Review

How do you decide if a book is (or has been) a life changing book?
For me, if a book changes how I look at life or gives me a new way of doing some thing, then I call it life-changing. The thing that it enables me to differently has to be something that matters to me.

This book is a life-changing book for me. Which is a bit weird because I did not pick this book thinking it would.

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I picked this book, because I had just finished reading [[202604261903 Children of Strife|Children of Strife]], and wanted to read something light and breezy - a romantic story. I searched on the library and this one seemed interesting - a story about an immigrant couple in a big city and their quest to find a home.

I don’t know if this was fiction or just a biography or a diary.

The book has 100+ short chapters, each talking about a thing. There are multiple sub-plots and strands that run through the entire book, but each chapter contains a single story in it.

The writing is gorgeous. The way the language flows and sounds.

And above all, it seemed so relatable to me. So many things that I feel or have felt over the past five years since I moved to Helsinki. Like the constant feeling of not being there for our parents, like feeling like foreigners here, like wanting to be friends with the locals.

We follow Ayse, who is a freelance documentarian, and the thing that she wants to capture is the beauty of every day life. To do that she visits the park and talks to people every day. Some of these interviews are interspersed throughout the book. She, her husband, Manu and their friend Ravi form a unit.

The story evolves slowly, and patiently. There are no high-stakes here. Just life.

It reminded me a bit of [[202409201237 A Prayer for the Crown-Shy|A Prayer for the Crown-Shy]] and how it was similarly low-stake.

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The reason why I called it life-changing is because it showed me that writing about life does not have to be boring or written as if we are documenting something.

Stories are everywhere. Stories are the point. I don’t need to say I went there, saw this, did this, then that. It can be more.