Death usually marks the end of a work of fiction; but Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones begins with death – the death of the protagonist, no less. Right at the beginning of the book, Susie Salmon introduces herself, and tells us that she’s been killed and is now in heaven. The novel, then, is a look at how Susie’s family copes with her death and how she watches over them, hoping that her killer gets caught. Sebold gives us a detailed description of the after-world, creating specific rules around what heaven means according to her. Sebold’s interpretation of heaven is an interesting one – a place where dead people can create a reality of things they really love. If what you love intersects with what someone else loves, you’ll meet that person in heaven.
Although Susie has found herself in heaven, her attachment to her family and her murder means that it will be difficult for her family to move on in the wake of her death too. In spite of the fact that Susie knows this, she hopes that her killer will be recognized and be given his comeuppance. Susie cannot remove herself from her life on Earth, as she lives with the people she is involved in – her family, her first crush, a girl she brushed accidentally while she was leaving Earth, and of course her murderer. There is nothing Susie can do except be a passive observer. Her unique involvement in the story allows the novel to be from the point of view of a first person narrator, as well as third person omniscient narrator.
The novel sucks you right from the beginning, with the heart-rendering descriptions of a family trying to cope with the death of a loved one, as well as the dead person’s observations of a life she’s not a part of anymore. The incidents are at once touching and comic – very apt of life itself. Sebold’s tone is quite artful, and she is successful in creating a family that we are bound to feel for. The characters are well drawn out and rarely do we find any shallowness in her portrayals. There are many characters, but Sebold gives almost all of them equal importance. Although a little lengthy, the book is quite a grasping read. I might want to nitpick about the last two chapters, which left me very dissatisfied with the close of the story – it almost felt as if Sebold had no idea what to do with it, and decided to finish it off in a hurry. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the book is not worth it. More than likely, you’ve not read a book with this premise, so I’d recommend you give it a shot.
I am really curious about the Peter Jackson film-version of the book to be out soon. I usually don’t recommend books be changed for films, but in this case, I wouldn’t mind if he tweaked the end for the movie audiences.
It’s very rare that I read and enjoy a book like Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag. My mother often reminds me how I kept badgering both my parents to tell me stories. And I’d demand new ones – not finding solace in the familiarity of a story told over and over again, like some other children might. That love for stories has not left my disposition. So when I pick up a work of fiction, I am looking to read a story – a new, fantastic tale. I love getting into the lives of other characters, watch them unabashedly and know that they’ll always be there, hidden under the shiny cover of a paperback. So when a book like Afternoon Raag doesn’t tell a story, but more or less meanders over descriptive passages, back to back, with no end or beginning, one would think a reader like me would be disappointed. And one would be wrong.


When you pick up a book to get into the groove of reading after a month-long reading hiatus, you want the book to slap you in the face, wake you up, and get excited about the activity of reading itself. But that’s only the best case scenario. With Monica Ali’s Brick Lane none of that happened. I started the book and I wondered every now and then, why I was still reading it and why I wasn’t keeping it down. I finished it to save face (from myself), but rest assured, what’s going to follow is not going to be pleasant.
There are so many books, and so little time to read. Maybe that’s why it’s quite difficult to read more than one book by the same author (unless you’re a die-hard fan of the writer). Avid readers usually read the most well-known book by an author. In Khaled Hosseini’s case, it has to be
A few pages into Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I knew that this would be one of my favorite books of all time. However, with a caveat. Unlike other “all time favorites,” I don’t think I’d re-read this book in the future. The reason for both those statements is the heart-wrenching subject-matter of the book. Centered around three women at three different time periods – Virginia Woolf in the 1920’s, Laura Brown in the 1950’s and Clarissa Vaughn in the late 1990’s – the book does not go beyond their routine for a day, yet manages to cinch the attraction to death and the curious grip that depression has on the characters. Death and depression – two words I’d use to describe the book, and I think those two words are enough to guess why I wouldn’t dare to touch the book again.



