I found about The Midnight Library when I voted The Best Book of the Year 2020 on Goodreads, a few weeks ago. It’s actually called the Best Choice Award or something. I have voted for books whose authors I’ve heard of or I have read before, but also blindly, like in a poker game. I didn’t fill all the categories, I’m not interested in Young Adult, nor Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction. I voted in Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Nonfiction, Memoir & Autobiography, History & Technology, and Science & Technology. I don’t remember if I voted in Best Debut, but here I am, writing about this (I don’t know how to consider it) 280 pages thing, now, after more than six months without publishing a word here. I have cast my vote for it, in Fiction.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig – cover
[source of both pics: Goodreads]
I don’t think our lives on Earth are infinite, so I became very picky with my books. I wanted just something light and attractive for now. The Midnight Library has good reviews from my friends and others as well. Four-point-five through the whole five stars in a long row. That’s the baby, I thought. Oh boy, what flamboyant reviews! …
“The main character is full of regrets after attempting suicide and ends up in a library where she gets to try all the other lives she could have lived.
This book was heartbreaking and unputdownable. My main regret is starting it late at night because I had to wait until the next day to finish it!”
So I checked it out, I start reading. It was kind of boring, but they said it was “unputdownable”. I have reached the halfway mark. It was too late to abandon it, anyway, usually, it’s in less than fifty pages. Unfortunately, I haven’t found the meaning. More than that, this was a sort of fantastic fiction without sense and with absolutely nothing to be attracted by. Dull characters, all of them, from Nora to Mrs. Elm, the librarian. This doesn’t respect any spiritual law, it’s like Twilight, a book that depicts shiny vampires in the sunlight.
The main character, a gal of 35 called Nora, wished to be a lot of different things when she was a child. “Swimmer. Musician. Philosopher. Spouse. Traveler. Glaciologist. Happy. Loved.” When we meet her, she is a sort of singer/songwriter who at a certain time in the recent past was very close to being signed together with the band she was in with her gay brother, by a “label”, Universal, none the less. But she was depressed by a recent break up from a guy called Dan, a “catch” as her mother believed before dying by cancer, who’s dream was to own a pub in a rural area. I wish I would abstain to comment, but I can’t. A pub is OK, but why in the country, starting from scratch in the middle of a limited community? So, she was torn between a music career or a country pub owner career. I don’t remember well, she sacked her brother and his lover from the band, or she left the band, anyway she was at crossroads, very depressed and regretful of her choices. She was brooding at home that evening when a guy knocked at her door and gave her the most heartbreaking news possible. Her ginger tabby cat called Voltaire was lying very still by the side of the road, apparently hit by a car. Oh my god! You know that book “Save the Cat” by Blake Snyder where the catch was to save the cat not kill it, to attract more sympathy? Jeez, I wanted to leave it right then, and I made a big mistake because I didn’t. The next morning she was late at her lousy job and she was fired from that. She decided to die.
I don’t remember what she took, but she woke up in a sort of library kept by her old high school librarian, a chess player resembling old Mrs. Elm. ‘Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Mrs. Elm. ‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.’ ‘So, I am dead?’ Nora asked.
And now, please have a morsel of great contemporary literature from Matt Haig:
‘Death is outside.’
‘Well, I should go there. Because I want to die.’ Nora began walking.
But Mrs. Elm shook her head. ‘That isn’t how death works.’
‘Why not?’
‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’
What happens next contradicts any possible logic. When Mrs. Elm hands Nora a book representing a life she could have lived if she had chosen differently at a certain moment, she “enters” that life, but she is the Nora she knows, with her recent memories, nothing related to the “new life”. She has to figure who’s who and what’s what. Crap. In a few hours, if she “doesn’t like” her new life, she finds herself in the library. A few hours, a day, doesn’t matter. I was curious, but it was boring and not very well written. During a life in which she was “good”, an accomplished successful Olympic swimmer giving TED speeches and paid speeches on “success”, when she couldn’t figure out what to say in front of an audience, having a stage fright like in her original life, she started to expose her depression, from the only life she remembers clearly, her original one. Everybody around was in shock.
Anyway, now, her gay brother was finally happily married with the love of his life, her ambitious pushing father, after divorcing Nora’s mother moved happily together with some Russian hottie, but all his goals were accomplished. Something was wrong, it was too good, why, when Nora’s mother died of cancer almost alone? Nora was swimming, the brother was singing in some tours and the father… I just said about him.
SYSTEM ERROR!!!
Nora finds herself again in the library successfully ignored by Mrs. Elm fumbling with her old computer.
‘I want a life in which…’ and she is given that book, or we are explained that Nora has to live some more experiences to accomplish that version…
This is bad fiction, and I blindly voted for Mr. Haig. The only phrase I liked little before reaching the half, is ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves’ – and it’s from Henry David Thoreau, her “fave” philosopher, as Matt Haig worded it.
The author Matt Haig
Now the unbelievable news I’ve just read:
“This year’s Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction was the closest contest in the history of the awards. Your winner—by five votes—is The Midnight Library, author Matt Haig’s wildly inventive blend of literary and speculative fiction. The quick gist: Imagine a library in which each book represents a different path your life could have taken. Now imagine spending eternity in that library. It’s a Goodreads kind of dream…”
The last phrase is written by someone who didn’t read The Midnight Library. A Goodreads dream might be one in which you spend eternity READING in a library. Those “books” were in fact lives to be lived, not books to be read.
Wildly inventive indeed, shiny vampires, as I said. I’m sure they voted blindly, like me, based on that misguiding “quick gist”. If not, I’m sorry for them. A book I liked with four stars out of five, Helen DeWitt‘s The Last Samurai, considered by the brainy bunch from Vulture the best book of the 21st Century so far, has 4.16 stars from only 6.2k ratings, and I hope the voters didn’t have Tom Cruise’s movie in their minds.
I’ve felt more than twice the urge to abandon it. I’ve read it, I understood the point (pretty predictable, by the way), and I still think about it as a waste of my time. Considering one needs two and a half, a maximum of three hours top to read it, it wasn’t the end of the world.
The Midnight Library has been superficially given 4.25 stars from 42.8k ratings. It seems almost normal in these progressive times we live in.
If you liked what you read (and for that I humbly thank you for your patience), subscribe to this blog by Email! Follow this blog on Twitter, and on Facebook! For a joyous day, check out my pins on Pinterest or my grams on Instagram 😄. I hope you like this blog so much that you think it’s time to take a step further by becoming yourself a blogger; in order to do that have the kindness to read the Own Your Website offer I have prepared for you! You won’t regret. Thanks for passing by 😄 Speak your mind, don’t be shy!
