Living Backwards

I had just read The Effect of Living Backwards by author Heidi Julavits. The story is about Alice and Edith who are dissimilar sisters, one bookish and good, the other sexy and promiscuous. They are on a plane over North Africa en route to Edith's wedding to a Spanish ex-prince when it is hijacked by a band of terrorists lead by a blind man, Bruno. The book moves back and forth between the verbal sparring and pasts of the sisters and the psychological games played by the hijackers.

It is contemporary look at Lewis Carroll's work Through the Looking Glass. A passage extracted from it,

"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day"," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," Alice said. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first -"

There are many thought provoking moments in the story, much like the fantasy in Alice in Wonderland:

"If you blubber at a movie," she persisted, " are you experiencing actual suffering? No. It's a facsimile of an emotion. We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking backwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does it say about potential?"

Perhaps it is right about how people tend to dwell too much about what has happened in the past and fail to move on in life.