500 pages...not yet completed the book,2.05 am and I'ii just add one more facetious detail, I have not slept yesterday at all, please no exaggeration, and the day before yesterday my sleep was just like the sleep of a mother who has to attend an impetuous new born child every now and then .So you can safely presume that there is an avalanche of thoughts, ideas in my mind with the fiendish desire, now being fulfilled beyond measure, to create ruptures in my heavenly sleep. Now there is also an irony, though I am distressed that it has considerably affected my efficiency at work which I flagrantly abhor, notwithstanding the sordid state of my mind due to inadequate sleep, I have been seized by a bolt of exultation and incomprehensible happiness. This book dirties it's pages with every aspect of life. Inextricable confusion, lamentable naïveté, inexplicable complexities, truths arrived by gut, untruths by a legitimate experience, befuddling philosophies all condensed into 500 pages which we call life. Up till now the books I have read, I am sure the editor would have replaced a word like talkative with loquacious, middle class with bourgeois to provide an apparently pedestrian English an air of grandiose. And it deceptively provides the writer a tunkard of individuality. But here I found a writer whose writing has come seamlessly, effortlessly. He is a writer who knows the subtle difference between contentment and satisfaction. He has written the book in lucid, plain English and he has only used seemingly difficult words to my embarrassingly limited knowledge of this funny language when the need arisen. I always felt a good book is which helps the reader to articulate the obscure meanings of the spirit. A good book is a book which turns an anecdote or a seemingly frivolous situation into an event crowded with battles of idiosyncrasies, which uncovers the prejudices concealed within the obscenity of small talk, which provides indisputable evidence whether a man has been obsequious to past circumstances or conditioning or has he been the one who has carried his fate in his clenched fists or has been ironically both which is often the case, I want to conclude with etc. By my definition of good book, this is surely a classic whose writing is a piece of art or an irresistible delicacy that needs to be tasted, chewed and devoured. I have not read the book once or twice but thrice because the writing was detailed, impressive, splendid, wondrous and a word that I have never used for other books mystical. A famous artist said" god is in the details" and this book justifies that even without any attempt to justify it.
Now it has been long that I have completed the book and I have been completely mesmerised by the book, its elegant, wondrous writing. It is an autobiographical novel. Every time I read this book I discover something new and peeved at myself that how did I miss it. It is about Philip Carey adopted as a child by a fanatical Christian family. His pedantic mind overemphasises the minor details and adheres fanatically to biblical knowledge accompanying an outrageous violation to common sense which finally throws him into a typhoon of disillusionment. This compels him to pose some ominous intimidating questions to long held beliefs, dogmas and he finally extricates himself from religious chauvinism, which, made him conceive a dream to be a vicar. This disillusionment, escape makes him reconsiders his decisions and goals and then actually the story starts with his frustration, chagrin, his indefatigable endeavour to find the purpose of his life, that makes him travel through Germany, France and back to London, his little encounters with man of letters, connoisseurs, aficionados, people tangled in a web of contradicting ideas, opinions and as a result becoming habituated to intellectual masturbation, his irrevocable, irresistible, inextricable platonic love for a philistine woman, and finally the ocean of unconditional love he falls into with another woman ,all these heaped on each other forming a pyramid reaching to a vertex when he finally uncovers the meaning of life.
If there is a list of books you have to read before you die, this will surely figure in the top ten.
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