the curious incident
of the dog
in the night-time
by Mark Haddon
Fiction
First published in 2003
¡@
"Five red
cars mean that it is going to be a
Super
Good Day" ¡@
Christopher John Francis Boone is 15 and
lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a
form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock
Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he
discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the
mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good
detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the
mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family. ¡@
I
read this book last year. This is Mark Haddon's debut novel
which was written in the first-person narrative of Christopher
John Francis Boone. I still remember I had once wrote a
composition talking about a man who deeply believed he was sick
but indeed he was just paranoid. I wrote this story by using
first-person narration and I had got an 'A' and my English teacher
said if I continuously wrote this way, I could really do something
about it! Well... apparently I can't!
¡@
This is both an interesting and touching story.
¡@
Interesting .... Christopher
is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a
working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their
child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at
face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his
elders and peers. He quoted a number of famous puzzles of
maths and logic. Besides, he numbered his chapters strictly
with prime numbers, ignoring composite numbers such as 4 and 6. So
the first is Chapter 2, followed by 3, then 5, 7, 11, and so on.
¡@
Touching .... Christopher's
father loves him very much. I don't want to reveal too much
about the story but what sores me is that Christopher cannot
comprehend human emotion and he has still not completely forgiven
and trusted his father at the end of the story. I love dogs,
have 2 myself, though, I have forgiven Ed Boone and felt for him
that he couldn't win back his son's trust. ¡@
This is a must-read, unlike Forrest Gump, Christopher Boone is a
real autistic kid. I read some reviews about this book and
came across one which was written by a real autistic (or so he
claimed) who said "Mark Haddon absolutely 'got it right' in
this book". ¡@
Read an extract
here.. ¡@ |