Life is Beautiful!

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.

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

Book Review: Looking for Alaska

Book Review: Cloud Atlas