Book Notes – In this series, I share my insights, ideas, and reviews of my favourite books, whose topics are wide-ranging.
Rating – 9/10
Amazon Link – The Midnight Library : Haig, Matt: Amazon.in: Books
Favourite Quotes
“To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.“
“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes.
Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
“The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense.
A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing.
Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.
I AM ALIVE.”
Insights and Review
You know the funny thing about this book? You can kind of guess the way it’s going to end. You can guess why the story is set up the way it is, how it is will move forward, and what the end result will be. And yet, you continue reading it, absorbing each part, and you feel a sense of loss at the last page, for you are at the end of a fabulous story.
Matt Haig knows how to dance with the reader’s emotions, and he uses that ability to teach them that the lives they’ve been gifted with are a life worth living. That there is no greater privilege than being alive in this present moment. This is perhaps the most important thing we must remember while at the same time being something we must be reminded of.
I don’t want to recount much of the story here because it will spoil discovering how Matt Haig sets it up, which is done beautifully, in my opinion. So I’ll tell you only what you need to know. Our protagonist, Nora, seems to live a life where she hasn’t reached her potential, and things aren’t going her way. It all comes to a climax where, finally, she decides to take her life.
But before she gets the chance to die, she enters the midnight library, where she can see what her life could have been if she could undo her regrets and sample lives she could have had if she had made different choices. I will not spoil the conclusion; I want this preview to be incentive enough for you to read and find out. All I can say is that it is worth it.
If I had to summarise Matt Haig’s writing and storytelling style, I’d use the word “skilful”. As you read the book, you’ll be able to see why he structured it in a certain way and that you’d not be able to structure it any better. There is a danger of the plot structure appearing repetitive and boring (SPOILER: with Nora having to sample one life after the next only to learn something new about herself). Yet Haig seems to have found the balance. I found myself reading it with “one lifetime per session”. In a way, it gave me a cadence to read. This is a deliberate book.
In many ways, I think reviews try to reduce the value of a book into a few paragraphs. This is one such book where that is not possible. No review can truly capture its emotional impact. Read it and see for yourself.
