Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

** spoiler alert ** This is my first from this author.

I am puzzled why this has good to great ratings, with many of my trusted pals at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ praising lavishly both the book and author. I don't care about the larger acclaim this work or this author gets, it is the GR friends who I value more than the general readers.

I have a serious contention with the theory of memory the author proposed, that got expressed through the letter's contents the protagonist sends to his ex-girlfriend and friend (who is his boyfriend) decades back.

Here the protagonist claims that he had completely forgot about the content, words, tone of it. Quite unbelievable. Or perhaps it isn't, but nevertheless it has its flaws.

As far as I know, most of us would never remember (or we would, it is different for different people) vividly, with every details of a significant past event, however important it may be. But we would always remember the general essence of it, particularly the taste/feelings of the event it had left on us. To take a book or a film for example (by that I don't dilute the seriousness, but just to give an example), we might remember how we liked, or disliked the film in general, even to the level that we may know why it was so. There are of course other instances, like we may not even remember anything about it except the fact that we have read or watched it. Those, as it is evident (or philosophically self evident, to borrow a phrase from the book) were trivial accidents of our life with no impact on us whatsoever.

But in this book we are talking about first love of the protagonist and one that involves his remarkable friend too. So no trivial phase. Though I agree that the protagonist could have forgotten the contents of the letter he had written to them, he never would have forgotten what was the tone of it (let's leave the consequence of the letter's word to the last), or the feelings he had about them joining.

Or he had wantedly erased it from his memories, not just the letter, but the whole college love and fall out, etc. Possible. But in the book, when the death of the friend is informed, the protagonist and his friends discuss the suicide seriously without the protagonist thinking about the hurt he had inflicted through his letter (considering how few months back it would have had happened unlike an old man recollecting a spur of the moment letter decades back), though that could not be the reason for the suicide, at least it should have been fresh, after all that was the last bit of communication he had with his friend.


But the climax twist (if you could neglect the earlier revelation) was way too much. I am not even getting into the detail of how it all sounded completely stupid and how, I now suspect the writer wanted to do twist for the twist sake.

The only interesting bits were the early ones involving their classroom lectures and philosophising.

Though I could agree on one point, the words do have some effect, but not to this level.

Not sure why this author is getting this much praise!

Or may be he is all right about the time and memory part, just that I feel otherwise and mainly not convinced from the story in the least.