Saturday 20 March 2010

The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night-time



It's a simple story of a not-so-simple boy who understands science, loves mathematics (in the book you will find numerous instances that proves his love for the subject), likes dogs, dreams of being astronaut . But he doesn’t understand people and jokes, don’t like being touched, hates colour "Yellow" and "Brown"loves reading mystery novels and that’s why he wrote one of a true incident .
The narrator is Christopher Boone and he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. Yes ,this is the same syndrome of which Rizwan Khan’s character suffers from in the movie “My Name Is Khan”. And this character Christopher is such nicely created that you can imagine him in flesh and blood. In his locality, there is a murder committed and he goes on to find the murderer and in the path he resolves to write a book about it.

The peculiar points of the writing style in the book are so different from the other books that I read.

Not many characters that you lose focus as the narrator don’t like crowd.
Chapter numbers are only prime numbers because the narrator loves prime number. Hence when you find the first chapter 2, don’t go back and start looking for the Chapter 1.
It has graphics and maps because that’s how his mind works. His mind calculates and make maps of any place he goes.
It has an Appendix that is a solution of a mathematics problem. He didnt include it in the book’s text because his teacher says that one should not include un-interesting facts while writing a book. And the writer Mark Haddon proves true to the words he wrote because not in any instance does the book loses the interest of the reader.
The chapters are written in such a way that they make an alteration between the actual story and his basic nature. Like Chapter 2 tells the story and in chapter 3 the narrator talks about himself or anything that comes under his curiosity (the main plot is not at all here) and then again the chapter 5, the story plot resumes and so on.

Just the way, you fall in love with Holden in “The Catcher in the Rye” because of his thinking, you will fall in love with 15-year old Christopher for his quirkiness, that I can assure you.

A couple of years earlier I recall, I read the interview of Shah Rukh Khan where he was asked about the book he was currently reading and he named this book. That was the same year, I suppose, when this book received “The Whitbread Book Award”. The name of the book remained with me( oh yes, I remember namesJ) and it was only in 2010, when I chanced upon the book and I totally love it.

In short, what I can say is that reading this book made me :)




3 comments:

  1. sounds like one interesting book..I wanna read it asap now......

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  2. even i heard about this book like 2years ago...but never got my hands on them...n now i have kinda given up on reading...haven't read anything for more than a year!

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  3. Thx Lady, am just done with reading NAMESAKE and was listing the next set to books to be read!!! This is definetely in my list now....

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