Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Do you know what he sees?


He doesn’t like brown and yellow colors. He doesn’t like to be touched or hugged. He just can’t understand people. He likes dogs and Sherlock Holmes novels. He can play the minesweeper expert version in 99 seconds. He is gifted with an amazing logical thinking. He knows every prime number upto 7057.
This is the latest novel that I read. It's one of the masterpieces that gives you a totally new viewpoint of things, shows you how things look from the other side. The side which you never thought about often.
But here are some lines form Mark Haddon’s “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” - it’s in the form of a ‘murder mystery novel’ penned by Christopher John Francis Boone. World from the eyes of an autistic teenage boy.

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them”

“The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from Greek words µετα (which means from one place to another) and Φερειν (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means the word metaphor is a metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.”

“I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But this is not because I am a good person. It is because I cannot tell lies.”
“A lie is when you say something happened which didn’t happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things that didn’t happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn’t happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn’t happen.”

The way in which the people around the boy have adjusted to his ways is endearing. How everything in the parents’ life revolve around him, his likes, his way of telling them “I love you” and so on complement the simple and at times funny narrative.
You can listen to an extract here. But as always only reading the book would do it complete justice.