We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

Booker Shortlist -2014

One of the most beautiful stories I have recently read. An issue which has plagued our 'scientific' society for decades has been dealt with so compassionately, with humour and such understanding, that it would be a shame if it didn't win the Booker this year. 
The heroine Rosemary, is a college student who has to face up to her childhood reality that her sister Fern, was a non human primate. Rose was a month old and Fern a three month old orphan when Rose's parents started the 'experiment'. The journey that the story traces is primarily from the perspective of Rose and the devastating effect Fern's departure had on the family and how Lowell, Rose's brother suffered as he blamed himself for being unable to protect Fern, his dear sister. 

The author also touches upon the various experiments conducted on dogs, rabbits, monkeys and rats in the name of understanding the 'human' condition and shows how bestial are our experiments. One can only set up a tortured lament empathizing with all those 'animals' that we presumably study in the name of 'science'. 
As Coetzee said, in Elizabeth Costello, even the knowledge of evil, somehow fundamentally alters us. And the same thought is reflected in this book, "The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff". But the qualities which make us human include the good and the evil. Like Rosemary says, of her brothers' fight to rescue his sister Fern, “Lowell’s life has been the direct result of his very best qualities, of our very best qualities – empathy, compassion, loyalty, and love.” 
A book I would read and re-read, just to remind myself of my 'human-ness'.

Saturday - Ian McEwan

     Saturday - Ian McEwan

An action packed day in the life of Henry, a neurosurgeon with a loving family - journalist wife, musician son and poet daughter. The elaborately described and shared details of Henry's day could have been painful but for the insightful statements that emerge in the course of following his thought processes.

.....he knows that sleep is behind him: to know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity.
work - the ultimate badge of health.
..his free time is always fragmented, not only by errands and family obligations and sports, but by the restlessness that comes with these weekly islands of freedom.
Furthermore, nothing can be predicted, but everything, as soon as it happens, will seem to fit.
For a few seconds they enter one of those mute vacuous moments that follow an enthusiastic reunion - too much to be said, and a gentle resettling needed, a resumption of ordinary business.
When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion. 
Even as you struggle against the numbness of poor recall, you know precisely what the forgotten thing is not.

That so much happens in our heads during the course of a single day, is something we all realize - our thoughts wander to colleagues at work, to children when they were young, to our parents when we were young, to our spouse, to the state of the world and our changing surroundings, to the service we are subjected to at shops, parking lots and hospitals - but that it can actually fill an entire book in an interesting way, is something McEwan has accomplished.