THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY – MATT HAIG

avukatahmetozdemir
May 24
8 min read

MY COMMENTS :

Written by author Matt Haig, the work tells the story of a young woman named Nora who attempts suicide and whose life changes as a result of the events she experiences before her death in a surreal environment called the Midnight Library.

The main character, who lives an ordinary and aimless life, feels very weak to hold on to life when one day he sees his cat, the only living creature he loves, dead. When he goes home, he attempts to commit suicide by finishing a box of pills. However, he goes to a place where he thinks he is dead and falls into a surreal library between life and death. The main character, who lives in the mind of Mrs. Elm, the high school librarian, as the director of the library, begins to live his possible lives one by one in this library where all his possible lives are located with his regrets in his life. In these lives, he has lived many options such as being a famous rock star, a polar explorer, a National Geographic photographer, a medal-winning swimmer, an academic writer specializing in philosophy.

In order to stay and die in one of those lives, she must have no regrets there. After dozens of experiences, Nora still cannot find the most suitable place for herself, and after a while she feels even more helpless. However, she finally decides that the most valuable life is her current one. In this process, she realizes both the value of the people in her life, the value she should give them, and many important lessons.

In addition, if Nora died in one of her possible lives, she would never be able to come to the library again and her life would end. Despite this, the main character, after all those experiences, chose the root life, which is one of the most important messages of the work, that is, the survival that caused her to attempt suicide in the first place. The reason for this is that her belief that we can make a lot of changes in our own lives with every decision we make in daily life is fixed as a result of experiences. One of the main reasons why she does not feel like she belongs in any of the other possible lives is that she does not feel like she belongs there because she could not reach the position she is in in those lives with her current state.

Therefore, while the work contains strong philosophical messages, it also gives the impression of a novelized version of personal development books in terms of the messages it conveys, from some excerpts.

The Library, which gives its name to the book, is one of the details that should be noted as an element that also reminds us of the Purgatory layer in Dante's Divine Comedy or the concept of Purgatory in other celestial religions. However, it should be noted that it is not possible for a person who is not dead to be in the Purgatory of the Divine Comedy. The people who come to the Library are neither dead nor fully alive in the worldly sense.

As a result, the work can be considered as one of the novels that contains important messages from beginning to end and manages to keep the reader engaged with a strong plot.

MY QUOTATIONS(*) :

It is not possible for me to be everything I want to be, to live all the life I want to live.
But what creates us is pressure. At first you are coal, and thanks to pressure you become diamond. He did not say that coal and diamond are both carbon, but that coal is such an impure carbon that it cannot turn into diamond under any pressure. Scientifically, if you were coal you would remain coal. Maybe that was the real lesson to be learned from life.
Every book gives you the chance to live a different life that you could have lived. You see what your life would be like now if you had made different choices…
The more possibilities there are, the more lives you have. There are lives in which you make different choices.
To better describe it, I would say it's an in-between place. Not life. Not death. Not the real world in the traditional sense. But not a dream either. Neither one nor the other. In short, just the Midnight Library.
People were like cities. You didn't hate the whole city just because it had some bad aspects. It might have some parts you didn't like, a few dangerous backstreets and neighborhoods, but the good aspects were what made a city worth living in.
“ Want ,” he said in a measured voice, “ is an interesting word. It describes lack. Sometimes we fill the void with something else, and the original desire disappears altogether. Maybe your problem isn’t wanting, it’s lack. Maybe there’s a life you really want .”
Nora said, “ Librarians are knowledgeable. They point you to the right books. The right places .” Miss Elm said, “ Absolutely. But you have to know what you like, too. You have to know what to type into that metaphorical search bar. Sometimes you have to try a few things out beforehand to get it right. ”
“ Those who have resilience are no different from anyone else ,” Nora said. “ The only difference is that they have a goal in mind and are determined to achieve it. Resilience is the ability to maintain focus in a life where our attention is easily distracted. ”
The basis of freedom is disobedience. Those who obey will only become slaves.
Being a part of nature meant being a part of the will to live.
Perhaps even those who lived the most seemingly intense and worthwhile lives ultimately felt this way. There were a few miracles and beauties amidst the acres of disappointment, monotony, pain, and competition.
Absolute fame meant reaching a level where you would be seen as a hero, genius, or god with minimal effort.
If we could understand that there is no way of life that would make us immune to pain, everything would be much easier. That pain is part of the nature of happiness. That one cannot exist without the other. But we cannot live in pure happiness forever in any life. Thinking that such a life could exist only increases our unhappiness in the life we live.
“ If you want to win at chess, you have to understand one thing ,” said Miss Elm . “ And this is what you have to understand: The game is not over until it is over. It is not over if you have only one pawn left. Even if you are a pawn, which we all are, you must never forget that the pawn is the most magical piece. It may seem like a tiny and ordinary thing, but it is not. Because no pawn is just a pawn. Every pawn is a queen waiting to emerge from its cocoon. ”
“ Compassion is the basis of morality ,” the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said on a good day.
According to Nora, there were three kinds of silence in relationships. Of course, the passive-aggressive silence, the I-don't-have-anything-to-talk-about silence, and then there was the kind of silence she and Eduardo had achieved. The silence of not having to talk. Just being together, togetherness. Like when you're not bothered by being silent when you're alone.
You didn't have to like every aspect of a life to continue experiencing it. It was enough to hold on to the idea that there was a life you would enjoy. Similarly, liking a life didn't mean you had to stay in it. But you could stay in a life you couldn't imagine being better at indefinitely, and yet, paradoxically, as each life you tried expanded your imagination a little more, it became easier to imagine something better as the number of lives you experienced increased.
He realized that he wanted to end his life not because he was in pain, but because he had convinced himself that there was no way to relieve the pain. This was both what created depression and the difference between fear and despair.
“ We only know what we can perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately what we can perceive. It's not what you look at, it's what you see that matters .”
Nora had now realized that no matter how honest you are in life, people can only see things that are closest to their own reality.
The real problem is not the lives we regret not having lived. The problem is regret itself. We don't have to listen to every piece of music ever made to understand music.

MY EVALUATIONS:

Subject : The work tells the story of a young woman named Nora who attempts suicide and whose life changes as a result of the events she experiences before her death in a surreal environment called the Midnight Library.

Style: The author has managed to construct the plot, which is one of the requirements of the novel genre, in an impressive way thanks to his simple narration and generally short sentence structures. Thanks to the style, the messages that are intended to be given can be clearly understood and internalized by all readers.

Originality : The work definitely deserves to be counted among the truly original novels in terms of its subject matter. Both the philosophical meanings it contains and the extraordinary foundation of the fictional structure more than meet the requirements of this element.

Character : The character scheme in the work has been careful to avoid unnecessary character clutter from the beginning to the end. Nevertheless, by the end of the work, many readers do not remember more than 3 or 4 characters. Nora's brother Joe, her father, her mother, her ex-boyfriend Dan and of course the library director Mrs. Elm are at the forefront of these. Although this may seem like a positive element at first glance, it creates a difficult effect for the messages given by the supporting characters to be remembered because the sections of the characters are very short. On the other hand, although some characters are used as supporting characters in the work, they manage to give impressive messages despite their short sections.

Fluency : The work is a book that can be read from beginning to end easily and in one go. For this reason, it should definitely be stated that it is a fluent book. It should also be stated that it is an engaging work. Only the feeling that the sections where the main character has continuous life experiences, especially in the middle sections of the book, have no purpose after a certain point should be stated as an element that makes the immersion stagnate for a short time.

General : In the evaluation made out of 10 according to the criteria stated above:

Subject: 8

Style: 8

Originality: 8.5

Character: 7.5

Fluency: 8

The overall average of the work, which received its scores, is 8 points . The work, by reaching the 8 threshold, shows that it is definitely among the novels that must be read. It can be evaluated as a one-to-one for novel lovers with its important life lessons and gripping story.

(*) : All parts under the title My Quotations:

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

Author : Matt Haig

Publisher : Domingo Publishing

Edition : 22nd Edition – August 2023

The photo used on the cover was used as a quote from the book.

Comments