Vanishing Acts

Book Review

Title: Vanishing Acts

Author: Jodi Picoult

ISBN: 978-0-340-83549-4

Memory is a very unreliable thing. Most of us keep on recreating our memories to make ourselves feel comfortable and the illusions created in the process of those modifications are necessary to make life bearable. In the words of Jodi Picoult, “… after a while, you believe the fiction you’ve told yourself so well that you cannot remember the fact upon which it was based.”

Vanishing Acts is about the role of memories in human life. Andrew Hopkins is arrested at the age of 60 for kidnapping his own daughter 28 years ago. Delia was just 4 then and her name was Bethany Matthews. Andrew changed his name as well as his daughter’s as he took her to another place in order to avoid being caught. He was divorced from his wife and she was given custody of their daughter. Andrew was allowed to visit her and what he saw during one of those visits forced him to kidnap her. Delia was just 4 years old then. But she has certain dormant memories which are activated during Andrew’s trial. How reliable are those memories, however? That is an interesting question raised in the novel.

Delia now has a little daughter by Eric who is going to marry her. Fitz, their childhood friend, is also in love with Delia. All these four characters – Delia, her father and her lovers – present an interesting insight into human memories as well as motives. Love is the dominant motive. Eric is an alcoholic which works against him in winning over Delia totally. Fitz is a friend and little more than that as far as Delia is concerned. Fitz loves her so genuinely that he can give up anything for her sake including herself. Putting it another way, “When you love someone, you want her to have everything she wants,” even if that everything includes another man.

That’s a saintly approach to life and such saints don’t make interesting characters in a novel. Even Andrew turns out to be a feeble character when he is arrested, burdened by an unnecessary sense of guilt. This could be a reason why this particular novel of Picoult’s didn’t attain the degree of success that the others did. Nevertheless, the questions raised about the role of memory in human life are worth pondering about.

The novel has quite a few thought-provoking sentences such as: “Maybe Fate isn’t the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.”

Comments

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below. Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala: The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog