Description
You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.
‘The Midnight Library’ is an absolute masterpiece by the author Matt Haig. The story aligns with its title but is still quite different. An unexpected, nail-biting story that will keep you hooked until the last page.
The story revolves around Nora Seed, a young woman trapped in the monotony of her life, coping with feelings of inadequacy and failure. One night she ends her misery by committing suicide. As luck would have it, she chooses to end her life at precisely midnight, with the clock striking midnight. However, there is a twist here.
Nora wakes up and finds herself in a deserted but enchanting library ‘The Midnight Library’ where she needs to make some tough choices between life and death. Nora is met with a snobbish but slightly helpful librarian who tells her the library’s rules.
The librarian explains that Nora is currently stranded in a realm between life and death, and the library is filled with books that unveil countless parallel lives she could have lived. Here, Nora makes amends with her past regrets and unfulfilled desires by choosing a life of her choice. Every book holds a story about an alternate life she could have led. If she finds a perfect life from the books that hold countless parallel lives, she can live it and undo her suicide.
‘Between life and death, there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices…Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
Apprehensive and clueless about this situation, Nora decides to give this arrangement a try. One thing was for sure, she was neither alive nor dead and she needed to choose one side as soon as possible. In this alternate realm with a thousand different possibilities of choosing a perfect life, Nora starts to live her version of a perfect life one after the other. As she navigates through hundreds of different lives, she always encounters some form of leading her to return to the Midnight Library to choose another life.
Nora realises that what she had always imagined to be perfect was filled with compromises, and bad experiences like any other life would have. So, what did she want? Her chosen life was as demanding as the one she gave up. Each had their pros and cons. The more she ran away from each life, the more she realized that there is nothing called a perfect life. Nora’s enchanting journey of self-discovery reveals the essence of what truly matters in life.
Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.
The author Matt Haig transforms a beautiful subject into a magical world of books and life. This book will take you through multiple dimensions of your life and its endless opportunities. Backed by theories of multiple realms and quantum physics, Haig intelligently parallels the librarian to our mind and soul guiding us through the challenging choices life presents.
The characters are interesting with bold personalities. The plot has multiple twists and turns leading the readers to hang on to the story to know more.
So, whatever exists between universes is most likely not a library, but that is the easiest way for me to understand it. I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is.
Although this is a story about Nora, the author has successfully managed to prompt the readers to reflect on their own life choices, regrets, and failures. Haig sheds light on an important subject i.e. mental health.
We’ve all thought, at least once, “I wish I lived the life I dreamed of.” And if what we have currently, is not in alignment with our expectations, the flight response is stronger. The book emphasizes the importance of making correct choices to improve our current lives rather than just dreaming of a perfect life.
When I chose to read this book solely based on its entertaining title, I had no idea what unusual story awaited me. I was completely enchanted by the author’s imagination and style of writing.
What happens to Nora eventually? Does she find a perfect life for herself?
Read the book to find out!
Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function.
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