Book #153: The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
Matt Haig
Released: September 3rd, 2024
My 19th book for 2026 was Matt Haig’s "The Life Impossible".
I first got into Matt Haig about a year ago. My ex had me read "The Midnight Library". I wasn't sure what to make of it, but after reading it all in less than a day, I knew it was pure gold. The other good news: They just announced that there will be a Midnight Library movie in development soon. Super exciting news.
The funny thing about Midnight Library is that it's a self-reflective tale. Often times in this negative and depressing world, we're left feeling hopeless. As if things simply will never get better or pining for a different life altogether.
This one is a little bit different. 72-year-old Grace Winters has been left a house in Ibiza by a former colleague named Christina van der Berg, that she took care of by inviting over to celebrate Christmas one year. Upon arrival, Grace discovers that Christina was well ahead in knowledge of her passing, and left her a trail of clues to find the ultimate revelation of her demise.
I really enjoyed a lot of the quotes and passages from this book. Lots of strong wisdom, something missing from today's world. I wanted to highlight some of them here:
"There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been."
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"I certainly never became rich, in the conventional sense, as you can see from this modest house. But I have had a rich life, and discovered things I never could have dreamed of."
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"I am also a person who now realizes that our human understanding of the world is incredibly limited, and that there is a bias not to believe things that don't fit our worldview. What I am saying is that sometimes we can't accept the truth that is right in front of our eyes. And that sometimes the mad people of one era become the sages of the next."
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"The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped. And that was my conclusion. The problem hadn't been Lincoln, or the bungalow, or my situation. The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same aging body with my same cuddled memories, I was my own life sentence."
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"The point of desperations is often the point of truth."
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"Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."
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"Visualize your dreams, and make them reality."
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"Maybe that's the truly ridiculous thing, the way we don't even blink at the sheer improbability of our lives here on this rock spinning through space. The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing, an here we are, the impossible something that made existence out of the void. Impossible life. A fluke to be cherished."
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I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. it turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion."
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"Just because something happened, you are under no obligation to believe it."
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"The only thing I ask is that you leave a door open in your mind to possibility. We are never at the finish line of understanding. There is always something about life and the universe that we are still to discover. That has been the ultimate lesson for me."
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"It's so strange that we don't want spoilers in our stories but se seek them in our lives."
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This book was really interesting. It's not The Midnight Library, but it strikes out in it's own way. Matt Haig books so far have shown a great deal of in-depth thought, and just rational thoughts that might not occur to us right away. He ideals that we are much smaller than our egos allow us to believe we are is absolutely correct.
I was working as a Barnes & Noble Cafe Barista at the Francis Scott Key Mall in Frederick, MD when this book came out in September 2024. I sold several copies of these books. We had a table set up, and when people would ask for their coffee, I would strike up reading conversations, I would ask what they were reading. If they were unsure, I heavily pushed The Midnight Library, and added that The Life Impossible was the brand new novel by Haig. Gotta love those customer services skills, especially for things you enjoy in your spare time. The saddest thing is, I only ever bought two books with the discount. Jaws, and this book.
Here is what I learned:
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- To the Island and People of Ibiza.
- Mrs. Winters taught math at Hollybrook.
- Maurice is 22 and in her final year at college studying mathematics.
- Her mom passed away, and her girlfriend broke up with her.
- The old woman had been alone since April 2nd, 1992.
- The old lady and her husband accrued £23,390.27 in life savings.
- Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure.
- Grace has been left a property in Ibiza from Christina Van Der Berg.
- Christina’s maiden name was Papadakis.
- Grace gave Christina a memorable Christmas in school.
- Christina died at sea.
- “No two legs are ever the same, even on the same person. Even if they look identical. The veins are always a different pattern.”
- “There are two kinds of ghosts that torment you when a young person dies. The ghost of who they were, and the ghosts of who they could have been.”
- Karl was Grace’s husband.
- He passed away at age 11.
- His favorite band was Black Sabbath.
- “The word 'eras entered my mind and didn't leave. I thought about how you enter a new one. Not just by stepping back through rows of headstones in a cemetery but in your own living existence. How you need to create a distinct break with what has gone before.”
- Ibiza is a Spanish island.
- The taxi driver knows the house Grace is going to.
- The most expensive restaurant in the world is in Ibiza.
- Ibiza is an island of salt.
- They harvest the salt in Ses Salines.
- Taxi Drivers in Ibiza double as tour guides and historians.
- “Mucho gusto” means “nice to meet you” in Spanish.
- “Buena Suerte” means “good luck” in Spanish.
- A Fiat Panda is broken down outside the Ibiza house.
- Books inside the house include a translation of “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse, and “Tao Te Ching”, some Agatha Christie, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, “Zorba the Greek”, poems of Calvary, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Isabella Allenda, the Ultimate Guide to Psychic Power” and “La Vida Imposible” by Alberto Ribas.
- I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what's on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest book-shelves, not the fancy ornamental kind.
- The Count of Monte Cristo is the best book Grace has ever read.
- “[I] certainly never became rich, in the conventional sense, as you can see from this modest house. But I have had a rich life, and discovered things I never could have dreamed of.”
Places Christina recommends:
- Get lost in the narrow lanes of Dalt Vila.
- Take a hike from Cala Sant Vicent along the old pilgrim’s path to Tanit’s Cave.
- See the horses at sanctuary at Es Murta.
- Go to the north and surround yourself with pine trees.
- See the flamingos at Ses Salines.
- Head to the Las Dalias hippy market.
- Hop on the boat to Formentera and take note of the lighthouse.
- Drink a shot of Hierbas Ibicencas at a bar in a hilltop village.
- See the drummers at Benirràs beach at sunset.
- Get your shopping from the grocery store at Santa Gertrudis.
- Drive to the old stone fountain known as the Font de Peralta and catch a traditional Ibicenco peasant dance.
- Go dancing yourself. Just once. Age matters not a bit here.
- Have fun.
- Oh, and most important of all: go to Atlantis Scuba at Cala a Hort.
- Grace also inherited the Fiat.
- “I am also a person who now realises that our human understanding of the world is incredibly limited, and that there is a bias not to believe things that don't fit our worldview. What I am saying is that sometimes we can't accept the truth that is right in front of our eyes. And that sometimes the mad people of one era become the sages of the next.”
- Georg Cantor came up with Set Theory at the end of the nineteenth century.
- Grace is not a tattoo person, seeing it as a “generational thing”.
- Johan was Christina’s husband. An old Dutch hippy.
- She had a daughter who now lived in Amsterdam.
- Lieke Van Der Berg is her daughter. She is a famous musician.
- Grace is 72 years old.
- Daniel’s favorite films are The Temple of Doom and Return of the Jedi.
- Christina was at Freddy Mercury’s 41st birthday party at Pike’s Hotel in 1986.
- Alberto Ribas was one of the first people to bring attention to microplastics in the water.
- “A teacher once told me it prayers aren't reaching God, it was because they had been blocked by your own sin.”
- The Las Dalias hippy market is about what San Francisco looked like in 1967.
- Alberto Ribas was questioned in Christina’s death.
- Atlantic Scuba does not exist according to Grace’s navigation.
- Alberto owns a snake.
- Dolphins are pleasure machines.
- “And dolphins really like to f*ck.”
- Grace Kelly had her honeymoon in Ibiza.
- “This is Ibiza. No one is too old for anything. There is a ninety-year-old who dances at Pacha every single night."
- “There is no such thing as a pure present in this book of life. You can always see the words from the page before, their inky shadows darkening what is in front of you. Or at least dulling it.”
- “The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped. And that was my conclusion. The problem hadn't been Lincoln, or the bungalow, or my situation. The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.”
- “The point of desperation is often the point of truth.”
- “When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don't meet ourselves in the light and air. We don't understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.”
- The East Midlands English are raised to have self-consciousness as a virtue.
- “There are many things that people have thought were not real that turned out to be very real. Up until near the end of the nineteenth century, every marine scientist on Earth was convinced that life couldn't exist more than five hundred metres below sea level. Then they discovered it went all the way down and it was a shock. A big shock.”
- “Reality is merely an illusion. A very persistent one. I think that is what Einstein said. Sometimes the illusion is the reality we don't understand yet.”
- “Can you imagine believing in Earth if you were someone who had never been there?”
- Every even number is the sum of two primes.
- Hispanic peopl pronounce “Jesus” [Hey-Zeus].
- Alberto enjoys paprika crisps.
- “The only thing you have to believe at this point is that there is a possibility that we don't know every single thing about life in the universe. That we aren't so arrogant as to think that this particular point in history is the one where we know all there is to be known. Is that possible?”
- Carlos Guerrero was the Guardia Civil Officer Grace met.
- Carlos loves FC Barcelona and hates Real Madrid.
- He has reoccurring dreams of being urinated on by a lion.
- “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
- Johan acted like it was still 1967 in 1987.
- “Visualize your dreams and make them reality.”
- Grace has visions of a lobster.
- “When everyone has the same miracle, you devalue it.”
- Taylor Swift has a song called “Mirrorball”.
- Frankenstein is Grace’s 2nd favorite book.
- Grace has 123,210 hairs on her head.
- Some great DJ’s are Carl Cox, Amelie Lens, Adam Beyer, and Paco Osuna.
- There is a goat outside Atlantis Scuba.
- “Maybe that's the truly ridiculous thing, the way we don't even blink at the sheer improbability of our lives here on this rock spinning through space. The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing, and here we are, the impossible something that made existence out of the void. Impossible life. A fluke to be cherished.”
- Michael and Olive Cotswold are a British couple on holiday in Ibiza s they await a biopsy on Michael.
- Hugo kills a goat with a gun.
- Some mystical force lodged a fork in customer Brian’s leg while the lobster tank screams out.
- The seawater from La Presencia grants telekinesis.
- The phrase “brave new works” comes from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.
- The church in Es Cubells is beautiful.
- Reptiles are the truest, most noble and poorest of all creatures.
- Francisco Palau wrote a manuscript in October 1855,
- “For instance, whenever I read an autobiography - Maya Angelou or Anne Frank or Richard Feynman or whomever - I feel a kind of empathy, where a tiny part of me becomes for a short while the person I am reading about.”
- “I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.”
- John 1:5 says “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
- Christina made it to Salacia.
- In the 1930’s, a fisherman named Joan Bonanoba was saved by La Presencia.
- Grace sees the world in numbers and calculations as I do.
- Alberto enjoys Reggaeton.
- There is a while that calls out at a frequency of 52 hertz.
- The text came from 271-8281.
- It is a reference to Euler’s number.
- The difference between a gift and a curse was sometimes just a question of perspective.
- I realized there are no islands. If you go far down enough, everything is connected.
- Christina’s maiden name is Papadakis.
- Grace hasn’t been to a nightclub since 1980.
- Diego came to the island in the summer of 1988 which was a big summer there.
- Diego is a pothead.
- “Just because something happened, you are under no obligation to believe it.”
- “The only thing I ask is that you leave a door open in your mind to possibility. We are never at the finish line of understanding. There is always something about life and the universe that we are still to discover. That has been the ultimate lesson for me.“
- “It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives.”
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Overall, another strong book from Matt Haig. It doesn't match his previous outing, but certainly tells an entertaining tale that is sure to enlighten masses of happy readers.
Recommended
On to Book #153: Midnight Graffiti by Various
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Need to catch up? See previous blog post: Hey...Wait a Minute. I Wrote a Book!
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Want to read more of this author? See the other posts below:
The Life Impossible
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