Mitch Albom. And his magic.

Racing through Mitch Albom’s “ Magic Strings Of Frankie Presto” at a pace I would’ve imagined I had left behind in the pre-internet era, my heart does a jig with every page I turn, delighted that one of my erstwhile favorite writers has rediscovered his Mojo, and how ! After two average outings in his fourth and fifth, and a disaster with his sixth ( “The First Phone Call from Heaven”), Albom is back with his signature melancholic vengeance that is almost physically painful. What effortless storytelling ! Albom moves you to blood and tears turn by turn, and makes you secretly smile at your vulnerability !!

Something like poetry from a broken heart . Something like music of a restless soul. I mean, who can write lines like these anymore ??

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“Of course I didn’t marry Frankie. I didn’t see him again for forty years. But when I heard he died, everything came rushing back. That’s why I am here, I suppose. You are never in love with anyone the way you are when you are eighteen, on a beach, at night, with your shoes off.. I still can’t believe he’s gone..”

“ Talent is a piece of God’s shadow, and under that shadow, human stories intersect..” 

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Sharing the last review I had written of a Mitch Albom book, four years back on my blog . It was scribbled on board my flight from Delhi as I left India in search of a new life on the other side of the ocean. I was nervous, sad, lonely and four whiskies down as I tried to loosen myself in his words. I don’t know how, but they helped. Mitch Albom, and his magic !

November 1st 2012

Mitch Albom is an author who suddenly happens to you when you are least expecting him.

Most of us might not remember when we first laid our hands on “Tuesdays with Morrie” (possibly sometime during our early 20s) . But we all DO remember having surely read it cover to cover in one go , something deeply stirring within us as we tried to soak in the life lessons of a dying man. There was something heart-achingly enlightening in this simplistic narrative by Albom (a then successful sports journalist) that made us all pause from our punishing rat races and peer within to ponder whether they were the right races or not.

We picked up “The Five People you meet in Heaven” as already converted fans of Albom. We knew that there is going to be something long lasting in Eddie’s story as it unfolds backwards from the day he dies, through the windows of his past birthdays and the completion of dots to decipher the meaning of his life through the five people who gave form to it. “FPYMIH” surpassed “Tuesdays..” when it came to being a medium of reflection and contemplation.

A Statement - About life. And about death.

Attempting to draw a list of those five people in our own lives was fun, melancholic and awakening , all at once.

“For one more day” drew us to it at the bookshelves the first day that it arrived there. We had grown older by now, wise enough to realize that Albom is a gifted author with a fluid pen and a grasp on reachable philosophy that is addictive. We were no longer in search of a lesson in his genre , but rather wanted to soak them for the melancholic evening they left us with. “FOMD” narrated us a fascinating tale about a near death experience of a self destructive man out to end his own life, and who gets to live one more day with his mother who had died eight years back. Narrated with a stylish simplicity that only he is capable of, Mitch Albom left us lost in thoughts for many weeks , after this book of his.

Mitch Albom ventured into non fiction with “Have a little faith” , a true account of a priest from his own childhood church who asks Mitch to do his eulogy. Known to have taken him almost a decade of real time to compile his thoughts into this sentimental trip, “HLF” talks about Mitch Albom through his 40s, a decade when one takes a hard look at his life, it’s values, it’s responsibilities that come knocking with the first tuft of grey on the temples and the first wrinkle around the eye. “HLF” captures the journey of another interesting character as a parallel plot – a black, ex-convict cum drug pusher, who discovers religion at a jutted corner of life, stranded in his last alley of doom. This is a book that needs to be read twice, or maybe thrice. Only then you would be able to uncover, and discover it’s layers. You are likely to connect best with it if you are on the wrong side of your 30s or in your early 40s, an age where you know all that is to be known about faith and have started taking your first steps into consolidating and living your faith.

Last month saw a major transition in my life. I changed jobs, left Delhi and also India after a long time. And to tell you honestly, it’s not a happy feeling when you leave your shores and are taking off into the unknown. I always hate goodbyes. And for multiple reasons, this particular goodbye was getting too heavy for me to handle. The first nip in the Delhi air saddened me all the more because I was going to miss many more things about my Delhi life besides just the winter of Delhi, in the years to come. I spent the last two days at my brother’s flat in Gurgaon and that’s when I saw Mitch Albom’s latest paperback, “The Timekeeper” in his book shelf. I was in two minds whether to read a Mitch Albom book at that hour or not . The last thing I wanted was an added emotional hangover on top of my present mental state. However, the lure of Albom’s magic made me start the book. And in the two hours that followed, I don’t recall when exactly my heart lifted itself out of it’s heaviness and I was lost in Mitch-land for a considerable time after that , long after my flight took off into the dark skies, tearing me away from India .

And I still had a silly smile on my face. Old Mitch still has a bit of it left in him. Quite a bit , actually !

“The Timekeeper” , an adult fable , is a compelling narrative about the first man on earth who thought of measuring time and who went ahead to become “Father Time” by inventing the first clock in this world. It is about the punishment he undergoes for daring to do so, getting banished into a cave for centuries and subjected to millions of voices floating out of a pool inside the cave – voices belonging to people of the world, each one in a race with time, some ahead of , and others behind it, but everyone eventually unhappy with it. Finally after forty centuries (that start with the fall of the Tower of Babel when Father Time escapes doomsday and drifts into his cave ), he is spared from his prison and let loose into the contemporary world below, to seek his atonement and end his ordeal for once and for all.

He has a simple mission – to find two people, one who seeks more time , and one who seeks less.

And then he would need to explain to them the futility of this entire mathematics !

Father time descends into 2012 – and witnesses a new version of mankind , which is forever sprinting to keep count of every second of it’s existence. He soon discovers his two target characters – a very successful business tycoon into the final stages of a fatal cancer and a bright yet clumsy teenage girl with a defeated self - image.

While Victor refuses to accept his destiny and plans a coup to hoax death itself (and hence stretch time to transport himself a few centuries into the future with the help of cryogenics, by when cancer would have become a “common cold”. So he hopes, at least ), Sarah chooses just the opposite – to shrink her time and finish it all off when she undergoes a humiliation on the Facebook page of the class charmer.

Connecting their widely separated lives is Dor, or Father time – who now works as a mysterious salesman in a showroom selling antique timepieces.

So similar and yet so different from his previous works, “The Time Keeper” gets on to you stealthily as Albom tosses a few questions on relativity, infinity and the sheer dynamic nature of time, which stops for none - Not even Father Time himself. An enchanting plot that weaves in the significance of seeping in the life in an hour, and the futility of mapping the hours in a life, “The Time Keeper” is a modern day classic and a must read for all of you who plan for a thoughtful weekend ahead. Only Mitch Albom can pen such deep thoughts with such clarity and simplicity.

I give “The Time Keeper” 3.5 stars out of 5. And the only reason it loses it’s one and a half stars is the fact that Mitch Albom took three 5- stars , back to back , for his first 3 books. He started off on a very lofty bar that set his benchmark pretty high.

Though not at par with them, yet his latest outing is contemporary as it is profound, reflective as it is entertaining. Very nice indeed !