I have been thinking whether to write this blog in Vietnamese or in English, because after all the book I read was in Vietnamese. I should be able to discuss this book in Vietnamese, but as you can see, I’m typing it in English. I guess when thinking about a more academic topic, my vocabulary in English is more precise and spot on.
Camel has bought me a book name :”Kẻ Ngoại Cuộc”. The book is not long, yet it took me 4 or 5 days to finish it. I could finish a book by a Chinese writer in one go, but this book, it took time to read and to digest from time to time. Plus, I don’t know why but my eyes kept on shutting down after every twenty pages or so.
It’s a fiction book written in the strangest way that I’ve ever read. Yet, I found the main character is strangely familiar with me. He’s someone I used to know, or to be exact, he’s the Mai I knew awhile ago.
In the first part of the book, the description of the mother’s funeral is exactly how I felt during my father’s funeral. I remembered knowing that I was very tired, and I wanted to sleep. I didn’t want to see my father’s face because after all, he’s dead. I found my image painted vividly through the main character Mersault.
I remembered asking my therapist, why did I handle myself so good at the time of my Dad’s funeral? How come I didn’t crash. He said: the answer is simple, at that time, you completely cut yourself from feelings. You forbid yourself to feel, and all that left is logic. “Oh God, I have to attend 3 days of funeral, what I’m going to say? How am I gonna stay awake for 3 days ? ”
That’s exactly what Mersault must have felt. “Hôm nay mẹ mất. Hay hôm qua cũng nê, tôi chẳng biết… chắc là hôm qua.” I can almost be on the train going to the funeral house with Mersault and not feel a thing like him. It’s a skill, and I know how to do it well when needed.
As the story goes on, Mersault reminds me of me so much. A person who’s an outsider of life, a person who just do the bare minimum to continue with life, to breath, to eat and to fuck. When his girlfriend Marie proposed to him, his answers is strangely familiar:” I can get married, it doesn’t really matter, I’m not sure I love you, but probably not, but we can still get married”.
You know that was me? That was me with Karim. I was so uncomfortable sharing a bed with him, that I told him if we get married, we will sleep separately because I can’t stand your sweat. We can get married, or not, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not sure I love you, perhaps not, but let’s just go ahead.
That’s why it took me so long to finish this book, because it was as if I was reading a story about me. A fiction book about a guy name Mersault, but I can replace the name with Mai and still makes all the sense in the world.
The whole topic of the book is about Death. It opened with the death of his mother, the transition is where the main character cause the death and ended with his own death. One of the nice thing I like about this book is honesty, brutal honesty. The honesty that is naked and raw without any kind of filtering. I like that, just like I am with this blog post, utmost honesty.
I particularly like the part where he said I just want to explain that I didn’t mean to. Mersault, he didn’t imagine, didn’t exxagerate. Mersault only answers questions and describing thing, it was as if he’s not the main character but and observer of his own story.
I was reading it and kept thinking about myself, so this was how I look before. This was how I lived my life before. Well I was different, obviously this is a fiction so the author can remove all of the emotions from the main character. I did have a lot of emotions, I still do. The difference is I let the emotions led my life, and now I’m no longer be led.
The book started with clear definition of time, place and people. Each one was given a name, a specific description of how they look so I could imagine easily, but then in part 2, I can only know by their job title, nothing less, nothing more. For a visual person like me, this is interesting, because it’s up to me to create the shape and look, how everyone looked at the courtroom. How hot it was, I imagined ông biện lý must have be en a short fat, bald guy sweating out of his heads why arguing that Mersault should be given a death sentence.
The book is also describe the hypocrisy of the society at the time. So what if the guy is tired and wanted to sleep on the day his mother is dead? So what if he wanted to smoke and have a cup of coffee? I thought there was nothing wrong with that, but it’s something for ông biện lý to argue that the guy is cruel for having “not” wanted to look at his mother and smoke on the last night while having a cup of coffee.
Boy, I would die if I was to live in that era.
It was interesting for me to see and read what kind of a person I once was, and it was interesting for me to see what I could have done differently.
All in all, it was a good book and I love it 🙂
