline we are living now. And thus, can be easily understood.

One character who stood out the most for me was Robert Frobisher, a bi-sexual English musician who told his story through letters sent to his then male lover Rufus Sixsmith. There is a kind of melancholy and delicate beauty with which his words were crafted together, and this with the help of imagining the kind of music that he was composing during his time in Zedelghem, where most of his plot happened. And if you get the chance to watch the movie--and you should--you’ll find that Ben Whishaw did a terrific almost perfect job of portraying the character of Robert. It was like Ben as Robert were a mashup of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume by Patrick Süskind and Richard II in Shakespeare’s Richard II. His tragedy was a thing of beauty, and his words, forever ingrained in my broken heart.

Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas film

Cloud Atlas was a challenging read for me and almost took me a year to finish, but I’m glad I did not let go and labored on until the very last page. In the end, it’s really all about love.

"Junior was born with the knowledge that in 36 years, the world will end when a giant comet hit the earth and everything in it will cease to exist. Zero survivors. He knew this, thanks but no thanks, to the strange voices in his head. That and the knowledge of a lot more things no normal person can know-- like the brutal story of his girlfriend’s past or his mother’s secret addiction to alcohol, provided to him by the 'voices'. And knowing that in a few years the world will end, Junior came to adulthood burdened by the question, “Will anything I do matter?” Inevitably, not putting much thought and effort to his existence, his life became a series of failures -- as a son, a brother, and a lover. Everything seemed to go spiralling down in his life. Then came the chance for him to save humanity. With his 'special' knowledge and remarkable intelligence, he was able to redeem himself. Only to find out that all of his hard works will go to waste. And before it was too late, life game him another opportunity -- a special chance to do it all again. Junior stopped caring less and started to learn that, even though you know the world will end soon, everything still matters."

I honestly don’t know the author-- it was his first novel, and I had no idea if the book is going to be a good buy (it's a little expensive), but I picked it up anyways. Because just like what the title says, I believe that everything (in our life) matters. However miserable you think your life is -- things, however small they are, matter. They’re not just there for no reason, they have meaning and purpose.

The book was written rather differently, with chapters providing different voices and point of views; it's refreshing and easy to read. I’m not sure with other readers, but it somehow made it much easier to connect with the characters -- them narrating their stories directly to you and the voices inside Junior’s head providing a morbid humor that will make you say what the heck most of the time. I’ve managed to finish it in less than a week (an achievement for me these days), all the time imagining seeing the book on the big screen. I really think it would make a funny and poignant film, the type of films that I really enjoy watching. There were so much misery and let-downs in the story that you would have this perpetual feeling of pity for everyone. And almost all throughout, when you’re about to get depressed of their miserable state, you'll find these hilarious and crazy jests that’ll make you burst with a dorky laugh or stop in the middle because what just happened left you dumbfounded.

More significantly for me, and this is why I picked up this book, is cause I’m pretty sure that it will be a touching and inspiring read. It made me feel so much grateful of the things that are most important in my life -- my family, my friends, and all my inspirations. You see, in the end, it was really all about love. How, when you love a person, you’d do anything for them to keep them from experiencing a hell of a life they might go through or feeling the pains you yourself have encountered. No matter what, you will always try to protect them, even if it means undergoing the same heartaches and disappointments over and over again. Knowing that even if at the end of the day, after you’ve done everything that you can and things still screw up, you are left with the fact that you did your part. And you tried to prove how much love and devotion you have, trying your best to make things better –- somehow.

It sure left a smile on my face; I hugged it when I was done. I don’t know how I can easily let go of Junior, his lovely family, and his crazy life story. I didn't want it to end. I might just re-read the book sooner than later just to laugh again at all the beautiful and painful moments of their doomed lives. So anyways, if you are at a point in your life when you feel like everything sucks, read Everything Matters, and I tell you, you might start to look at things pretty differently.

;) xo

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Navigation

Book Review: Gone Girl

Book Review: The Curious Incident of Dog In The Night-time

Book Review: Looking for Alaska

Book Review: Cloud Atlas

Book Review: Dark Places is Quite a Dagger to the Heart

Book Review: Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr.