Book Review: THE LUMINARIES by Eleanor Catton

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view."

This line encapsulates my experience of reading this formidable book. I feel both fulfilled and frustrated, happy that I managed to force myself to finish it, and sad that I did not enjoy it as much as I could have, had I read it in normal times. It's the novel form of the old joke: "A man walks into a bar..." and encounters 12 strangers in a secret meeting about crimes in their town.

Came upon this book during a sale last year, was sold because of the price and the label declaring that it won the Man Booker Prize, and also... look at that enticing cover!!

It couldn't sustain my interest after the first couple of chapters, mainly because there were SO MANY characters! I abandoned it, thinking I'd pick it up again when I'd have a long period of uninterrupted reading time so I could make sense of it.

Fast forward to this pandemic, and I thought I'd give it another go. By this time, I had found out that it was going to be made into a mini series starring Dev Patel, Eva Green, and Marton Csokas! So I was quite motivated.

Even so, it was hard to read with all the anxiety. I could only manage a few pages a day, so it took FOREVER to finish all 832 pages.

I suppose it's not the book's fault that the reader's mind was, quite simply, fractured. I do have a lot of respect for its construction. All those characters, all those different story lines and points of view... how did she manage?!

The Luminaries takes its name from the celestial signs, but also, there is this beautiful Maori belief that the stars are the souls of loved ones who have passed on. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, the chapters are longest at the start, and get shorter as the book progresses. The book has a lot of celestial charts, which make no sense to me, but then again, I never much cared for zodiac signs and fortune telling.

This book is a masterclass in characterization! Although sometimes, I feel like the length of time spent in showing us how the characters think and feel was at the expense of the story's pace.

"We all want to be loved -- and need to be loved, I think. Without love, we cannot be ourselves."

At its core, The Luminaries is a love story. It is about fate and destiny, and how more than a dozen strangers' lives can be so intimately threaded together, regardless whether they come from China, Britain, or New Zealand.

The mini-series is just one of the many things we have to look forward to, when this crisis passes!



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