Book Review: Midnight Library by Matt Heig

The Midnight Library follows the protagonist Nora Seed and her life-hopping experiences across parallel universes inside the a surreal Midnight Library , a quantum bubble, a doorway to many possibilities in the form of books, containing every single choice Nora made or didn't make across her life. With the trope of multiverse theory in hand the book deals with the philosophizing or "anti-philosophizing" on the question of "how must one live?"

No matter how phantasmagorical a book seems, it holds within itself a sense of rationale. Within the confine of it's literary brick and mortar it defines the rules of its world. Like the laws in our universe, the laws defined by the book also holds its narrative, the characters, the incidents, even the Dues Ex Machina accountable to any violation. This is where we the readers test how convincing the author is in selling us her ideas about the universe she lets us in. And these rules per se have some metaphorical or symbolic parallel with our actual lives. It is on these grounds we often judge a book of it's credibility which consequently determines how we build our relationship with the book.

The Midnight Library romanticizes heavily on the paralytic residue of life's regrets and leap frogs rather nonchalantly from one parallel life to the other, grossly ignoring the question of how some of the choices made in those short hops by our protagonist may have life changing domino of consequences around the real people there who belong to those lives. It was disturbing and somewhat repulsive to see the complete lack of consideration by the author on the moral implications of leap frogging into parallel universes, intruding into the lives of the protagonist's doppelgangers without any warning and leaving their body without paying the slightest heed on the consequences of what she already did while taking over her doppelganger's body. This complete objectification of the protagonist's doppelgangers in their parallel lives by the Nora just to thin down her Book of Regrets is not only blindly selfish, it's morally pervasive. For example, in one instance of such leapfrogging, Nora enters into the life of her doppelganger in another universe where this doppelganger Nora is a glaciologist. There she meets a guy and later decided to have sex with him and then leaves her doppelganger's body in the middle of the act. She's aware that the actual Nora who belongs to that universe will suddenly wake up from within and will experience a memory loss for a certain time. It's not difficult to extrapolate the possibilities thereafter. She might find herself in a shocking situation with a guy. She might take it as an assault, a violation (which it truly is). This may give her a trauma that she can never recover in her life. This makes the guy a violator in her eyes. Alas, an author who is name calling one philosopher or the other in every next page with or without context is completely unhindered by the moral and ethical complications of his ingenuous quantum leap manifested in these pages.

The book promoted a "self-help" mantra that "life should be lived not understood" with a vague resemblance to the aphorism of Kierkegaard that "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." However, other than a few punchy one-liners, the pages offer us little perspective through a list of life-hopping by the protagonist, entering into the lives of others in parallel universe and righteously judging them and their life's choices based on her inadequate experience in those lives. Be it a dream to impress parents or siblings... a dream to be something others would appreciate... a dream of success... a dream of creative affluence just following the footsteps of someone else' dream... each of these dreams have some value to give... but she dismisses it all.

I had a great anticipation for this book, probably due to the level of reception on Goodreads but in the end... i felt dejected, especially in today's world where the multi-dimensional impacts on our moral choices are so much on the forefront of the social discourage, compared to our current standard of social values, this book seems quite primitive, more like solving transportation problems with fossil fuel in 2021.