Sometimes all it takes is another perspective to judge your life differently. And perhaps by rearranging the pieces of his existence, like pawns on a chessboard, new paths are traced and thus open up an infinity of possibilities.
Posted at 1:30 p.m.
“There is no right way to play, there are a lot of them. In chess, as in life, it may be the basis of everything,” writes Matt Haig in The Midnight Library.
This is what Nora discovers, a 35-year-old woman who lives in a small rainy town near London and who decides that she no longer wants to live from the day when, after a succession of bad news, she feels that it has become “superfluous for the whole universe”.
Under a false air of lightness, the novel transports us to a multiverse between life and death – a library, in this case, where Nora can choose from an endless collection of books the life she would have liked to have. Because behind a candid tone hides in fact deep reflections on existence, interspersed with quotations from Camus, Thoreau or Sartre.
In this “library of possibilities”, governed by the old librarian from her secondary school who guides her in her learning, Nora understands, through all these other lives she experiences to erase her regrets, that none of them is perfect. That no life, however seductive in appearance, immunizes against sadness, disappointment or those feelings of emptiness and deep loneliness that can make you want to give up everything.
The Midnight Library is reminiscent Stay alive, the author’s autobiographical work which was a great success when it was published in 2016, and in which he recounted his suicide attempt and his fight for recovery. The novel may not make any great revelations; rather, it’s the kind of book that makes you want to see things differently, one lesson at a time. But his tour de force is certainly to manage to show us the fragility of these illusory happinesses which undermine existence, by asking questions that are both simple and so fair.
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig (translated from English by Dominique Haas)
Mazarine
414 pages