This was a lovely gift from Kenny @BooksActually in Singapore. Kenny is also responsible for my new love – the author Nevil Shute.
An illness separates a couple. Through close to 400 pages, and a time span of 17 years, at each turn I clung on to the desperate hope that their love survives the passage of time. I felt nauseous and full of anxiety; some books are too close to the heart of ourselves. I felt so much for Polly who was stripped of everything – identity, familiarity, love, – all things that are minted in a specific moment. I broke down and had to ask Kenny if it ends well.
The Frank that Polly returns to, is not the same Frank of 17 years ago. Things change. Life, love, ethos- all of it. It is something we do not realise even though we are told countless times, in various ways, that nothing stays the same. We think “love is timeless, forever.” We believe it. But in reality, what is ‘immortalized’ are events of the past and not of the future. But that is not to say that love which has transpired in the past is not real; on the contrary: not only is it real but we can keep it, for it is held onto forever from within.
“‘When someone dies, there’s no one to share your memories anymore. They become like secrets. A secret life. No one knows you lived it, but you. I didn’t want it to be that way.’ He knocked on the yearbook, now pressed to his chest. ‘This is proof. It’s not a secret. It all happened.’ He scowled. ‘Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?’”
“Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure.”
“She asked him what he had imagined. ‘The same place. But a different time,’ he said. ‘I guess that makes it a different place.’”
JohannaAirth 