The Answer To The Riddle Is Me

       "You fight and search and fight and search, and when you give up, you find yourself sitting next to what you've been looking for. And it recognizes you before you recognize it."- David Stuart Maclean

         We all have questions, we're constantly searching for answers, for the meaning in everything, it's what we do. We're born with a burning curiosity that compels us to learn as much as we can about everything. It's that curiosity that sometimes forces to take a step back and really look at ourselves. "Who am I? Why am I the way I am? Why can't I be better? What do I do now?" In this book, "The Answer To The Riddle Is Me" by David Stuart Maclean we are forced to focus on those tough questions right along with David; but those questions get asked from a whole new perspective and forces us to ask all new questions. 

       From the very first page the reader gets sucked into David's story of amnesia. He lets us experience the terror of waking up in a foreign country with no knowledge of who you are or why you're there. The first person that David runs into is a police officer who assumes that David is a drug addict, and David not knowing anything different, believes him. Being a drug addict brings him one step closer to possibly figuring out who he is.

      "I was relieved. I should've known. This was the kind of trouble drug addicts ended up in all the time. It was serious, but I was thankful that this police officer had let me know who I was and that I wasn't to be trusted. I knew who I was. He had given me a key to my identity. I didn't have a name, but I knew what kind of person I was." - page 7.

      As the story continues we find out that the amnesia  was a side effect of his malaria vaccine and not caused by a drug binge. This is where things start to get really tricky and the main question isn't just who am I but who was I then? During the rest of the book we get to be David's shadow, following him back home, we get to try to discover who pre amnesia David was right along side him. 

      "I could recognize these people in these photographs as me, but I felt a distance between us. They could all just as easily have been a chorus of doppelgangers. I felt myself slipping, worried that I'd never recover, that I'd be this wood-glue-filled pinata for the rest of my life. And then if I did recover, if I got everything back, who knew if it would happen again? How many times would I end up touring the exhibits of my curated self?"-page 92

      This book makes you stop and think about what your life would look like in the eyes of a stranger. If you had a chance to start over would the new you want to leave the old you behind? Was the old you happy? Were you the person that you always wanted to be? Life is short, you never know when it'll end, you never know how long your loved ones have, did you love enough? If you had to pick up the pieces would you be proud of what you find? It's a perspective that few of us really experience and through David's story we can ask ourselves the same questions that he asks himself. His story is gripping, terrifying and beautiful.

     "In the chaos of this world, where we carom and collide in the everyday turbulence, there's something about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound."- David Stuart Maclean