A Fair Shot

 Review by Ronica Wahi

You: The World of Thoughts Matters

By Rose S. White

First published: September 29, 2019, Independently Published.

Kindle Edition Pages: 158. 

ASIN: B07Y5YJ13K

You: The World of Thoughts Matters lends, as the title clearly tells, worth to the world created by thoughts, different from the physical world that all beings inhabit. In one instance, the protagonist and narrator Mei tells of a colourful mix that she creates by throwing numerous colours on a white canvas. How she progresses with this painting parallels the progression of her thoughts at this point, and her work begins to reflect the state of her mind, the happenings in her world of thoughts. From dejection and sadness, she moves to gradually achieving control and beauty in what she finally sees and interprets.

This particular instance is an important one in the world of Mei that Rose S. White creates for the reader. White shows around one year of Mei’s life, framed between the authorial voice in the introductory bit before Chapter I, in Chapter III, and in the Author’s Epilogue, wherein she, as Lara White, directly addresses the reader and shares her thoughts about her own life, craft, and desires.

The character Mei, in her voice, presents her world of thoughts which is a world that is quite real to her for it’s an integral part of her existence and plays an instrumental role in what happens to her within the space of the narrative. Mei is doing well professionally, which indicates that she is a woman committed to pocketing achievements and bettering her life. However, the narrative shows her preoccupation primarily with what happens in her personal domain – there is loneliness even when she is in a relationship, a lack of excitement and contentment, a yearning for finding someone she would truly cherish having in her life, and a cruel dashing of her hopes that eventually leads her to want to exercise more control over her world of thoughts and the world where she physically resides.

Mei’s story asserts that success and a home even in a place as wonderful as Rueschlikon, voted Switzerland’s best neighbourhood, is no guarantee of happiness or gratification, and that positive transformation and mental peace can be achieved with introspection, with realization that a “made-up puzzle” is not reality, with acceptance of what has been, what is, and what will or will not be, with change of perspective, and with keeping up of hope.

Among other things, Mei ruminates over what constitutes happiness in this digital era; the varying sorts and degrees of priorities people have; the fact that staying in a romantic relationship is important for social validation; how we tend to place good looking people on a pedestal and view them and their lives as compromised solely of positives; and how a singular event or person can be a catalyst for altering our frame of mind, our level of energy, our engagement with how we appear, and even the colour of the clothes we wear!

The work is structured the way thoughts flow – organized at times, difficult to control or redirect at times even with efforts towards distraction, interspersed with random mental checks or observations about people or events, and tending to take a specific track in the face of encounters with objects – such as the red ladybird for Mei - having pointed associations in memory or evoking different reactions at different points in time with the variance in circumstances.

Despite picking up relevant themes for the contemporary audience, including loneliness, monotony, perils of online dating, lingering dissatisfaction, and despite adopting the well-appreciated stream of consciousness kind of style, this novel, sadly, fails to leave much impact. This World of Thoughts is not as colourful as the cover or Mei’s painting would suggest; the monotony in Mei’s life seems to have been transferred onto the text itself. True, one sort of thoughts preoccupy Mei but too much focus for a substantial proportion of the text on the same aspect of her life prevents the story from having variety and action. At one level, the text reflecting the sentiment is a good factor, but here, the monotony takes away from the connection that the story could have otherwise established with the reader.

Moreover, while many readers would identify with the experiences of Mei and agree with her viewpoints, some others, perhaps, may find her general outlook too boring or too resigned for someone about 30 years old. The novel has many errors – missing words, incorrect word choices, ambiguities and lack of agreement in pronoun usages, and typos. There are slight inconsistencies too, such as in Mei’s age, which is around 30 and mid 30s at different points in the narrative, when covered is just one year of time.

The overall content, the language, and the grammar should have undergone thorough editing and proofreading before You: The World of Thoughts Matters was actually published. A lot more effort and time were necessary for chiselling and polishing this work for it to have become an achievement. Nevertheless, it does show that White does have potential as a writer.

Not very exciting but it’s a fair work, suited for a lazy afternoon and the like.

Check out You: The World of Thoughts Matters here:

Amazon India link for You: The World of Thoughts Matters (Paperback, Import): https://amzn.to/3AqRe3f

Amazon India link for You: The World of Thoughts Matters (Kindle): https://amzn.to/3uYWKJc

 

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