The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 29 September 2009

LOST INTO ‘THE LOST SYMBOL’? COULDN’T GET THE CHANCE

I was assuming a fair outcome of my reading of the latest Dan Brown work but after going through 509 pages of The Lost Symbol, I can say it’s tough for me to go back and think about something captivating. The promise promised by the celebrated The Da Vinci Code author is not delivered here though the book is selling like anything.

The story begins with a sense of déjà vu. One can start picking threads of the story just at the moment when the writer starts setting its pieces in motion. Once getting a clue here, the story follows somewhat a predictive path, the worst case scenario for a thriller.

What holds the book even after this killjoy of reading is its excellent narrative. But even this is deeply ironic; we will come to it later on. I can say the narrative outdid my sense of déjà vu while reading the initial pages and led me to finish it. Brown writes so marvelously about Symbology and Mysticism that it holds your attention and creates an urge in you to know more about Symbology, Semiotics, Noetic Sciences and Mysticism. I am sure many would have googled for all these terms.

Development of characters takes it’s time and evolves as the author wants but every character except Langdon demands something more. We can safely assume here that this missing ‘something more’ in characterizations is the main culprit of the sense of déjà vu.

The premises that constitute the later part of the story and its climax have nothing better to say. By their composition they seem ironic in what the author wants to convey and how he thinks he can hold interest of his readers. Excellent narrative of the book is based on intelligent mix of deeply intellectual and highly complex fields of discourses like Symbology, Noetic Sciences and Mysticism and the author has based his storyline all along the theme of obscure with two main characters representing the two fulcrums of reason and unreason. What is ironic here is the greater influence of the character that represents the Mysticism without any scientific temper in retaining interest in the narrative, the not so menacing Mal’akh or Zachary Solomon. Brown attempts to be on the rational front through the conscious of Langdon but he has not been able to capitalize on the same excellent narrative this time to save the protagonist.

We expect a captivating Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code and a clearer Robert Langdon next time.