Review By Harsimran Kaur
Grace Winters sits on an inconsequential sofa, unsettled and uninhabited. She has nothing to lose now, and what once belonged to her is lost. Her chagrin towards life is quite similar to the infinite paramouncy of the bird perched on the oak tree nestled by bulbous flowers and pubescent leaves, albeit flaps her wings raucously to not able to protect its nest; its posture drops and the listlessness impinges the impassiveness of its character.
The infinites around her seem desolate; the awakening now resolute to be untempered with. She sits and then recklessly stands due to the vein thrombosis prodding her legs. But, she prefers to sit more as it’s the only uninterruptable movement; a corporal stagnancy she lives by.
Out of the Blue, something changes her life!
An imperceptible flagellum of light protuberates to awaken Grace from the existential shudder. She turns into a sonorous sentient from a stentorious soloist.
What was that light? How did she get into the scintillate waterbed illuminated by the armory of light pointers? Was it all an eldritch; the panorama expanding into darkness?
Grace feels like an eccentric earthling endangered by paranormal parquet! A retired Mathematics teacher, she lives an unpleasant life, drenched in guilt of letting her son go out in the rusty rain; she loses him forever in an accident and in the years ahead, loses her husband to ‘death’. Grief settles in life as an ‘appalling mistrust’, as a battle-axe against ‘what is life’s truth’? She searches for ‘truth’ but finds none, everything seems an illusion; grief and despondency takes over. Don’t we often ask ourselves?
Does sorrow ever goes away?
Can the possibility to be happy again a recherché?
Does life only invite vague forebodings; the pleasant stuck up in the heavens playing a schadenfreude?
WAIT! What if the power, in muted silence within us, awakens to embrace the impossible, dues ex machina?
The story of our life then beats the IMPOSSIBLE!
‘The Life Impossible’ by Matt Haig is about the life still not lived. We give all our time in life to act the ‘pique’, bear resentments and play the ostinato of opulent distress; barging uncontrollably into the desultory mind of ‘this is what is destined for me’ and ‘I am always on life’s edge’. But, one day you see life change to help you conquer the biting wind as it does for Grace Winters. A letter received from an acquaintance, ‘Christina’ makes Grace travel from Lincoln to Ibiza to find the cause of Christina’s death. Ibiza is an el dorado of the echinoderm. It is a prized possession of the ‘Goats’, ‘Snakes’ and the ‘panicle of flowers’ that is now being sabotaged for economic aggrandizement.
Why is Grace here? Is she the chosen one to the lead the sine qua non? Can the sacred rock, ‘Es Vedra’ be saved from the hubristic pride of the miscreants who wish to drain it out of its energy? Around the lop-sided terrains and the hustle-bustle of tourists; amidst the beach’s sunset and the fandango dance, she comes across a light almost like an invigorating trance that penetrates her mortified soul laden with comeuppance.
What is this illumination?A cloud cuckoo land, or the tales around it a ‘cock and bull story’? Or is it a form of healing to coalesce the inner turmoil breeding as a putrefying flesh; now is the time to break the corrugated adhesions—the ‘truth’ about living.
What is this ‘truth’? The possible breaths need not be counted waiting for ‘death’ but every breath should serve a purpose—to heal one’s soul through constant gratification and serving the human kind, the natural habitat, and be the cotyledon to let others grow with you. The conceited pride resting within us is a culvert of braised cracks; the wound always open and disregarded.
Have we ever tried to look inside us? We also carry this formidable power to break the lesion grotesquely punctured in the falsehood of assumptions. Conquering the irreparability and the mystic hangdog, we now lead a life what we thought of as an impossible defeatist. The question then comes ‘how to identify this power’? Is it an illusionist or a magic stick conjuring tricks to lead us to our purpose? The power is the ‘truth’ that responds to the evanescence of life, mirrors to the surrendering process and rises up to ‘acceptance’ to initiate healing.
Magical and revivifying, ‘The Life Impossible’ is Grace’s journey from being the old rickety vehicle to driving her mind in compos merits. She meets Alberto, once a maritime biologist, to be then touched by the illuminating light. Both convene on a path to help preserve the beauty and habitat of Ibiza and fight the bad elements that are deprived it of its glory and sanctity.
The book has it all to make the mind a powerful companion to help heal wounds and thereby find anthropomorphism in every particle on this planet Earth. These connections are the raison d’etre to find new perspectives; past never leaves us but accepting the analogy of it opens vast dimensions.
TAKE AWAY
Revelatory and full of intrigue!