Curt's Read-Bag: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
By: Mark Haddon (Doubleday, 226 pp.)
Concerning: Autistic 15 year-old Christopher John Francis Boone writes a narrative of his attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor’s dog, setting him on an adventure and revealing secrets that test his mathematical mind's ability to cope.
Quote: “My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like, because my memory has a smelltrack which is like a soundtrack.”
Verdict: Highly readable - almost deceptively so. At first I wondered, once Haddon came up with the general plot and the voice of the narrator, if the book didn’t practically write itself. The book also features chapters of Christopher’s ideas about time and memory and the way the world works, and Haddon does an impressive job of conveying an autistic teenager’s point of view, and the way he uses math and science concepts to (imperfectly) make sense of his life. During the book he resolves to do some actions that, for a “normal” person, would be completely mundane, but for him, are arduous and terrifying, so the book has an unexpected “triumph-of-the-human-spirit” quality, despite some of its downbeat implications.
For further reading: Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant Motheless Brooklyn, in which the unlikely detective, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s Syndrome.
By: Mark Haddon (Doubleday, 226 pp.)
Concerning: Autistic 15 year-old Christopher John Francis Boone writes a narrative of his attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor’s dog, setting him on an adventure and revealing secrets that test his mathematical mind's ability to cope.
Quote: “My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like, because my memory has a smelltrack which is like a soundtrack.”
Verdict: Highly readable - almost deceptively so. At first I wondered, once Haddon came up with the general plot and the voice of the narrator, if the book didn’t practically write itself. The book also features chapters of Christopher’s ideas about time and memory and the way the world works, and Haddon does an impressive job of conveying an autistic teenager’s point of view, and the way he uses math and science concepts to (imperfectly) make sense of his life. During the book he resolves to do some actions that, for a “normal” person, would be completely mundane, but for him, are arduous and terrifying, so the book has an unexpected “triumph-of-the-human-spirit” quality, despite some of its downbeat implications.
For further reading: Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant Motheless Brooklyn, in which the unlikely detective, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s Syndrome.