Book review:)
Live a Little – the Book that Made Me Want to Live More
Beginning
Joanne Kathleen Rowling once said that something very magical can happen whence one reads a good book, and that unknown magic became known to me when I read the book – “Live a Little”.
“Live a Little” is a book by Howard Jacobson, a fine author with a fine perspective regarding the entire world and the mere humans with not so mere lives that reside within this world.
About the Author
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. His superpower is words for their impact lasts forever and ever. Henceforth leading him to win the Man Booker Prize Winner. For those who believe in zodiac signs, he is a Virgo born on 25th August.
Overview
The book is about two humans, very very old humans- Beryl Dusinbery and Shimi Carmelli. These two were perhaps star crossed lovers, who met each other through a club of the old, rich and elite.
Beryl was a woman in her 90s whose entire world was fading into nothingness because her memory is disintegrating. She was the most beautiful woman in her young age and in her old age as well, her children never loved her for she never loved anyone. Not even the many many husbands she married and the children she bore. For all Berly ever cared about was her words, she found immense beauty in words and people found immense beauty in her.
Shimi, an old man, and one of the only old eligible bachelors who unlike Beryl had a sharp memory but the kind he didn’t want. Memory of his childhood trauma, of his mother dying during war and his father dying due to war. The Second World War by the way. Both of them had never found love in their entire life of trauma, of sufferings and afflictions, a life full of sharp sharp pain. Shimi was too hurt by his parents dying too early and his brother abandoning him forever to ever love.
Alas when too little life was left in the both of them, they found each other to live the little life they’ve left along side each other.
Good Aspects
The book is nothing if full of wondrosity- oh the words, the quotes, the lives. This book will make you laugh and make you cry, if your emotions are wired like mine. This book is also one of the sole books ever to achieve the meaning of the title in its entirety- “Live a Little”. Beryl’s sarcasm and Shimi’s eloquence is to die for, or rather live a little for. The book is nothing if not an ocean full of values, a desert full of lessons, a forest full of emotions and a mountain reaching high levels of extra ordinary-ness. The values it teaches us are- live whatever moments that come your way, whenever they do. The lessons it teaches us are that even during the most struggling times of our life, we’ve to live and do so joyfully for each moment is worth savouring. Each moment in this book is raw with emotions- as mentioned before – the pain, the trauma and the unexpected love. Howard Jacobson (the author) really knows his way around words.
What I learnt from this book
This book taught me that pain is inevitable and so is it’s trauma but no one is incapable of a happy ending. For we see the two main characters suffer so much throughout their entire lives and then stumble upon each other. Happy ending is not a fairy tale, a terminological word out of some Never Land, but something that occurs after a long long time and is to be savoured in a short short while. The best lesson of all that this book taught me is – “She who wants a rose, must respect the thorn”. It means that if one wants to savour the beauty that is life, they shall have to accept it along with the thorns that come along with life.
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