The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin Page A
Authors: Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin
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will need only a brief dip to send you leaping out from under your duvet and thence into anything other than the small suburban bedroom and freak show of a life depicted within its pages.
Malcolm Ede has stayed in bed for so long that his skin is as “white as aninstitution.” He is deprived of sunlight and drained of life. Weighing in at more than half a ton, he is pinned to the bed by an “umbrella of fat.” After deciding, for complex reasons, on his twenty-sixth birthday to simply never get out of bed again, he’s been there ever since. Cared for and fed by his hopelessly devoted mother, his dreamy dad, and his broken brother, he is the planet around which they orbit. A great big hot-air balloon of a planet.
Malcolm escapes his carapace of flesh in the end. But unless you want to be living in your parents’ bedroom at age forty-three, unless you want blisters and sores on parts of your body that you can’t even see, unless you fancy being unable to even meet your hands together to pray for escape, read this. Then get up, out of bed, right now. *
See also:
Ambition, too little • Lethargy • Read instead of live, tendency to
BEREAVEMENT
See:
Broken heart • Death of a loved one • Widowed, being • Yearning, general
BIOLOGICAL CLOCK TICKING
See:
Children, not having • Children, under pressure to have • Shelf, fear of being left on the
BIRTHDAY BLUES
Midnight’s Children
SALMAN RUSHDIE
S o you’re about to be one year older and you don’t like it at all. You may fear the loss of your looks (see: Vanity; Baldness). You may fear the loss of your health and marbles (see: Senile, going). Well, you’re not the only one (see: Aging, horror of; Old age, horror of). In fact, at this very moment, one million seventy-six thousand two hundred and eighty * other people on this planet are also experiencing the birthday blues. Just like Saleem Sinai, the hero of
Midnight’s Children
, who shares hisbirthday (midnight on August 15, 1947) with the birth of a newly independent India and one thousand others, so you too took your first breath on the same day in the same year as an awful lot of other people around the world.
You don’t have to believe in astrology (or magical realism) to see that you have a special connection to these people—just as Saleem’s life is yoked to the history of his country, and to the other “children of midnight” with whom he shares a strange telepathy and magical gifts. Think of it this way: it’s already an uncanny coincidence to be alive on this planet with anyone else at all, given how long the universe has been in existence and how long it is likely to remain so into the future. To think that there are other people born the
very same day, the very same year
—well, they’re practically your siblings! Doesn’t it make you want to rush out into the world and wish them all a happy birthday?
On the eve of your big day, tuck in to
Midnight’s Children
along with all the other birthday boys and girls your age. Raise your glass to your extended family. Experience, simultaneously, the vibrancy and color of this delightful novel, chuckle in tandem at its goofy humor and attention to the craziness of life. As you laugh, you will feel young again, together. Keep reading all night, as you used to do years ago. It’s a long novel. From over the top of the page, watch those blues turn pink with the dawn.
See also:
Dissatisfaction
BITTERNESS
Oroonoko
APHRA BEHN
I f you feel you have been dealt an unfair hand and deserve better, that everybody else but you has it easy, if you are outraged when things do not go your way, you may have succumbed to the scourge of bitterness. It may well be true that you were dealt a bad hand. But life is what we make it and nobody said it would be fair. Besides, people tend to shun bitter characters—in life as well as literature—as they exude anger and ill will. Unless you want to make your life even harder, we urge you to take a lesson from
Malcolm Ede has stayed in bed for so long that his skin is as “white as aninstitution.” He is deprived of sunlight and drained of life. Weighing in at more than half a ton, he is pinned to the bed by an “umbrella of fat.” After deciding, for complex reasons, on his twenty-sixth birthday to simply never get out of bed again, he’s been there ever since. Cared for and fed by his hopelessly devoted mother, his dreamy dad, and his broken brother, he is the planet around which they orbit. A great big hot-air balloon of a planet.
Malcolm escapes his carapace of flesh in the end. But unless you want to be living in your parents’ bedroom at age forty-three, unless you want blisters and sores on parts of your body that you can’t even see, unless you fancy being unable to even meet your hands together to pray for escape, read this. Then get up, out of bed, right now. *
See also:
Ambition, too little • Lethargy • Read instead of live, tendency to
BEREAVEMENT
See:
Broken heart • Death of a loved one • Widowed, being • Yearning, general
BIOLOGICAL CLOCK TICKING
See:
Children, not having • Children, under pressure to have • Shelf, fear of being left on the
BIRTHDAY BLUES
Midnight’s Children
SALMAN RUSHDIE
S o you’re about to be one year older and you don’t like it at all. You may fear the loss of your looks (see: Vanity; Baldness). You may fear the loss of your health and marbles (see: Senile, going). Well, you’re not the only one (see: Aging, horror of; Old age, horror of). In fact, at this very moment, one million seventy-six thousand two hundred and eighty * other people on this planet are also experiencing the birthday blues. Just like Saleem Sinai, the hero of
Midnight’s Children
, who shares hisbirthday (midnight on August 15, 1947) with the birth of a newly independent India and one thousand others, so you too took your first breath on the same day in the same year as an awful lot of other people around the world.
You don’t have to believe in astrology (or magical realism) to see that you have a special connection to these people—just as Saleem’s life is yoked to the history of his country, and to the other “children of midnight” with whom he shares a strange telepathy and magical gifts. Think of it this way: it’s already an uncanny coincidence to be alive on this planet with anyone else at all, given how long the universe has been in existence and how long it is likely to remain so into the future. To think that there are other people born the
very same day, the very same year
—well, they’re practically your siblings! Doesn’t it make you want to rush out into the world and wish them all a happy birthday?
On the eve of your big day, tuck in to
Midnight’s Children
along with all the other birthday boys and girls your age. Raise your glass to your extended family. Experience, simultaneously, the vibrancy and color of this delightful novel, chuckle in tandem at its goofy humor and attention to the craziness of life. As you laugh, you will feel young again, together. Keep reading all night, as you used to do years ago. It’s a long novel. From over the top of the page, watch those blues turn pink with the dawn.
See also:
Dissatisfaction
BITTERNESS
Oroonoko
APHRA BEHN
I f you feel you have been dealt an unfair hand and deserve better, that everybody else but you has it easy, if you are outraged when things do not go your way, you may have succumbed to the scourge of bitterness. It may well be true that you were dealt a bad hand. But life is what we make it and nobody said it would be fair. Besides, people tend to shun bitter characters—in life as well as literature—as they exude anger and ill will. Unless you want to make your life even harder, we urge you to take a lesson from
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