Everything can be beautiful with the right eyes and ears. Every genre of music. Every sorrow and every pleasure. Every inhale and exhale. Every guitar solo. Every voice. Every plant beside the tarmac.
If you find the above sentiment moving or thought-provoking, this may be a book you’ll like.
I’d missed Matt Haig’s popular blockbuster The Midnight Library, so when his The Life Impossible crossed my library path, it seemed like a good opportunity to check out his work.
The novel opens with a letter from Maurice, an ex-student who is lonely and suffering, to his math teacher Grace. In response, Grace tells him about her own experience working through similar issues, in depth. In extreme, detailed, book-length depth.
Grace is withdrawn and miserable, still processing the death of her son and husband over the past few years. An old friend leaves her a house in Ibiza, Spain; unadventurous Grace (of course) heads off to find how her friend died. Heavy hints of mystery are dropped right away.
The Spanish authorities are still investigating her death […]
[the taxi driver in Ibiza] ‘I know this house… One night I saw something crazy there’’There are things about this island…things that aren’t easily….explained’
From that point on, the book heads into more mystery, quirky characters, and alien forces. Turns out that an extraterrestrial force landed in the sea grass around Ibiza a century ago, and has since been working to improve the environment and the connectedness of all living things on earth.
For a supernatural being with enormous powers it is rather inefficient, one might note, since the environment has suffered its greatest ravages in the last 50 years and humans are probably less connected to each other and the environment than ever before. This alien’s actions are also oddly specific, focusing on Ibiza, ignoring the rest of the world, and objecting to the hotel/resort developers while apparently welcoming the hippies and tourists who utilize the hotels/resorts and whose trash and sewage also affects the environment. (This last is probably explained by the author’s own stay in Ibiza that prompted the book.)
The being consists of a blue light. The descriptions of it are throughly unoriginal.
A luminiscent thing […] A geometrically perfect sphere. […] A blue unlike any I had seen before. Not the blue of the sea, not quite, though the color shifted as much as the shape and form. […] glowing impossible blue […] indescribable blue.
Its plan of action (also very inefficient) is to pick the occasional Ibiza scuba diver and grant them extraordinary powers including
Telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and precognition.
as well as the less lofty ability to really really appreciate fresh-squeezed orange juice.
this was the most wonderful drink I had ever tasted. The competing but perfectly balanced sweetness and bitterness was as complex as the finest Zinfandel.
Grace was chosen because she is special, we are told many times. But how, exactly? In 72 years of her life, the only evidence of that specialness is that she once invited Christina over for Christmas. She doesn’t think she’s special, and nor does the reader, but to counter this skepticism, the novel has every character tell her over and over again that she is special.
[Rosella] Christina told me you are special.
[Christina] You are a special person. I always knew you were special.
[Alberto] But you are special.
[Art] you were the special one, Grace
There is much discussion of (and the use of the word) ‘feeling’.
A fleeting feeling came over me.
It felt like looking at a feeling.
It is hard to explain what I was feeling.
The writing style, as you see, is mostly in short incomplete sentences.
He gave the smallest of nods. Growled a little to himself. Then spoke to me in a gruff Spanglish.
which I didn’t find appealing, nor the analogies like
I felt indignation rise up like lava.
I was opened up like a broken radio.
The greatest failing in this novel, I thought, was the voice of Grace. She is 72, but often sounds like a petulant teenager. Her conversations with Alberto, her local guide into the alien sphere, have an oddly rom-com tone — initially irritable and adversarial, then warming — although there is no romance involved.
I turned away from him. “Literally no one says that.”
‘Literally no one’ is a very Twitter meme phrasing, rather unsuited to the tech-averse Grace.
Grace seems to be very sensitive about her 72-year-old body and appearance, until she is touched by the alien, after which she announces that she is no longer conscious of her body and appearance. Guilt, forgiveness, music, and math are also running threads, but I found none of them very captivating.
As for the hapless student Maurice whose letter prompted Grace’s recounting of her saga? She offers little to him except a series of platitudes. Her own experience working through grief, guilt and trauma is of little value to him, since her problems were resolved by supernatural forces in Ibiza that are obviously unavailable to him. The introduction of Maurice is thus an ineffective tool that adds a quite extraneous literary layer.
Many ‘meaningful’ statements are expressed.
We are made of elements.
We have the unbreakable and the eternal inside us.
We have the universe in our blood and bones.
I think this novel is intended for readers who are better connected to their unbreakable, eternal internal universe than I am.
The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig. Viking, 2024
Wonderful review. Loved the tongue-in-cheek humor with which the short-comings of the book have been mentioned!
Hi Susan, your review made me laugh. By coincidence, I also recently read The Life Impossible, because like you, I also missed Midnight Library! Was convinced I missed out on something! Anyway, I didn’t review The Life Impossible, partly because it didn’t make enough of an impression on me, I guess. It wasn’t an awful read, I finished it easily. I liked the depictions of the Ibiza landscapes, so at odds with the usual portrayal of this as a party place, for stag and hen nights and drunken revelry, esp amongst the working class Brits. But as you know, I don’t like or have much sympathy with surrealism, so the light touching ‘chosen’ people – very problematic, troubling notion in itself – didn’t do anything for me.
Oddly, for me, it was not so much Grace I didn’t enjoy, it was Alberto. He is supposed to be wise and special and so on, I guess, I didn’t have much time for him. I don’t think I was as critical as you were of the book, but having read your review, now I feel a lot more critical of it! (Chuckle!) I had just glossed over the ‘meaningful’ sentences, but yes, now that you mention it…it is rather irritatingly like Coelho’s rubbish, which I have just no tolerance for. I am anti-book burning but wouldn’t stir myself to save any Coelho’s books if they were burning…. mainly because I strongly dislike ‘meaningful’ sentences, the would-be profound, but actually, just sentimental tosh. And yes, there are all too many of the same in The Life Impossible.
Now I am wondering if it is even worth reading Midnight Library. Not dashing out to put it on my reserved list in the library.
Agree, Alberto was pretty useless and self-important too. Chuckling at your mention of Coelho — I’ve tried to read The Alchemist three times with no success. We must be hopelessly realistic 🙂
If you do make it to Midnight Library, do tell me what you think.
“the light touching ‘chosen’ people – very problematic, troubling notion in itself ” — could you expand on that? I thought it was silly, but why is it problematic?