Jojo Moyes, "Me Before Y"ou

There are books that may not be literary masterpieces but they make you rediscover the pure and simple pleasure of reading, not only for the desire to dedicate every free moment to them, but also because you end up living in them, feeling part of the story, as if the story was yours too. You wake up in the morning already immersed in that emotion and with that emotion you go to bed in the evening.

It hasn’t happened to me lately with Kent Haruf’s “Our souls at night”, it hasn’t happened to me with Katsuo Ishiguro’s “The remains of the day” — albeit it caused to me a lump in my throat at the end the crystalline “at that moment my heart was breaking”, which contains the explosion of a whole feeling held back for the entire novel, interpreted in the cinema by the inscrutably expressive mask of Antony Hopkins — it happened to me instead with the best seller “Me before you”.

If, personally, I would not have chosen to break the tension by sporadically shifting the point of view from Louisa to the minor characters — whom, frankly, are of little interest — I do not find, however, in this beautiful novel, all the defects highlighted in other reviews indeed, it seemed to me an overwhelming story. JoJo Moyes may perhaps be a prisoner of certain cinematic clichés, but she has a lush and visual writing, which draws you into scenes made not only of thoughts and dialogues but also of gestures, noises, smells and tastes.

Beyond the social implications, and the arguments for and against assisted suicide and the end of life, this novel is — according to the author herself — a great love story. Indeed, it is once again the story of Beauty and the Beast, where the beauty is Louisa Clark and the beast the sensual quadriplegic Will Traynor.

We do not know the thoughts directly from Will, except for a final letter in which little or nothing is said, but he lets himself be glimpsed a lot. He hovers, handsome and motionless in his wheelchair, with his catheters, drinking straws and ice eyes, with his chopped food, his medicines and sarcastic kindness. He reminds us of Stephenie Meyer’s handsome vampire.

Louisa, on the other hand, is a Cinderella, the little-loved girl, with a very low self-esteem that he, the new Pygmalion, opens to life. And as she becomes aware of herself and spreads her wings, he is striding towards death. Instead of her stimulating his will to live, the opposite happens, it will be he, a prisoner of his paralysis and his infinite torments, who teaches her the beauty of life.

To return to Katsuo Ishiguro, here too the feeling is held back throughout the novel. On Will’s part it will be until the last. He cannot love Louisa because he would sacrifice her and because he should love her halfway, while he wants to be himself whole, the same as he once was. She, for her part, is engaged to a man who does not deserve her and only slowly realizes how much her feelings for her assisted change and mature in her, until her torment overwhelms her.

And what, I ask you, is the most sublime, most transcendent and romantic form of love, if not that which is not consumed, which burns in an eternal unfulfilled desire? Like Bella Swan (at least in the first book of the “Twilight” series) she can’t crown her erotic dream with Edward because she might die of it, so the clumsy, awkward, but secretly brilliant, Louisa can’t join Will.

And in the heartbreaking final scene — when, one step away from Will’s suicide in the Swiss clinic, she tries to merge with him, imprinting in herself, not only in her mind but also in her body, molecules of him, hoping that they will become part of her and continue to live through her — let’s face it, there is pure love, eros mixed with thanatos, an erotic seal that we know will continue forever, beyond life and death.