The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is one of those writers I am trying to keep track of. But this book has somehow was overlooked by myself until now.
An extract from the Goodreads.com synopsis:
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
I liked the story. It is a delicate, touching and at times frightening story of friendship, magic and fundemental truths that have nothing to do with magic.
The book also reminded me of myths about humans interacting with gods. There is this special quality, a measure of things a person is capable of knowing and remembering..
In some things it even reminded of myself, of my childood. The protagonist of the story says: "I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else". In certain periods of my growing this would be very true about myself too.
I liked that the protagonist is not supernaturally clever or brave, he is like children are beautiful but not-perfect in any "grown-up" way.
It is probably worth mentioning, that in this novel Gaiman has created a truly scary monster. The fear and disgust this monster embodies were very palpable and real to me. This one is probably the scariest monster Gaims ever created.
I liked the book.
Some quotes from the book.
“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."
“. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”
“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”
“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”
“I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.”
“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time."
“It's always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
“I thought, I'm going to die.
And, thinking that, I was determined to live.”