"Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell (1949)

 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell weaves a tale about what it is that makes us human. Through Winston Smith’s eyes, a mere face-in-the-crowd, we get a glimpse of the horror of the world he’s living in—the world of Big Brother. It’s a world where stars are a few kilometres away, a world where 2 + 2 = 5, where white always mates in chess, where 'thought' is abolished and logic is meaningless.

 

1984 is a terrifying piece of horror. Imagine living in a world where you’re under surveillance 24/7, even when you’re in the so-called comforts of your house, the eyes of Big Brother’s telescreens are always fixed on you… in a world where your own children rat you out to the government… in a world when even the act of love and ‘loving’ is forbidden… in a world where ‘thought’ is a crime.

 

While 1984 is meant as a warning for the future—even though it’s disproportionately back-and-white or exaggerated—one cannot help but wonder if it’s happening right now in some parts of the world where totalitarianism meant not only the seizing of the country’s economic resources but also extends to the seizing of its citizen’s ‘range of thought and consciousness' to reach a homeostasis of unified general consensus: the deconstruction of the past for a controlled conformist present.

 

 from Little Nightmares II

The reading process was painful. The people in Winston’s world are so drowned in the hegemony of Big Brother’s party, they know nothing else. For all we, readers, know, there's only Airstrip One, the UK, and nothing else after the nuclear bombs. No Eurasia. No Eastasia. Heck! Maybe even no wars. People of Airstrip One are like fish born in a fish tank. Their whole existence is defined by the perimeters of the tank’s glass. This is their world and the outside is nothing but an illusion. That’s why the mere act of thinking in opposition to the status quo takes a great amount of courage and no lesser amount of unique sense of individualism, to shed yourself from the blob of everyone else’s way of thinking, to think for yourself.

from Inside

In this sense, Winston is like the Matrix’s Neo, even greater, because, unlike Neo, Winston got no Morpheus to guide him. Winston had to work it out by instinct… and sadly, suffer the awful consequences of his subtle short-lived freedom.

While reading 1984,  I've had a love-hate relationship with its chapters. There are parts that I loved and others that didn't do the trick for me. The world-building and atmosphere and descriptions were so polished, I found myself roaming the streets along with Winston and shielding my face from the gritty wind and the miasma of the proles' odors. 

As I progressed, however, I noticed how Orwell exploits the outline of novel writing to pour his political projections every chance he got... which is fine. But what pulled me away was the heavy emphasis on prose with little regard to dialogue, especially when it climaxed as Winston embarked on a long journey reading the party's manifesto of 'the Book'. It was a breaking point that I thought of shelving 1984 to gather dust for good. 

I'm glad I didn't.

The ending, however depressing and ambiguous, redeemed all the struggles and pains that I'd experienced.

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Summary: In a time dominated by Lenin's communism and Hitler's fascism, George Orwell sums up the entirety of his life in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a testament to the atrocities of totalitarian regimes, a warning to the freedom of speech, independent thought, and privacy.

For an individualist, this book is the nebula of all nightmares. For a conformist, well, they wouldn’t notice a difference... and that's the most horrifying aspect about 1984, the descent into a decentralized hierarchal society without even realizing it, into mindless zombies. 

"The Last Time I lied" by Riley Sager (2018)

 

This is the second book I read by Riley Sager, Lock Every Door being the first one. I gotta admit, I think Sager's way of writing is growing in me. He simply doesn't disappoint and his books certainly live up to the hype.

In The Last Time I lied, we are introduced to twenty-eight-year-old Emily as she unravels the big bang that sends shock waves throughout the four-hundred-or-so-page-long book fifteen years ago—the disappearance of her three fellow roommates in Camp Nightingale. Riddled with guilt and shame, her life is in disarray, spending her time painting landscapes of forests with the three girls buried beneath layers of paint. One day, at her gallery, a woman named Franny, the one who owns the camp and the surrounding swaths of land, pays her a visit and invites her to the camp as an art instructor. Emily's thought is to turn down the offer, but after some thinking, she accepts it with reluctance; she needs closure.

The book is medium-sized, but I wasn't distracted or felt bored. The story is so engrossing and so atmospheric. Sager's descriptions were spot-on and minimalistic focusing on the dynamics between the characters and their character building. There are of course things I didn't like about the book. One of them is the two-dimensional nature of some of the side characters. But they are 'side characters' after all and their background stories or their mind processes don't advance the plot, so all is forgiven. 

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Summary: The Last Time I Lied is a story about guilt, forgiveness, revenge, and letting go of the past. It's a brilliantly told story, so intricate and so gripping, you won't put the book down until you reach the final page. And boy, what a hell of an ending that was!

"Lock Every Door" by Riley Sager (2018)

Meet Jules Larsen, a twenty-five young woman who hits bottom and her life was in a shambles. Shortly after, the fates guide her to an ad about being ‘an apartment sitter’, which is basically a job to be a resident in a fancy unit at the top of a gothic old building called ‘the Bartholomew’. What’s interesting about the ad is that it doesn’t require previous experience and demands almost no expertise in any field, and what’s more, it pays a shit ton of cash. Does that raise all kinds of red flags for Jules? Maybe, but spelled by her wishful thinking, ‘the queen of magical thinking’ decides to take the job.

Lock Every Door isn’t as scary as advertised, but as it kicks off at nearly the 55% mark, it has an insidious quality to it that leaves readers sickened and nerve-racked. Luckily, there are so many, many clues sprinkled throughout the book about what’s really going on. If you’ve paid enough attention to them, and also if you’ve watched Netflix’s Archive 81, it’ll lessen the tension just a notch but without sacrificing the book’s entertaining value.

At first, I struggled at the beginning with the prose; it felt overly ornate and unnecessarily complex… just like the gothic architecture of the Bartholomew building. But then, all my worries were no more as the story moved on.

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Summary: Lock Every Door is a gripping thriller that has its ups and downs that offers a story about the drastic outcome of capitalism (the expanding chasm between the upper and lower classes and the disintegration of the middle class). It teeters between fantasy and fiction, between the paranormal and the work of foul play, but doesn't leave readers' questions unanswered. I have my reservations about the long and slow build-up, but the last third of the book paid off.

The bottom line is I loved every second of it... and the ending—my god!!! I can't wait to read more of Sager's books.

"Confessions" by Kanae Minato (2008)

 

                         

From the very first pages, I knew I was about to embark on a rollercoaster of a ride. First of all, the book starts with ‘drinking milk’. And I know for a fact that there are no bad stories that have their characters drinking milk: A Clockwork Orange, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, to name but a few.

The 240-page-long book is divided into six chapters, each of which retells the main event through their own eyes. 

In essence, Confessions is a revenge story, but it’s much, much more. It’s a social commentary on bullying, on prejudice (against people with HIV/single mothers/ sexual ‘deviants/ etc). But what I noticed the most was the recurring theme of ‘other people's expectations and their effects on self-value’. The author comments that societies in general (and the Japanese especially) put more stock in what other people think of them, that their sense of ‘worthiness’ is external to them. Every character in Confessions seems to clearly display this kind of awareness:

Moriguchi: when she says: 

the teacher and the school were blamed—how could they expose impressionable young people to sexual deviants…or gays…or even single mothers.

Naoki’s mother: when she says: 

If he just stays home without a diagnosis, the neighbors will start calling him a hikikomori (a dropout).

Shuya: who forges his own logic and self-esteem based on countering and belittling the logic of his peers of ‘middle school kids’.

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Summary: Confessions is a compelling page-turner of a novel. It's as satisfying as it's shocking. What prevents me from giving it five stars is the unusually long chunks of monologue-like paragraphs and the decision to present the order of the chapters as they are.