U Bien Bridge - Mandalay

Pagodas of Bagan

Yangon Harbour

Swedagon Pagoda - Yangon

Pagodas of Bagan (02)

Inya Lake - Yangon

It is definitely another outstanding work of Coelho.  He vividly captured man’s basic necessity of life, by combining reality and esoteric experience.  Reading this book like we are riding our heart’s roller coaster in soul searching on our existence of being human in the midst ambiguity of everyday life.

The story is about a young, beautiful and intelligent middle class girl, who seems too satiated in her everyday life.  She has her life in front of her, being too predictable and too flat.  Having past of her life always “play” safe and try to make everybody’s happy (in particular her parents).  Than one lonely evening she decided to end her life by taking pills.

Failing her suicidal attempted, that she hospitalized in a mental hospital in Lubljana (Slovenia Capital).  This is when the whole story is constructed which each fragments have fill out her curiosity of her most existence.  She fell in love with a schizophrenic boy.  She got closed acquaintance with a depressed self compulsive lawyer.  She be friend with cognitive emotional disturbed mother.  Not withstanding that she lived and surrounded by numbers of mental disorder people. But what is the most essential that she is an experience of Life itself.  How the endless craving of dead can become a cure to appreciate and embrace life as it is.

For me reading this kind of book has evoked my consciousness of life.  Because sometimes I can be lonely in my busyness and sure I can be lonely in the crowd, but in the oblivion of my loneliness, I still have zillion things need to be thanked for.  For me Life is just a collection of moments, some are ours and some are what we might have been.  Just like it self, the road are meant to be for the journey not for destination …