A Love Story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common – a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?
I wonder if there is anyone left in the world that can be objective about John Green. And if there is, can they be objective about a John Green book about teens dying of cancer?
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
I didn’t want to read it as I’m not usually into sob-stories and this one was a sob-fest (I knew it after watching the movie). I’m not going to lie to you, the book is terribly sad. I suggest you don’t read it if you are unwell or depressed, but it raises some very deep philosophical issues about life, death, the universe and everything. It gives me a bit of hope that our young adults might not be scrambling their brains with screens all the time, but engaging with a beautifully written story with some challenging themes
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, ‘be happy Henry!’
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know
her dress upon my arm
but
they will not
give her back to me.
You want real hell? Try living with a so-called beautiful woman. It’s a mirage that turns into a total nightmare. If you have to have a woman, look for kindness. A sense of overall reality. – Charles Bukowski
Bukowski’s outward reputation was that of a brawling drunkard, and hard-ass, but much of that was a persona he cultivated through poetry readings, he was actually very sensitive and capable of deep love. His first love was Jane Cooney Baker, a woman ten years his senior, who died of alcoholism long before Bukowski passed away due to leukemia.
His poem For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough is as powerful a declaration of a man’s love for a woman as there is in all of poetry. Bukowski got married twice. First to a wealthy publisher’s daughter (who he married sight unseen before he was a famous poet) and finally to a woman he met at one of his poetry readings after he had completed his “research” of sleeping around for his novel Women.
Lange musst du leiden, kennend nicht was,
bis plötzlich aus gehässig erbissener Frucht
deines Leidens Geschmack eintritt in dir.
Und da liebst du schon fast das Gekostete. Keiner
redet dirs wieder aus
Rainer Maria Rilke, 10.3.1913, Paris
Gedichte 1906 bis 1926.
(Sammlung der verstreuten und nachgelassenen Gedichte aus den mittleren und späten Jahren.)
Well, if the thing is over, better it is for me,
The lad was ever a rover, loving and laughing free,
Far too clever a lover not to be having still
A lass in the town and a lass by the road and a lass by the farther hill —
Love on the field and love on the path and love in the woody glen —
(Lad, will I never see you, never your face again?)
There should be no despair for you
While nightly stars are burning;
While evening pours its silent dew,
And sunshine gilds the morning.
There should be no despair–though tears
May flow down like a river:
Are not the best beloved of years
Around your heart for ever?
They weep, you weep, it must be so;
Winds sigh as you are sighing,
And winter sheds its grief in snow
Where Autumn’s leaves are lying:
Yet, these revive, and from their fate
Your fate cannot be parted:
Then, journey on, if not elate,
Still, NEVER broken-hearted!
You’ve got another love
and I know it
Someone who adores you
just like me
Hanging on your words
like they were gold
Thinking that she understands
your soul
Poor Girl
just like me.
You’re breaking another heart
and I know it
And there’s nothing
I can do
If I try to tell her
what I know
She’ll misunderstand
and make me go
Poor Girl
just like me.
You’re going to leave her too
and I know it
She’ll never know
what made you go
She’ll cry and wonder
what went wrong
Then she’ll begin
to sing this song
Poor Girl
just like me.
If you haven’t read this book already, I recommend you find it and you read it. Even trying to summarize it for others will make you look like a total weirdo! This book here is sci-fi in all its glory – an alien price of super strength and regenerative abilities grows a pair of boobs and gets exiled and cut off from the throne. In his travels, he goes to a country where people live in trees where he is almost seduced by a lesbian who then wants to kill him/her. He escapes, gets captured as a slave, grows some limbs, gets a symbiotic evil twin, gets healed by people who can talk to rocks and then learns how to move time fast forward or very slow. He finds out that all the rulers of kingdoms are illusionists who can make others see them as something different and invent false memories of them and goes off to eradicate an entire nation. Then meets his twin, heals him and goes back to his initial sweetheart and they grow old together.
Did I lose you at the part where he grows soft and plump breasts above his rock-hard abdomen? Or where he goes into quick time and can move as fast as Quicksilver? Or where he grows a new arm from the middle of his neck and uses it to scratch his back?
I don’t think you’ve ever read a book like this (as I surely never did) and it will definitely keep you entertained for days!