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...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more