The Midnight Library: trying on lives

what drew me into this book was its premise!

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

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 if you had made other choices … Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

quoted by Sylvia Plath of course.

Nora is about to choose to die. She enters into an endless expanse of a midnight library, where books with green covers hold parallel universes, and she may try on as many lives as she wishes, just like trying on clothes.

These decisions all branch off and build on each other, and one small decision leads to another, and roads lead to more roads. In one life, she could have trained to be an Olympic swimmer, and in another, performed rock music to 20,000 souls at São Paulo, and in yet another, a glaciologist facing off a polar bear in Svalbard.

My gripe with this book is that there are too many spoon-fed ideas of “the world is beautiful and full of opportunity” (stand by the ideas, but not the method of delivery). The stories are cut-outs, without build-up, texture, or complexity, simpler than middle school anthologies.

Depression is de-coupled from reality and re-built from the DSM, and all of the writing feels too logical and simplified, with Thoreau and Voltaire and Schrödinger thrown in for the highbrow. For readers who actually know a thing or two about these figures, it’s only disappointing. The idea of this temporal re-shuffling of the past could have been executed with SO much potential. This book has its moments but does not feed my soul.

Sad to say.