I loved the initial set-up of the story. A man in his early twenties writes to his retired maths teacher to ask for advice on life. And the teacher doesn’t just reply with a normal letter, but with a detailed account of her latest, life-changing experiences.
Haig slipped effortlessly into the character of his first-person narrator, 72-year-old Grace Winters. I loved the way Grace talks, her choice of words and her way to split the story into many chapters, a lot of which are not much longer than three pages. I loved how much knowledge on mathematics she shared – even though mathematics was always my weak spot in school. I also have to admire how much wisdom on life Haig transports with “The Life Impossible”. Because it always felt as if another helpful thought might lay in wait just around the corner for me to find. That was truly enjoyable.
However: Grace’s experiences on Ibiza only cover a few days, I believe. But it took me, at least, much longer to read it. Which means that she explains a lot – of what is happening and especially what she was thinking at the time. We are inside her head for most of it and after a while I found that a bite tiresome. Also because – as is normal with human thoughts – they keep revolving around the same topics. Furthermore, her experiences are very unusual, to say the least, a bit on the mystical side of things. At some point it felt as though Haig was whacking me over the head with all his advice – on nature, preservation, guilt, age, shame and what we deserve. I have to admit that I skipped over the last twenty pages and did not read them in detail anymore.
Still, there are a few things which I hope to keep in mind. And maybe it just wasn’t the right moment for me to read “The Life Impossible” and I’ll just have to give it another go again in a few years.
