Harsimran Kaur ON Aug 05, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW, TOO LATE BY COLLEEN HOOVER-FICTION
Rating: 4/5
Love can be a tyrannical beast. In fact it is! Doesn’t love carry the loathe of the repugnant past to ironically get settled in the ‘present’ as an anomaly; the perfect conscious with its imperfections only remembers ‘love’ as a played emotion. It’s never the same; love eludes us at times and then embraces in stupefaction. It is a refulgent light in flagrante delictoor a gawky, mean-spirited parasite. We start despising it if we receive in abundance, and cry a folly if bereft of it. But you know, ‘love’ breathes in us, sometimes so much that it is despicable enough to cut mountains of their crest—no apologies, only a rebarbative stance to walk over the left-over.
Is ‘love’ really a Machiavellian hunter in poweress of a fractured reality encased in a vision?
What happens if that vision breaks?
Do we really fall in love with a person or a version of how it should be?
If ‘Asa’ had realized that ‘love’ is not an intention to love but just to love wholly, he would have been a different person. He has a disturbed mind fiddling with a ‘patriotic love’ of a kind. Asa displays a consanguinity to a contorted past pillaging it on & off to covet his love for ‘Sloan’. He is a charade; a conceited drug dealer with an infallible desire to cut the ground under the feet if the winds unapologetically meddle in the flavor of his sanguinity with the empyrean. What is Sloan to him?—a plastered obsession arising from a bohrium mind. It is a ‘love’ miscalculated, misaligned and misbegotten; a kind of an idee fixe incanted to incarcerate the paradise Sloan longs to be in. Here ‘love’ is a beastly caricature of Asa’s disheveling coping mechanism chastened by an incorrigible childhood.
Asa in ‘Too Late’ by Colleen Hoover’ is a curmudgeon lover hanging on tragedies. So well said in the book,
‘And that’s where love finds you…. in the tragedies.’
Bang on! Most of us would agree. Sometimes love is born in the rancid trajectories of life where the priggish-self scrounges on the magnetism of its impenitence.
‘Sloan’ lives with a deniable truth, forever plundering her inner soul to free it of the wretched life she shares with Asa. She wants to escape and she must. Every day, she pulsates on a battlefield of Asa’s nebulous incursions; the aftermath resides in her as a caterwaul of repressed emotions bemoaning her bête noir destiny. Her love for Asa is full of crenellations and a cumulonimbus of bargaining necessities.
If the ‘power of love’ emboldens you, it also has the capacity to crush you. Colleen Hoover sets the stage on fire of an intense love ordained by lust, sex and an unparalleled dominion to control. But isn’t love also about setting free the insecurities that make a demon of us? In her latest book, ‘Too Late’, Hoover has appreciated love for its strength to fight the odds, and underscored its prevalence as a bleak and a hair-raising emotion.
‘Make love a companion to behold you, comfort you and protect you before ‘love’ in its incapacitation hoodwinks you.’
In the dilapidated ruins of incessant perfidy and bedeviling purloin, Asa and Sloan live in a house that is more of a wandering slaughter house. ‘Drugs’ and ‘Deuce’ dive in a deluge of deleterious dampnessfor the ‘King Asa’ to moan in glory, and ‘Sloan’ to live in subjugation of his intemperate love that finally becomes an imprecation for her.
One fine day, though, love enters as a frosty wind to cuddle the burning sheath of contempt and flounce. Luke, charming and effervescent, enters the house as an undercover agent to open the can of worms, to burst the illicit ‘drug’ paraphernalia. His instant love for Sloan is a risk he must take to free her from the hay-ridden bondage and the invective clutches of Asa. Luke and Sloan both fear of their growing impulses towards each other. Love can be confusing, isn’t it?—an emotion that glides in the selfless alleys streaming a sense of belonging and warmth, and can also be a perpetual killer of one’s sanctified existence.
Asa, Sloan, and Luke discover and interpret ‘Love’ as per their propensity to understand love. Asa’s dystopic presence intimidates Sloan but Luke is a lambent that brings sunshine back in Sloan’s life. Love is not about winning or losing. It’s a steering that is controlled by the susceptibility of each to maneuver it as per the prolificacy of a protracted vision.