Wonder - by R.J.Palacio: A Brief Review

Sometimes, strange things happen. On a single day last week, two things happened to me: A colleague lent me her copy of Wonder by R.J.Palacio and another colleague forwarded me a link to a TED talk by Lizzie Velasquez titled How Do YOU Define Yourself. (For those of you who have not heard of Lizzie Velasquez, she was born with a rare abnormality that rendered her body completely unable to store any fat at all and causing her to be labelled and ridiculed as 'the ugliest woman in the world'.)

Now when such random events accumulate together, you would think there's a lesson in all of this somewhere. That's what I thought too - when a quick glance in the mirror assured me that I didn't look any uglier than I usually did, I decided that the lesson was somewhere deeper than that.

I read the book and watched the video, and this is what I came up with.

Being beautiful and feeling beautiful are two completely different things. The little group of us met again a little later over coffee. If you looked at us, you would think of us as average-, maybe even above-average-looking women. In fact, if you looked at us from the right angles, you might even think we were attractive. And yet, each of us had at least one story to share when we were made to feel repugnant, ugly, hideous. Too dark, too short, too fat, too thin, you name it.

Wonder is one of those books that you read relishing each word, savoring them, and then when it's done, go back and re-read some parts of it that you had mentally marked (at least I had to mentally mark them as the book was borrowed from a friend.)

The book revolves around 10-year-old August (Auggie), who suffers from an incredibly rare and unpronounceable facial deformity. By the time the book begins, the worst of his health problems appear to be already behind him, and it is only the social and emotional angles that apparently need to be focused on.

 

The book heralds his entry into regular school and thus into society, after having been home schooled thus far. We see him being taken "like a lamb to the slaughter" and follow his sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes euphoric journey from being the 'orc' or 'Freddie Krueger' to becoming Auggie Pullman, a regular little fifth-grader. He looks exactly the same as he did when he started, the difference is all in the eyes that view him, and more importantly, in how he views himself.

The book is mostly presented from behind Auggie's 'hooded droopy eyelids'. Children can be cruel, we all know that and so it seems can adults. We see the different forms of cruelty - the malicious if childish cruelty of Julian the bully and the more dignified yet doubly reprehensible cruelty of his parents (apples really don't fall far from the tree), the unintentional cruelty of almost everyone who sees him for the first time, and sometimes even of people who have known him forever, the inadvertent cruelty of his only friend and ally, Jack Will, a particularly heartbreaking moment. You fight the urge to gently close his deformed and misshapen ears and protect him from the betrayal of his only friend. His sister Via (short for Olivia) assumes that she is being incredibly cruel when she decides not to tell anyone in her new school about Auggie, so that for once in her life, she can be free of his constant presence in her life.

The universe has been unkind to Auggie is a message that is thrust on us again and again.It is only somewhat at the end of the book, through the eyes of Auggie's sister's boyfriend do we see the other side of the situation:

 

"My head swirls on this, but then softer thoughts soothe, like a flatted third on a major chord. no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely, and the universe doesn't. It takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. Like with parents who adore you blindly. And a big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. And a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. And even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. Maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. The universe takes care of all its birds.”

This is a beautiful book, reflecting both the beauty and the ugliness in the world around the little boy.

Flip side? Well, in a way the book is structured like a social experiment of sorts, a documentary of the journey of August Pullman into society. In documentary-style we see the same episodes from different points of view. The feel is of different people looking into the character and mouthing their words at times. And the end of the book is a little predictable - it couldn't have ended any other way.

 

Those are just a few faded scars in a supremely beautiful book - a book that is beautiful beyond its beautiful cover.

 

Confessions of a Grownup Potterhead

Okay I love reading Harry Potter. I have read all seven books many many times and watched all eight movies many times over as well. My daughter and I have lengthy and impassioned discussions about them.

There, I said it, the skeleton is out, so to speak - from the cupboard under the stairs.

But in my defence, it is not just the childlike wonder of escaping the boring world of Muggles into the captivating wizarding world once in a while. Or that there is a certain poetic justice in seeing a wounded and scarred little boy becoming The Chosen One. Of course not! Ok maybe all that. Just a little. For those of you who are decidedly unenchanted by all things magical, before you get all disdainful and hippogriffy, stay with me. I do have a few grown up reasons for liking Harry Potter too.

You see, I work in the field of learning - I live and breathe it day in and day out - and there's a lot to be learnt in these books, at least the first few. Learning that ought to be out there in the Muggle world in schools and in organizations.

For one thing, Voldemort and Harry are in a lot of ways two sides of the same coin, just like we all are. The final horcrux that Harry has to destroy before killing Voldemort was the one that was within himself. This means that Harry and his friends need much more than just book learning. What is needed first and foremost is self-awareness. Nowhere in all the curricula that I have seen is there a course called Self-Awareness. At least not self-awareness in the ways that count.

Again, stop already with the smouldering basilisk eyes that threaten to burn me to oblivion. There's a point to all of this I promise you. I'm getting there.

Take the Mirror of Erised. For the benefit of the uninitiated, Erised is Desire spelled backwards, a little word trick that helped get my attention from the get go not to mention that seemingly meaningless gibberish written on it - Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi. No this is not Parsel Tongue or any other weird magical language. This is simply the phrase 'I show not your face but your heart's desire' written backwards. So the Mirror of Erised shows you nothing more and nothing less than your heart's deepest desire. Harry peeps in and sees his dead parents; Ron sees himself as the head boy. The happiest people, according to wise old Dumbledore, see themselves just the way they are. For them, the mirror of Erised functions like a normal mirror. It gives you neither knowledge nor wisdom, and people have wasted away in front of it, says Dumbledore. Now I'm not suggesting that we pine away in front of it, but wouldn't it be helpful to know what our desires are?

I wouldn't call myself the happiest person in the world, but my Mirror of Erised has always been very close to a normal mirror, which interestingly was never considered a virtue. "You're too content with things. You're too happy with the status quo. You're not ambitious enough. If you just put your mind to it..." were all common exasperated refrains that I have heard all through my school and college days. Come to think of it, I heard it from my boss last week! Oh well, I always knew that whenever my stuff was not in fashion - clothes, ideas, books - if I left it alone long enough, it would be. One day. Who am I to argue with Dumbledore after all?

That was about the heart's deepest desires, now about the soul's darkest fears...

Smartly enough, the Hogwarts curriculum involves putting students face to face with their deepest fears and equipping them to handle them using Boggarts, a safe sandbox environment in which to practise for the real thing. Turns out that Ron's is spiders, Harry's is dementors that bring him head on with the worst horrors of his life. Do you know what your greatest fear is? And what is the Riddikulus spell that you would conjure up to dispel it? Wouldn't it make sense to think about your fear and practise conquering it before it socked you in the jaw when you least expected it?

What about the weapons you have at hand to achieve those dreams or dispel those fears? What form does your patronus take when the dementors threaten to suck out all happiness from the deepest recesses of your soul? Is your patronus a person, or an animal, or a thing, or an abstract concept? Do you know what it is, so you can take strength and comfort from it? Do you know what you can do to make its charm strong and invincible and help it to protect you?

See - I told you there were some wise and grown up points in there somewhere. I can almost feel a long grey beard coming on! But now that I think of it, maybe I wasn't entirely truthful about my mirror of Erised. Maybe if I looked deep enough, I would find something else. Maybe I would see a pair of woollen socks. After all, it has been getting rather chilly in Bangalore!