Skip to main content

Gone Girl

Book Review

Title: Gone Girl

Author: Gillian Flynn

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2012

Pages: 466

This is a masterpiece. It makes you laugh a lot, especially in the early pages. Then it fills you with awe; awe at the complexity of the two main characters: Nick Dunne and his wife Amy Elliott Dunne. As you move to the final section, it terrifies you.

This novel is a thriller. Amy Elliott Dunne has vanished. All evidence points to Nick Dunne as the murderer though Amy’s body is not found. There is her diary and a lot more that put Nick in the dock. The whole story is told by Nick and Amy in alternate chapters. And they are amazing narrators. Both are writers, after all. Nick was a journalist writing TV and movie reviews. Amy’s specialisation was making personality quizzes for magazines. Both lost their jobs due to the Recession in 2009 and so they move to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, where Nick opens a bar with his sister Margo. He also finds a job as a teacher of journalism which gets him entangled with a young and beautiful – and immature too – student, Andie.

Did Nick murder Amy in order to live with Andie? Is Amy dead at all, in the first place? Both Nick and Amy are very intriguing and complex characters. When we meet them in the initial pages of the novel, they are two jobless grown-ups who spend weeks wandering around their “Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice crem at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.”

Soon we see their true colours in all their possible shades. The plot becomes not just suspenseful but clever. Terribly and terrifyingly clever. You begin to be amazed by the intellect of the novelist. If I tell you more about that intellect, this review will be a spoiler. I would like you to read the book and relish it. Relish its bizarre humour, insights into human psychology, the intricacies of a criminal mind, and the dreadful ironies of human life.

I quoted a few lines from this novel in an earlier post and Blogger flagged that post. I shall keep this review chaste if only to follow “Blogger’s community guidelines.”

Labels:

Comments

  1. Aishwariya LaxmiJuly 14, 2023 at 9:31 PM

    Have you seen the movie based on the book?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 15, 2023 at 6:12 AM

      No. I was told the movie leaves some horrifying images in memory.

      Delete
  2. peppylady (Dora)July 15, 2023 at 4:18 AM

    would you read anther book by this same authors.
    Coffee is on, and stay safe.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more