Book of the Month series round#7
“Never forget you have two lives. The second begins when you understand that you only live once.”
My current book of choice is full of suspense and you can’t put it down until you finish reading all of its pages. I literally read through it in one sitting. That’s why I enjoy reading a good book; the excitement around the unknown, the feeling when you get that urge to keep going forward because you need to connect the dots in the storyline immediately. This is the best achievement a good book can provide to the reader.
Guillaume Musso is a French novelist, who is also one of the most popular contemporary French authors. I have never heard of him before, so L’Instant Present as the book I chose for my current pick, came to me as a surprise. This book was translated into more than 40 languages. It was originally published in 2015. I read its Hungarian copy, which only got translated this year, but in my later references, I will refer to it with its English title.
Musso is really good at maintaining tension, creating complex characters, and adding sensational twists to his novels that can be described as anything but predictable. It reminds us of Hitchcock, the master of unusual encounters. The author’s writing style is very captivating, he provides the perfect getaway for lovers of mysticism and romance.
So, what makes the story of This Very Instant become so good, you might ask.
Growing up in a toxic family, the protagonist, a young ER doctor, Arthur Costello inherits a lighthouse, the 24 Winds Lighthouse, which is owned by his family, if he promises not to set foot on the doorstep of the walled-in iron door. The story unfolds through this mystical plotline, a secret, few can resist, so obviously, Arthur breaks his promise too.
This marks the beginning of the tragedy of Arthur’s life; he can only live one day out of each year. By the time he realizes a year has passed again, he is older but not more experienced.
“What is happening is inconceivable yet true…”
After he got into this repetitive cycle he gets to know his grandfather, about whom everyone thought is dead, and Lisa, a girl who works in a bar in Manhattan to pay her way through acting school. The majority of the book is about Arthur and Lisa trying to navigate the complexity of their relationship, keeping in mind that while the man can live one day out of each year, the woman is waiting for him for the rest of the year. In New York, the city of unpredictability, they couple their destinies in order to escape from the traps set by the most ruthless of enemies: time.
Every time a cycle ends, Arthur vanishes into nothingness, then he randomly reappears in a totally different place, roughly a year later. This can be another district of New York or in a totally different country, France, but he never knows where he will land next: in a pleasant place or next to a corpse.
The emergence of chasing time in the plot can also be interpreted as a metaphor. Many of us can relate to this metaphor, as the most mundane source of concern: time passes. Day to day we feel life rushing past us; unnecessary meetings, too much time spent in traffic jams or crowded queues, public transport, scrolling through social media.
This plot besides being entertaining also reminded me of an interesting phenomenon. As we grow older, it can often feel like time goes by faster and faster. That 24 hours we have to allocate into a day seems less and less enough.
I recently have read an interesting article about this experience. Are you familiar with this feeling, when days are just passing you by? What if I say that this feeling has more to do with reality than we might think and the time actually does speed up? This quicken up of subjective time with age is documented by psychologists, but there is no common agreement on the cause.
Professor Adrian Bejan, in a published paper, presents an argument based on the physics of neural signal processing, where he hypothesizes that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, and this is what makes time “speed up” as we grow older.
As we age, he argues, the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increases — electrical signals must traverse greater distances, therefore signal processing takes more time. Moreover, aging causes our nerves to accumulate damage that provides resistance to the flow of electric signals, further slowing processing time. Focusing on visual perception, Bejan posits that slower processing times result in us perceiving fewer “frames-per-second”— more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. This is what leads to time passing more rapidly. When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images. Like a slow-motion camera that captures thousands of images per second, time appears to pass more slowly.
“Nothing stays the same it all gets crushed. It all gets broken. It all passes with time. Only the moment you’re in has any meaning.”
So what would you do if you inherited a lighthouse, like Arthur in the story? Would you open the walled-in iron door and face the curse? If you would, how would you react to the fact, that each of your next 24 years is reduced to 1 day? Would you change anything? Would you appreciate your surroundings more? Either way, only one thing remains the same: time passes.
“Your father was wrong: the biggest problem in life is not you can’t trust anyone, the biggest problem is that man’s only real enemy is himself.”
Overall, This Very Instant is by far the dizziest psychological thriller, I have read, with an unexpected, staggering ending and I recommend it to anyone who likes to delve into a good story.
Monsieur Musso, nous nous reverrons un jour ou l’autre!
