I Am Not The Messenger - I Am The Message

Another great book by Marcus Zusak. Another amazing experience of prose close to poetry. However, unlike in The Book Thief, the poetry of the prose does not stand out as explicitly. We hear the sound of Australian suburbs and their lingo instead.

The story is about Ed Kennedy, a 19-year-old cab driver who lives alone with a strange old dog Dorman - a true canine coffee addict! Ed has not much ambition to do anything else with his life, besides driving taxi and playing cards with his three friends. His mother despises him, and after his father died a year before – he does not have any goal in life.

Until something happens - something totally out of the blue - and he gets a series of messages to deliver, acts to perform, deeds to do. I will not tell too much - I do not want to spoil it for you.

Till the very end of the story Ed doesn't understand the meaning or the purpose of the messages he was chosen to deliver. But the whole process marks a first serious awakening in his life. As the story evolves, he abandons simplicity and shallow commonness and his life gets a meaning – he does things that truly make difference.

This is a book about love, hate, solitude and friendship and about difficult family relations, about the hardship of life in today's poor suburbs of contemporary cities, and finally - about the hope to get rid of the “epidemy of ordinariness” and vanity of our daily life.

And it is told without any bombastic preaching of “greatness”...

“Maybe everyone can, maybe everyone can live beyond what they are capable of”

The enduring power of ideals

It's unusual to write about political events on such blog.
But this event, event of November 4th, 2008 is unprecedented.

Let's keep in our memories two fragments from his speech, words that say more about America, than hundreds of some other opinions:

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

and

"Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope."

G-d bless Obama, G-d bless America...

Now, as a kind of PostScriptum, Obama speach in my mother's tongue...