Messages...the joy of decoding

Messages by Lynn Rees and Sara Salway

Messages is a very different read and the first of its kind that I have read. Well most of the books i read these days are through chance encounters. Strutted away of the new arrival display section of the British Council Library, this book, through its cover almost like the Archies Gift Wrapping paper diverted my attention. I picked it up and was immediately hooked on to it. The plan is unique. Three hundred e-mail messages, each of 300 words were exchanged. And these messages make up the book. The topics range from Love, death, chocolate, sex, life, anything.
When i started reading the book, the sheer brilliance of the project got deciphered. Each of these e-mails can (and i am sure is) be taken as separate, distinguished, disjointed and non-connected pieces of information or write-ups. But linking them one after the other, where the linking point sometimes was the theme, sometimes mere word, characters spiced up the game. Where one e-mail ends with the mention of spoons and forks-kitchen cutlery, in the following messages, these two objects are taken up again, now to become symbols for a couple's decaying relationship.
And you slowly realize the sheer ingenuity of the authors. In fact, as you are reading the book, you take up this project of linking the themes, stitching them together and embark on this journey of weaving a plot working through this meshwork of apparently disjointed messages. This challenge of decoding dissimilarity and encoding them to a narrative form-something we are so familiar with, is what we attempt to do. The of conditioning of reading dished out, plot narratives, almost shook me off when is started reading Messages. I just could not take each message and each page as and how it appears-singular, alone yet ringing in a theme of familiarity. The familiarity with its preceding one, immediately prompts you to link the two and embark on this journey of making sense in totality, in the congruence of all , where surprisingly, there was no congruence to be arrived at by its conscious design.
It was a wonderful experience to read Messages-a unique one though.
My suggestion, when you take up reading Messages.. just sit with a mug of coffee and smoothly read through the pages, not in sequence, but just like sifting through----that will create the fun, since soon you will feel the urge of reading in sequence, the challenge to connect them, the anguish to find discord when you have mentally framed few of the messages into a sequential narrative, sudden take off by one message, the crescendos and the diminuendos of your enthusiasm as you are at times successful in cracking it and at most times when you fail, due to some, naughty, arrogant message, who dares to interfere in your way of forming a story... all these and much more...

Read it to enjoy..