The Midnight Library by Matt Haig | Book Review

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig was one of the most talked about books that won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2020. But as I had decided to steer clear of the overhyped contemporary books, I chose not to read this one.

The critical nitpicker inside me finally caved in, and when I started, I was in awe of this book! This was a psalm that I needed for most parts of my life. It is a philosophical book without being overtly didactic or sounding distant with heavy grammar and has an easy charm to keep you intact with the story.

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, lost and given up on life. She is dealing with loneliness, grief, and failure. But her wish to end her life lands her in a peculiar place, a midnight library with her school-time librarian, Mrs. Elm, yielding her the option to choose books from the shelves leading her to a different life. This library is a sort of transitionary space between life and death. The deal being that once Nora finds a perfect life, she may remain there and forget about her sad existence of the present. Now I may be suffering from the Loki syndrome and gobbling up anything to do with more timelines and branched-out lives, variants and versions that are quite in the season for me. But, assuring you, this one is as interesting and more emotionally riveting!

“…whatever exists between universes is most likely not a library, but that is the easiest way for me to understand it. That would be my hypothesis. I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is.”

Unsure as Nora, we delve into this journey with her to see if alternate decisions as a younger or wiser self could have altered her life. Altering would mean giving her a happier and a successful life. There are many lives where Nora sees professional success and in some, she is content at a personal level, but life has its own curveballs. A perfect life is alluring, or at least that is what is required to be understood while reading quotes from Thoreau and David Hume.  

“The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”

As the cover says, ‘one library, infinite lives’, this book explores the possibilities in these infinite lives for its protagonist. The book talks about regrets and loneliness, the two issues that we face in our times (or maybe it always existed but today, we feel the burden of it at a much-heightened scale.) Little anecdotes and references throughout the book uplift the mood and lean towards a positive disposition. One such perspective is to see life as a game of chess…with millions of possibilities. Or, understanding the difference between fear and despair. Yet the most worthy lesson is to value life, how hard or difficult it may seem but cherishing the fact that you get to live!

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

“This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile”