All my friends…

I have just finished my read-some-old-presents period. The last casualty has been this “All my friends are going to be strangers” by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry is, among other things, the winner of a Pulitzer prize and co-author of the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain”. My uncle gave this book to me three years ago.

Even if I'm not as capable of a good review as malglam, here follows a brief opinion on the novel.

I found it difficult at the beginning to identify myself with the main character, or any of the other characters; the main reason being their exaggerated impulsiveness and ability to switch from love to anger and back. I'm very cerebral and sometimes take ages to make decisions; so reading about people who get married one week after meeting their partner for the first time or give away their car to a couple of hitchhikers, that tinged a bit the story with irreality. Characters that were being friendly the minute before, become suddenly crazy and start insulting or beating each other. Complete strangers seem open and generous as if they were good old friends of the main character's. There are surrealistic situations and dialogs, too; but I laughed with some of those.

“I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. […] I just don't have any moral coordination.”

“I had known all along that my brain was not going to win any fights ─ or impress any girls.”

Despite of this, I discovered that I was glad to read again about credible feelings of human beings in a realistic story. I had been missing that before. I had been lately going out with elves, spiders and psychokinetic teens. But this is a novel whose ingredients are writers, literature, friends, girlfriends, love, sex, loneliness and the search for happiness. And it's easy to read. So I got hooked.

Now the interesting thing is that by the middle of the book I started to feel empathetic with the main character, this young writer-to-be divided between his love for things (books, of course) and his love for people (women, no doubt), feeling utterly alone and more and more different from anyone he knows, without a clue about where he will be in a few days time, nor about how to find happiness.

“He had long ago concluded that I didn' lead a normal life.”

“All the furniture of my life had been changed around.”

“All the people I had things in common with were thousands of miles away.”

I liked the in crescendo that are the last chapters, and the end of the book, too. In general, I think I liked this book.

Reading others' presents before tackling the pila may let you discover books that otherwise you would had missed.