The Island Bookshop Explained: Three Visions of A.J. Fikry's Life

This life is very short, a hundred years in a hurry or even shorter, in the long river of life, everyone is just passing through, but even if it is passing through, each life has its meaning of existence, but also it's wonderful. How should people spend their lives, is it a big fuss to leave? Or leave in silence? When A.J. Fikry, the protagonist of "The Island Bookshop", opens a bookstore with his wife on Alice Island, their life should have gone on happily. But when he reaches middle age, Fikry loses his wife, and his life becomes darker than ever.

The first life: to get drunk to the end and die like a real alcoholic.

A.J. Fikry had a very happy start in life. He and his wife Nicole Evans met in college when Nicole wanted to be a poet and was also unhappily working on her Ph.D. in 20th-century women poets (Adrienne Richie, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop). Fikry, meanwhile, was working on his Ph.D. in American literature, writing his dissertation on the depiction of illness in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, a subject he had never particularly liked and had grown to genuinely resent.

It was then that Nicole suggested that there might be a better, happier way to have a literary life. Her hometown of Alice Island did not have a bookstore, and she always believed that "a place is not a place if it doesn't have a bookstore". So they gave up their graduate studies, moved to Alice Island, and opened the Island Bookstore.

It was wonderful to be with the people they loved, even on an isolated island, not to mention that they were doing what they loved, running a bookstore where his wife Nicole could take care of everything and Fikry could immerse himself in the world of books.

When his beloved wife is separated from him, A.J. Fikry is desperate. Although Nicole does not appear in the novel, one can imagine what a lovely woman she is, beautiful and gentle. In Bai Juyi's "Jane Jane Ging" there is a line "the good things in the world are not firm, the clouds are easy to break the glass is brittle", the talented and gifted young girl Jane Jane, flawless, but died prematurely and died in the world. This sentence explains the situation of Nicole, two perfect people, and things will not last.

When his wife dies, Fikry is so devastated that he starts drinking, trying to relieve his grief in this way, but alcoholism will only take you from one predicament into a deeper one. If Maya had not appeared, perhaps Fikry would have been sinking, step by step, to drink himself to death, which is also a life-ending such an ending is not what the reader wants, nor is it what Fikry himself wants, and not what those who love him want, and certainly not what the residents of the island want.

The second kind of life: the hope of life, courage to love and reconciliation with the world, to obtain happiness.

A.J. Fikry's eccentric personality and special taste in reading make it difficult for him to run the bookstore. Just as Fikry is immersed in the pain of the death of his beloved wife and the distress of the crisis in the bookstore, a valuable and rare book, "Paste Mul", is stolen from the bookstore. A.J. Fikry's health is also in the red, and his life is in a desperate situation.

However, at this time, A.J. Fikry returned from a run one day and found a two-year-old girl, Maya, in the bookstore, who was very smart and cute, like an angel, changed everything, and changed the course of Fikry's life. Thus bringing people closer to each other, the writer Dostoevsky once said, "Being with children saves your soul." Indeed, A.J. Fikry has a new lease on life and, as a result, a love affair with Amelia, a book sales representative.

As the book says: Everyone has the toughest year in their life that turns it into a beautiful and expansive one. A.J. Fikry eventually emerged from the trough of his life and reaped happiness, and in that last part of his life, his loving wife and daughter were by his side, and his illness and misfortune were not so terrible. In the end, he passed away as the owner of the bookstore, and his warmth remained in the hearts of the islanders, and the island bookstore was sustained. The Island Bookstore" healed A.J. Fikry and touched all those who read with its healing warmth.

The third life: leave the island and start a new life, a life with infinite possibilities.

Fikry is a reclusive person, his reading taste is unique, he hates all celebrity biographies, success stories, gossip, and books that sell, and he also hates tourists, which is not at all good for his island bookstore operation. But there is no denying that when he returned to his hometown with his wife to open the bookstore, it touched the people of the island. The very existence of the island bookstore carries warmth with it.

If he hadn't met Nicole and accompanied her to the island, Fikry would probably have been a cynical doctor of literature living somewhere else for the rest of his life. At the beginning of the section "The Tell-Tale Heart" of the book "The Island Bookshop", a letter from Fikry to Maya mentions that for years after his wife Nicole left, he often imagined what his life would have been like if he had finished his doctorate and had not come to the island.

Life is like that, there are many choices and many unpredictable encounters. If he had not come to the island or left it after his wife's death, life would have looked completely different. But if that were the case, there would probably be no bookstore on the island, or at least no Fikry's version of the island bookstore, which is a unique presence. That's not what readers want either, and that's probably why The Island Bookshop is a bestseller.

Life encounters, with warmth

Conclusion: A different way of thinking can lead to a very different path in life.

The Island Bookstore" is a hodgepodge, perhaps not as good as the reviews say, and not much depth, but it depicts a life that is so real, the greatest misfortune of human beings is not knowing that they are happy. Although there was a painful loss of a loved one, love and happiness do not end abruptly.

Nietzsche said: Everyone should know what he lives for, and then he can endure any kind of life, and deeply believe it. For all that you have, only love can see happiness for itself, ups and downs as well as bland and unexceptional, are real life. Sometimes treat life, maybe bold, life encounters are different, not caught in the inner dilemma, go out to meet love, get love, give love is the success of life.

A.J. Fikry's life was rooted in a small island bookstore, and his joy was in the books, which was a blessing.

Life is unpredictable, but peace of mind is the only place to return.