Animated Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

As the name suggests, a Paper Town is a non-existent, phantom and fake town, as if made of paper.

The literal meaning of the term ‘Paper Town’ refers to a metaphorical name given to a fake place that has been embedded in a map by the map’s creator, in order to protect the copyright for their map. Sometimes these are called as the ‘copyright traps’. People and companies that create or design maps, typically insert one or multiple Paper Towns in their maps, so that if someone steals, copies or plagiarizes their map, they will be instantly caught, because, a Paper Town has no real existence after all.

This novel, Paper Towns by John Green, brings into action, an animating storyscape set forth in a town zigzagging along the city streets of Florida and featuring a bunch of interesting characters, primarily a batch of school-going teenyboppers studying in Winter Park High School and about to finish their school years.

The novel is an invigorating work of fiction, mainly combining the themes of mystery, young adulthood, romance and Bildungsroman, which refers to ‘a progressive spiritual transformation or a series of major internal shifts in a character’.

In this case, this character is Quentin. The novel pronounces itself with a series of events that occur in the life of the protagonist character named Quentin, thereby, bringing out this transformative inner shift within him.

This boy, named Quentin Jacobsen, known by his buddies as ‘Q’, is a high-school going boy who seems to have an infatuating crush on a girl named Margo Roth Speigelman.

Quentin loved all-things Margo, and Margo loved all things adventures and mysteries.

However, Margo, who loved adventures and mysteries, one day disappeared all of a sudden, turning into a mystery herself, as she left a series of clues for Quentin to be able to solve the mystery and discover her. And Quentin devoted himself to solving this mystery, the mystery of the lost paper girl.

The trove of clues included a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass with lines of the poem The Song of Myself, highlighted with a coloured highlighter.

The character of Quentin is seen in the novel to be clutching the book of poetry with him at all times, hunched and steeped over the collected clues, wandering his way through the city streets and abandoned ruins, jutting the best of his brains studying maps and browsing a reference encyclopedia managed by his friend and classmate Radar.

In addition to Radar, the circle of his closest friends included a boy named Ben and a girl named Lacey.
The three of them left no stone unturned to decipher the clues left by Margo, and by the end, this happens!

Together with Ben, Radar and Lacey, Quentin sped off in his minivan, driving to a paper town named Agloe, in the most unusual and strange manner, on the day of their school’s graduation and farewell ceremony.

However, not until the end of this search was he able to realize that he wasn’t actually searching her, rather all this time he had been searching an idea, the idea he thought was her, but it wasn’t.

Apparently, the image he had for her was as fake as the idea of a paper town,
and the moment this image was shattered, his attraction and fascination for Margo eventually began to evaporate and fall away, collapsing and crumbling like balls of crumpled paper, an illusory fallacy breaking apart…It was not the love that was breaking apart but rather what he thought and understood to be the concept of ‘love’.

Another interesting scenario that the book depicts, is how seeking to discover his dear friend Margo, Quentin immersed himself in reading over and over the highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s poetry, deciphering, interpreting and trying to make sense, of what possible clue was Margo leaving, while highlighting these lines of poetry.

But as he realized in the end, all the interpretations still and all, were about who he was and how he thought, more than who Margo was and what she thought. Learning which, he is depicted in the book to be pondering over this insight: That, the way we think about the other person reveals more about who we are than about who the other person is.

The novel is divided into three main parts, which are titled as The Strings, The Grass and The Vessel respectively, each containing a number of chapters.

While the storyline begins with notes scurrying with a jovial nostalgia and plenty of cornball humour, by the end, it dissolves into an outpouring torrent of emotions, streaming, welling and shining with intense spiritual exuberance, leaving the readers with some profound insights to ponder and dwell into.

One such insight being the discrimination between an idea and the reality. Another being a realization, that not until we get to have something that we thought we desperately wanted, is that we come to know that we didn’t really want it in the first place. We wanted something else.
It was never the destination that mattered, it was the journey of the search. The journey is the way. The search is the finding. The means is the end.

The character of Quentin Jacobsen has been depicted to arrive at these understandings while navigating the span of this storyline…

By losing himself in the search of her, he ended up losing her but finding himself.

In the same spirit, when we lose ourselves to something which is greater than our personal identity, our limited paper towns, only then the journey itself marks the thrill of experience.

Wrapping up the review with a small poem…

 

This life is a great paper town,
and we, we are these little-little paper humans,
crumpled and crinkled,
waddling and fluttering,
amidst these paper towns,
trying to navigate through,
constantly getting pulled by invisible strings,
as if some teeny-tiny puppets,
relishing the bright golden sunlight of the golden green meadows,
desiring for a dream to last forever,
locked inside our own vessels,
but soon enough discovering our vessels cracking open,
and the illusion of our fallacies fading away…
which leaves us questioning and wondering,
the purpose of all of this, of all this seeking and running,
losing and finding, finding and losing it again,
wanting something and then all of a sudden not
wanting it anymore,
losing something, finding it and then wanting to lose it all over again
Life is a paper town and we are paper humans…
How fragile, how vulnerable,
and at the same time, how powerful, how impeccable
How illogical and disorderly,
and at the same time, how perfect, how mathematical!

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Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Every mystery has a beginning and an end.
And every mystery leads to the end of some or the other search.
While some mysteries lead to the hunt of a treasure or a secret, some others lead to an understanding or a realization, an insight or an observation.
In the same vein, some mysteries lead to the unfolding and revelation of something which causes us to wonder and wish, that it’d have been better if the pandora’s box of this mystery would have remained locked shut forever…because to glare at the revealed discovery, is probably too astronomical an appearance to assimilate all at once.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrson too is one of those mysteries that is as spine-chilling as intensely appaling.

It is a heart-thumping jigsaw puzzle sketched from a labyrinthine storyline of several interlinked mysteries, revolving mainly around the lives of the characters Mikael Blomkvist (a journalist and part editor of Millenium magazine), Lisbeth Salander (a clever hacker and a star-rated freelance researcher who works for a security company) and Vanger family consisting of hundreds of family members, who occupy the entire estate of Hedeby Island in Sweden.

The mystery number one reveals itself when Mikael writes and publishes an article about the financial corruption of a top-spot business empire owned by Wennerström. Followed by the release of this article in public, Mikael is sued with several false allegations that could be equally damaging to his reputation as to the sales of Millenium magazine which is partly owned by him. Like an abrupt flip-flop of events, Mikael gets himself embrolled and entangled in a lawsuit against the CEO of Wennerström business empire.

The mystery number two presents itself to Mikael in the form of a phone call. A phone call from a person named Dirch Frode, who is the official lawyer of an eighty-year old man named Henrik Vanger. Henrik Vanger is the owner of Vanger Corporation, which is one of the wealthiest and another top-spot business empires.

Henrik Vanger has been looking to hire Mikael for the job of solving two mysteries for him. These mysteries were linked to a series of events which occurred nearly forty years ago. One event concerned the strange disappearance of Henrik’s granddaughter Harriet, who was sixteen year old at the time when she disappeared all of a sudden 40 years ago.

Apparently, the mystery of her disappearance seemed to be interconnected with yet another mystery, which was the ‘The Case of The Pressed Flowers’. The 80-year old Henrik Vanger told Blomkvist that it was only his grandniece Harriet who used to gift him these framed flowers each year on his birthday. And so, receiving these flowers every year after her disappearance was a sign that indicated that someone knew this secret about Harriet and that someone was trying to torment him with these flowers - these flowers framed in portraits, wrapped as his birthday gifts and sent to him from various places and from an unknown sender....

He further told Mikael that it was his anticipation that Harriet didn’t only disappear just like that, but rather she was murdered, and that too by one of the members of the Vanger family. And he was almost certain of this suspicion.

And so, Mikael was hired for the job of solving these mysteries for Mister Vanger, in return of which, he’d be paid a mammoth sum, as well as provided some good evidence against Wennerström, which could help him drop out of the lawsuit.

This was meant to be a cold case, for which Mikael would stay away from the town, in a cottage in Hedeby Island for an year, in order to carry out a thorough research of all the members of Vanger family, concerning the mystery. Though, reluctant at first, Mikael agreed to take up the job on the thought that solving these cases would help him save his reputation and get him out of the Wennerström lawsuit.

As he began his research, Mikael discovered that most if not all the members of the Vanger family turned out to be somewhat strange, weird, unusually freaky, bizarre and aloof to the point of stirring his curious idiosyncrasy.

Overwhelmed by the information of his research, soon enough, he also hired an assistant to work with him on this mystery. The assistant was Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth was a freelance researcher who worked for Dragan Armansky, the CEO of Milton Security, a company which offered a variety of security-related products and services. Though seemingly introverted, socially-absent, hard-nosed, emotionally unresponsive and almost psychopathic as she appeared to be, but according to Armansky, she was one of the most brilliant, and gifted investigative researchers he had ever come across. This girl with a dragon tattoo perched in glaze on her shoulder…

Guess what, she was a genius hacker too…

Even Mikael, during their work, was surprised to notice her sharp photographic memory and her excellent research reports, that he couldn’t deny but only appreciate her brains even more.

However only, Lisbeth’s sharp brains hadn’t prevented her from getting labeled by the law as ‘psychologically disordered’ personality, the consequence of which was that her life was taken under the control of a guardianship agency, where, paradoxically, the guardian would exploit her dependance and reputation for their personal interests.

Lisbeth liked working with Mikael, because according to her, he was one of those persons who treated her like a human. She dedicated days and weeks and months to tracing the archives and researching the internet, trying to sew together the scattered clumps of mystery one way or the other…

Followed by a gigantic research work and a few startling clues, Mikael and Lisbeth arrive at a baffling discovery. A cruel reality of sadism, victimhood, cult superstition and criminal activity resulting from these tendencies.

As it turned out in the end, the criminal behind Harriet’s disappearance revealed to be none other than a member of Vanger’s family. Harriet’s own brother, Martin Vanger.

Martin was years ago initiated by their father Gottfried Vanger, who was possessed by a sadistic tendency to torture and murder women. Gottfried, who was Henrik’s brother’s son, was a man who hated women. And he in turn taught his son to hate women. This, led to a series of murders which Lisbeth and Mikael discovered while researching the mystery…

Martin is revealed to be a seriel murderer and criminal, who even had a private torture chamber where he tortured women, slaughtering and murdering them to bits and pieces.

But this is not all. The story cascades into a series of more stunning secrets and collapsing realities that unfold gradually.

The novel is a chilling psychological thriller that combines a murder mystery, the psychopathology of cultish sadism and plenty of financial tidbits. But it is also a story of one-sided love – the love that Lisbeth feels for Mikael but that which is an impossibility.

The novel is
not only entertaining
but absolutely thrilling
and more than anything else, whackingly heartbreaking.

The book was published posthumously in 2005 after author’s death in 2004, and was an instant bestseller internationally, This particular edition is an English-translated version, but the original novel was penned in Swedish language, the original title for which is ‘Men Who Hate Women’.

A drastic depiction of the horrible reality of a world sooted with pathological tendencies innate of human organism. The storyline also hits at the ugly consequences that result from twisted misinterpretations of religious scriptures. From a creative writer’s perspective, the book features a regular third-person narrative, with descriptions neither too bland nor too verbose. The dialogues are painted with a writing style that crisply highlights character-specific voice expressions, which seems to add a dramatic and immersive effect for the reader.

All in all, the book is one of the most intriguing works of crime fiction and psychological thrillers.

Thank you,
Neha
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Book Review: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Death.
Imagine what if death was a person. And this person could speak.
Imagine if you could hear it speak, and all of a sudden, it opened its mouth and began narrating to you, a story about a girl;
a girl who was a thief, a thief who stole books…

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, is a historical fiction novel. The novel is written in a third-person narrative. But even more interesting an aspect about this narrative is its narrator. The narrator here, is not a human. Rather, the narrator is ‘death’.

Yes!
In this novel, the narrator is none other than the character of Death.

Death narrates the story of a girl named Liesel Meminger. But the story is not only about this girl who relishes words and steals books. The story is also about a small street called Himmel Street, in a small town of Germany, precisely during the rule of Adolf Hitler, the Führer. The story is also about the people and the children and the families living in the boxlike houses sewn into the muddy snow blanketing this street. And the story is also about the tiny pockets of people who were like the subtle splashes of colours on the otherwise gloomy field smattered with ashy charcoal sky of dystopia and chalky-powder mountains of the rubble of war, these were the people who despite the terror blanching the veins of their hearts, liked to see people as people, transcending the boundary that was scribbled under the dictatorship of Hitler.

In simple words, the story features the setting of Nazi Germany, and it revolves around the time period of history when Adolf Hitler triggered the World War II between Nazis and Jews, upon the invasion of Poland.

The book comprises of eighty-eight chapters, divided in chunks among a prologue, an epilogue and ten central story parts.

Another noteworthy highlight of the book is that, it doesn’t only uses the common storytelling technique ‘story-within-a-story’, but also employs an intriguing approach called the ‘books-within-a-book’. Tucked within the chapters of the novel are two little story-sketchbooks, named as ‘The Standover Man’ and ‘The Word Shaker’ respectively.

In a writing style that is thoroughly poetic, almost musical and songlike, the author has embroidered into the book, the emotional gems of friendship, attachment, pain, separation, angst, fury, little joys, family, love, tragedy and above all these, the greatest law of life, that is mortality.

After witnessing her young brother die in her arms, Liesel was abandoned by her mother to a couple named Hans Hubermann and Rosa Hubermann, who would be her new foster parents. Hubermanns lived in a house located in a location named Himmel Street which nestled in a small town of Germany called Molching.

Hans was a painter and accordionist, whereas Rosa did the ironing of clothes for people living nearby. Liesel went to school, played soccer with the neighbourhood gang of kids, ate bread & peasoup that her mother cooked, helped her mother with the delivery of ironed clothes, strolled with her best friend Rudy and in the meantime, she engaged herself with reading the books that she had stolen.

She stole books from ice and fire, and sat in the basement of her house, unraveling the mysterious words printed in the rectangular-square lodgings of old paper.

The first book that she stole was The Grave-digger’s Handbook. She had stolen this black-and-silver pocket book from the ground of the graveyard while the grave-diggers were digging her brother’s grave. To Liesel, the book was not only a stolen treasure, but the last memory of her brother she could cherish, as well.

While this was but only a coincidence, her curiosity for deciphering words led her to steal some more, sometimes from the library of the mayor’s wife, who lived in a house on a slopey hilltop and sometimes, even from the fire set in the town square to commemorate Hitler’s birthday celebration. Yes! In those times, these German people liked to host their celebrations by burning books and papers in the bonfire!

While in her house, Liesel had still not forgotten the dead body of her brother slinging from her arms. Every time she slept, the nightmares of it shook her up and awake from her sleep. And so, to cure this, every day, her father began to teach her to read. They read from the books she had stolen. Often times she wondered that she learned more about words, reading and books from his father than her school where she was taught by an obnoxious Sister Maria who didn’t seem to believe that Liesel could ever read an alphabet. On special occasions, her father brought her books by trading some old used cigarette rolls with a gypsy in the city who took these in return for some money.

Liesel was having the good time of her childhood life.

Until one day, when her life took an unexpected turn…yes, yet another one…

A boy named Max, the son of his father’s old friend from army and a Jew knocked the door of their house to seek a shelter amidst all the outer atmosphere tussled with smoke, rubble and bloodshed of World War II. Hans and Rosa received Max with an open-hearted generosity, despite the heavy terror culminating in their hearts. As time went by, Liesel began to see in Max, her dead brother, only except that he was an elder one and that he was still alive.

Quite soon enough, Liesel grew fond of Max. While he remained in the frozen cold of their basement, camouflaged by several dropsheets and paint buckets, Liesel would often bring to him presents that would enable him to know about the external world, about what was going on in the nature outside. Presents like trashed newspapers with blank crosswords, fallen feathers, leaves, old buttons, candy wrappers, tiny stones and pinecones, of course in addition to her detailed descriptions about where she had discovered these items, and storylike descriptions of the sky, the weather outside…what people were doing, what was air like….things like that…

During this period of time, there was yet another thing going on, besides the various wars initiated by Hitler, and the parades of Jew prisoners. In the town where Liesel lived, there were air-raids, in which several tin-can planes would fire bombs in their street, and the people living there had to hide themselves in some deep underground basement if they were to save themselves.

During these air-raids, Liesel, along with her parents as well as with their neighbours, all the people would snuggle inside the basement of a house owned by a common neighbour Fiedlers.

It was during these times that Liesel began to read stories from the books she had stolen. The stories seemed to distract the people’s minds from extreme fear, misery and sorrow.

Liesel read to people during these times, she read to a neighbour Holtzapfel every day, she read to Max more often than not, and Max gave her the story sketchbooks he had created during all the time he had to remain in the dark basement.

Above and beyond all, Liesel was beginning to heal from her nightmares. The more she saw of Max, the more she realized that there was so much in common to both of them. And so, he kept creating sketchbooks and Liesel kept reading the stolen books.

But it is not for no other struggle that a struggle ends…it seems.

for, in one sudden gash of a moment, Death hovered above the street, loosened and extracted the souls, and took nearly everyone away….

but there was a girl who was left
alive
because when death arrived, it couldn’t find her
because at that time
the girl had been sitting in the basement
busy reading from a book
she had stolen

Death was puzzled,
it grinned and went away
wondering
until the right time then…

In the end, the book signs off with a reedy note that is a mixture of a sensation that is dreadfully numbingly terrorizing and warmly soothingly comforting.

The story is not exactly the one that will cause you to cry. The story is not either the one that will make you smile. Rather, the story is a bittersweet lyric rustling between the scales of melancholy and merriment, rolling between the gloom of terror and the glee of compassion, looming between the shadows of “mortal certainty of death” and “immortal uncertainty of life”.

A soupy swirl of feelings like these…
Life, what is life, it says!

And death, it watches a life named Liesel, it watches her as she falls in love with the thing called ‘words’, and then she hates this thing called ‘words’, and somewhere between this love and hate, she begins to write, because how after all, could she describe this contradictory bittersweetness of love and hate without this thing called words.

Words!

Signing off with a note, here are some words from the book uttered by death.

Death says,

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”

True enough!

Well, thank you!

Neha

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