Sep 08, 2009 05:43 PM
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THE LOVELY BONESBy Alice Sebold In the recently concluded Delhi Book Fair at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, I met an American old man who was interested in story books which were read by Indian children.
Perhaps he was looking for Indian children’s story books and wanted to take them back home for his grand children. He handed over (or gifted) me a book titled “The Lovely Bones” written by Alice Sebold a few years ago. Although I was not very keen in reading this book in the first instance, I did not want to disappoint the gift of that American Old man and started reading it. After I got an invitation to write a review in my mail today, I thought to write a few lines on this latest book I read.
The book is about the abduction and murder of a young girl. But consider that the bones of ''The Lovely Bones'' belong not to the victim but to an abstract and quite positive idea – namely, that bones are the structure on which living things are built. It takes a certain daring to write a book narrated by someone who's dead. Not only dead but murdered, and not only murdered but murdered at the age of 14. Susie Salmon is in heaven. And, she's looking down – but with a fishy eye. All is not well in the world Susie has left behind. Her grief-stricken mother has an inappropriate fling and flees to California.
Her distraught father attacks her best friend, Clarissa, in the cornfield where Susie was murdered, mistaking Clarissa for Mr. Harvey, the creep who lives nearby. Mr. Salmon suspects – and we know – that Mr. Harvey is the murderer. But the police fail to solve the crime and Mr. Harvey leaves town, turning up here and there over the years, observed by Susie but, alas, rarely by the authorities. I won't reveal whether he's caught. Why did Mr. Harvey kill Susie Salmon?
Sebold, perhaps wisely, stays away from this tricky territory, though his mother's early abandonment of him seems to be a contributing factor. Susie's chilling description of the crime opens the novel. In brief, dispassionate sentences she tells us how Mr. Harvey lured her into his secret cellar under the cornfield, how she fought back, how ''hard-as-I-could was not hard enough.'' ''I wept, '' she writes. ''I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel.'' It's a difficult first chapter, and a mesmerizing one.
Susie gradually realizes she's not actually in heaven yet. ''How do you make the switch?'' she asks Franny when she realizes she's only halfway there. ''It's not as easy as you might think, '' Franny replies. ''You have to stop desiring certain answers. . . . you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on earth.'' But Susie's not ready to do that. Not until she finally sees something in her family that gives the novel both its title and its resolution: ''These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone.'' And when Susie is finally free, so are those who loved her. ''When the dead are done with the living, '' Franny tells Susie, ''the living can go on to other things.'' -------- Pradeep Ratnaparkhi
