Thursday, February 5, 2015

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion


A Valentine’s Day Selection. 

 
This should have been our selection for February 2015 at the Brown Bag Book Club.[1] 

As you can see from the citations below, this won an “unpublished” book award in Australia (?).  The author sold the movie rights {but no movie}.  He did get an Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting in 2013, and when he wrote the sequel, he got, in 2014, a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing; both from the University of Melborne. [This was not his undergraduate, but his graduate school.]

I can’t recall what prompted me to order this book – I actually bought it. 

This is another entry into the genre-world of O/C behavior comedies.  The protagonist is off the charts of “normal” and the reader is encouraged to feel sympathetic as one might to a child with-learning disabilities.  Robin or Padma could comment on what variations are being portrayed.  The plot line is a basic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl: a romantic comedy.

Like Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he's appealing not just despite his eccentricities but because of them.  We read that book in this group back in June 2005 (see next page for what I wrote then).

The O/C behavior just spices up an otherwise standard R/C plotline that has been done for as long as I can remember: movies like “It Happened One Night”, or anything with Tracy and Hepburn; stage plays like with Burton and Taylor.  This is the basic essence of writing for social communication – Conflict – Yin and Yang – Opposites Attract – Salt and Pepper.

 

The predictability of the storyline is only matched by our, the reader’s, capacity to insatiably digest an infinite set of variations on this popular theme.

 

It’s a fun read.

 

I will offer up the paperback this Thursday in out book group.


 

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time           June 2005 Brown Bag

For me, Christopher’s way of thinking is natural, obvious, and the only logical way to view the world.

I took a scientific and mathematical training path all through school and in my career work.  I look at the physical aspects of the world through the lens of the laws of science, and I see the art and beauty of the world through mathematics.

I could easily and comfortably be just like him, except his behavior patterns have been “socialized” out of me from birth.  His is the natural way to look at life.

 

Books like this give one pause to stop and wonder about life.  Maybe that “retard” you’re either feeling sorry for or trying to trip is the next Stephen Hawking¥, world’s greatest genius in Cosmology.  Christopher and Hawking have different problems at the base of their “uniqueness” from other people.  What they do have in common, though, is focus.  It does seem that people who are lacking in some areas tend to focus their unused energy in other areas.  For Hawking and Christopher, the areas are mathematics and science.

I don’t want to tread into the more religious aspects of life & death, but one lesson to be appreciated from this cute short story is that all life is precious.  No life is beyond exclusion from respect and consideration and everyone needs to be given as many chances as possible to succeed in their chosen areas.  How do we know who will be the next Stephen Hawking?

The other lesson is that there is always hope for salvation from one’s demons, but it may take a lifetime, as it will for the father who has murdered an innocent dog and lied about a child’s mother, all caused by uncontrolled anger and jealous passion

I am also reminded of the movie, “Liar, Liar,” Jim Carrey, 1997, where Fletcher Reede must speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  It results in uncomfortable situations like in our book, when the police sergeant wants Christopher to say that he didn’t mean to hit the policeman, but he can’t say that because he did intend to hit him and he can’t lie. 

Part of the transition from childhood to adulthood is the graying of the spaces between truths and lies.  It seems that full adulthood represents the ability to never quite tell the truth.  The more respected and powerful the position: politician, media person, corporate president, even President Of The United States; the higher they go, the more these people have been seduced by the dark side of the force.  It is a sad commentary that concomitant with the lengthening noses of those on top, is the population’s willingness to accept the lies.

The truth is often a bitter pill to swallow, but we’re better off to take it when the doctor orders.

 

It was said of Diogenes that throughout his life he "searched with a lantern in the daylight for an honest man." And though Diogenes apparently did not find an honest man, he had, in the process, "exposed the vanity and selfishness of man." (The Chambers Dictionary.)

 



[1] Simsion won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book, The Rosie Project. Text Publishing has sold the rights to the book internationally for over $1.8m. The Rosie Project was published in Australia in January 2014, and has since sold more than a million copies in over forty countries around the world. The screenplay has been optioned to Sony Pictures Entertainment. A sequel to The Rosie Project, titled The Rosie Effect, was published on 24 September 2014 by Text Publishing.
Prior to writing fiction he was an information systems consultant and wrote two books and several papers about data-modelling. He established a consulting business in 1982 and sold it in 1999. At that time Simsion Bowles and Associates had over seventy staff. He co-founded a wine distribution business, Pinot Now with Steven Naughton.
From 2002–2006, as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, he conducted the largest published study of data modelling practitioners (489 participants, most with substantial industry experience), to address the question 'Is data modelling better characterized as description or design?' The research included interviews with thought leaders, surveys of practitioners, and practical modelling tasks.
He concluded that, in contrast to the assumption implicit in most data modelling research, data modelling is best characterized as a design discipline (the term design is used in the broad sense of design theory, rather than its more narrow and casual usage in the information systems field). His work was published as his PhD thesis Data Modeling: Description or Design, University of Melbourne, 2006 and in Data Modeling Theory and Practice (Technics Publications, 2007).
 
¥ Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.  http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html