The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 Nineteen years before Nora Seed decided to die, the world was her oyster.  Mrs. Elm, her school librarian, was telling her, “A whole life in front of you”, “You could do anything, live anywhere”.  And the next thing you know her father is dead.  Fast forward 19 years, we can see how much of an impact her father’s death had had on her.  We learn of her mother’s cancer, her brother’s depression, friends’ rejections. Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, her cat dies and she gets fired from her dead-end job.  Initially, I thought she was battling with regrets.  Maybe some.  But the events between the day at the high school library and the day she got fired just built up an arsenal of guilt.  Her fault that the band broke up, her fault that Volts her cat died, her fault her brother isn’t talking to her, her fault customers at the store are not buying anything, her fault Dan broke up with her etc.  She feels she failed everyone and no one needed her. “I have nothing to give”, she laments and overdoses herself with antidepressants.

Nora finds herself between life and death, in a library.  All the books on these sliding shelves tell her story. Opening them provides her a chance to live the life she regretted not living.  Here is Mrs. Elm again, helping her as she did all those years ago. She reminds Nora of her talents--her swimming, philosophy, glaciology, music --all of which she never pursued.  She urges Nora to try those lives and “undo” those regrets. And her journey begins. Although she enters a life with Nora in it, she carries with her the knowledge only from the root life. (We do not know where the other Nora goes.) Each life reveals some truth about her root existence, which gives her a better understanding of it.

Living those regret lives slowly erode her feelings of guilt. Because in these lives, she gains new insights into her family's character, and learns that those regrets were not really hers--they were the regrets of others which she was burdened with.  As she gradually begins to understand herself better, the library becomes insecure, there are “system errors”.  Total self awareness happens when she realizes that she can choose “choices” but not their outcomes.  So then, even when she is happy with Ash and Molly (and Plato) she knows that she had not worked for it and that life couldn’t be hers unless she was in it from the start. With this epiphany, Nora does not need the library anymore. 

It was tiring, waiting for Nora to find herself, watching (reading) her reject all those lives.  And there was a lot of sermonizing and everyone was doing it--Nora, Elm, the author.  There was nothing subtle in the book.  Nothing left to the imagination.  All loose ends were taken care of--even Mr. Banerjee who was such a non entity in the narrative.  It was like reading Dale Carnegie’s self help books, “How to stop Worrying and start Living”.  Moral of the story:  don’t have regrets.  You have to make do with the life you have.  Be happy.   There were clues towards the end that she would find Ash ultimately.  And even if she didn’t there was a happy ending.  She became more confident and wiser.  And the idea of several folks doing these quantum leaps didn’t appeal.  But yes, it was easy reading.

Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. USA. Viking. 2020

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The Gardens of Consolation

The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza spans about 40 yrs of Iran’s political turmoil from 1920-1953.  The journey of the young couple,Talla and Sardar, from Ghamsar to Shemiran describes not just a change in physical landscape but a shifting political landscape as well.  Talla believed that Ghamsar, the beautiful green valley,  was a “lost corner of paradise fallen from heaven”.  At 12, she trusts Sardar enough to brave djinns and ogres in the mountains to move north towards Tehran and make a life there away from her cruel father.  The author talks about how Talla had no idea the country was ruled by a king, did not know his name. “She has never heard the words history, geography, Asia, Europe, Russia or England.”  Russians, French, British, Germans all lived in that country, but she had never seen them.  She did not know even Iran’s tribes. In keeping with this primitiveness of its main characters, the author uses the Iranian calendar as opposed to the Gregorian one.  Talla arrives at a more restrictive city  Sharh-e Rey where she is expected to wear the chador all the time. There is a new social order here of masters and peasants which was totally different from that of Ghamsar which was not ruled by any khan and where everyone owned his own house and land.  No one feared anyone else.  Reza Khan is now in power.  Ultimately, they move to Shemiran. The bazaaris of Tehran disturbed Sardar and he sought to move away from them.  This migration proved to be propitious as it brought Bahram, their son, close to schools and the right social and political contacts.  But Sardar only moved so that he could keep to himself. He never even went to the mosque. He did not want to make decisions for other people, “ to command or change the world”.  He was happy with his radio (which he listened to believing everything and commenting on nothing ) and the acquisition of property.  So why did he leave his hometown Ghamsar?  He wanted his son to know the world beyond the mountains. His son never wanted to reveal to important people what his father did for a living, but ultimately Sardar did make a lot of money out of the land he bought! Talla was happy housekeeping, did not worry about politics, or voting or women’s rights. That was Bahram’s life.  Not the women’s rights.  He used women, treated them shamefully.  I think that is another reason why democracy did not work in Iran. All the ‘farangi’ women were liberated enough, but the Iranian men treated their own women rather badly. We see signs of that quite early in his life when he exhibits jealousy towards his teacher’s husband. Bahram knew he wanted Iran to be a democratic state but he never worked to change his community--only networked for himself. Did he even notice that when he started school the schools had children of “mixed ages and every sort of background, the destitute and the well-to-do”? Soon, that too changes-- once Reza Shah abdicates the throne in favor of his son after the 1941 Allied offensive. And the new king reinstates old traditions. The author stresses at every crisis point in Iran’s political scene that the common man has no role to play in deciding the fate of his country. “Sardar has no part in it, and Talla does not even count.”

Each chapter described subtle changes in their lives due to political upheavals but life went on for Sardar and Talla. However, Bahram was in the world of men, “men of his own era: passionate, uncompromising, brave, self-centered, seductive, authoritarian.” Iran is still evolving.  It got rid of all the international elements-- Britain (that country again!) messed up big time. Partnered with Russia then with US… 

Iran was yet to find its political destiny.  It tried democracy but could not sustain it.  Because of people like Sardar and Talla, parents of Bahram.  In the last chapter of the book, Bahram’s friend’s father comments that democracy came too soon to the country.  It was brought by aristocrats who wanted “the best of everything here: the constitution,  a secular society, freedom of expression, civil rights….Except you can’t just place an order for things like that, or buy them; they have to be learned and they take time, a long time.”  That comes at a price.  Democracy was the political ambition of the intellectual elite not of the 80% illiterate masses. Which was very true.  Right after the coup against Mossadegh, the defeat of the Communist party, the operation AJAX by the CIA, Talla and Sardar are enjoying the Gholhaki night without Bahram.  Sardar is smoking his pipe, Talla is pouring out tea and Sardar exclaims “Allahu Akbar! The world is so beautiful here this evening.  What more could we ask?”

Bahram represents the challenges of a first generation literate who desires to do well but he was not very likable.  He only succeeded in projecting himself as a social climber. His attitude towards women, his seductions, his possessiveness are all positively scary. He abused women. They would “primarily be partners in seduction, the stake in men’s desires” for “an age-old culture of harems and favorites could not be erased from men’s consciousness in the space of a decade simply because Iran had come into the modern age.” And the women themselves turned the game of seduction into playing with fire which is where they think lies the power. Bahram had contempt for his mother as well--he found her love too overbearing, enough for a lifetime.  He was ashamed of them for being illiterate but the truth is he was the failure. The author is obviously a feminist; when she talks about Talla’s miscarriage and the death of her second child, she is telling the readers that Talla was married very early and was not ready to have children or raise them.  And notice that each section of her book is named for a girl or a woman.  In this book Iran is the main character—and the plot is the fall of democracy. And the western world that worshiped individuality and freedom, played a large role in defeating democracy in Iran. It was through the combined efforts of England, Soviet Union and USA that democracy was defeated in Iran. The common people had no say and the intellectuals had no say in their own government.
The short chapters make the novel episodic. They seem to be isolated incidents with no relevance to the plot but actually lend a spirit of adventure to the characters' lives. Talla's first experience with seeing a car in her life, was amusing. For a while the reader saw the world through Talla's eyes. Somehow, her journey ended when her ambitions were fulfilled--to live contently under the stars not really concerned about the state of her country or the world.

Reza, Parisa. The Gardens Of Consolation. Europa Editions. New York. 2015. Print

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