I read Jojo Moyes Me Before You, too. How am I better than half the world? From here, I have two ways - either to wrinkle my face to an intelligent state and say it's cheap fun and even yesterday's doughnut, sprinkled with pink bourgeois pollen of rapid saturation, or not.
Well, whether or not, because Moyes' book was very good. Of course, it is not one of those books that receive literary awards for the courage to portray something in something, as well as an amazing language and immortalization, say, suffering, but within the framework of its genre, it has done a lot. A love story is actually a terribly conservative genre, there hasn't been much change here, perhaps since the time of "Ethiopia" (he, she, running to the heart with obstacles and sacrifices), and it's impossible to say that Moyes has fundamentally changed something structural and sewn a love story with some new leg, no - the main merit of this book is that, that it is technically flawlessly cut from a few important memes of previous literature and each of them is very qualitatively put upside down, so that the plot seems to be quite popular, but all that he is carefully so summed up, in verification turns out to be turned to the reader a completely different barrel.
From here will start spoilers, so if you do not read the book, do not read and here.
By the way, the plot: Will Traynor is a rich man, such a mini version of the hero Richard Gere from the movie "The Pretty Woman" - he sells and buys, turns millions and engages in all active sports, including sex with a long-legged blonde. But one day he is knocked down by a motorcyclist and Will remains completely paralyzed from neck to neck.
Lou Clark is a regular working-class girl. Her father works as a security guard in a factory, her mother is a housewife and my sister is pregnant. Lou is the only one who brings home sane money because her father is about to be cut, but here she loses her job. She has no education, she has nothing but a jovial character and so she is hired as a nurse in the Traynor family - or even more like a companion: to read, talk, take her to the doctor, wash, wash, clean. And it would have been good if Will hadn't dreamt of killing himself and Lou had to convince him somehow.
It's an understandable heroine.
Of course, even the most successful love affair wouldn't live without a new type of heroine. Just like last year shot a pretty stereotyped in the plot thriller "Girl on the train" - just because his heroine instead of boobs and diploma in quantum physics was an eternal hangover and a heavy divorce in the history - and in "Before I met you" the heroine looks more or less real. She lives with parents who love, of course, but her dad kindly calls her lardarse, her mother indulges her younger sister in everything, and her sister not only knocked up but also, bitch, takes away the best room in the house, because, you see, she has a child, and the money in the house earns one Lou, etc., etc. We have here, in general, a proletarian family, which would fit not only in a tiny English town but also in Bibirevo. Our heroine is a fatty (by modern standards), she has problems with her family, she has no money and her boyfriend is running marathons and eating only protein shakes and turkey breasts. In an ideal media space, the stories of successful and beautiful women who do yoga, do it themselves, know eight languages, start their own business, marry in an Italian palazzo and have a hundred thousand followers in the installation. But if you go beyond the limits of the installation, you can see that there are many more bibiroves in the world than the Italian palazzos, and there live solid lou Clark, sazhoopki, who have to choose between working in a poultry factory and wiping other people's asses.
That's exactly what Lou's life is all about - along with its absolute acceptability (Moyes doesn't show Lou's life as a continuous horror-horror, no, all right, okay, her parents love her, her nephew is normal, she likes her little cozy English bibirevo, people live here too, and not even with dog heads, and she would work at a local cafe all her life, just because she likes it here) and makes "Before I met you" almost real. There are no sharp corners, no caricature, no black-and-white confrontation - before you were all bad and life was spiked with needles of drug addicts, graffiti and unemployment, and after you I got money and new filters for life - lo-fi there, and capuccino. Even Lou's personal tragedy, which prevented her from flying to Australia and trying on some other surroundings, does not look distinctly, literary and horrible - and from this daily routine and looks really, terribly understandable. This fashionable idea, which everyone has already conceived before the holes, that we should move forward and open up new horizons, is not so striking, because on the example of Lou, the heroine who grew up in the world from where every successful woman in the idea of running away to her own startup and not looking back to the finish line, Moyes shows that, in general, she is much more adapted to life than Will. And not because Will is disabled, but because giving up Courchevel is like driving him out of paradise: no skis, no cartoons, all the corms, no pain, and immobility, because only Lou could survive in a world the size of a sandbox, Will didn't fit there - phantom skis prevented him from doing so. And since most of us have a world equal to a plus or minus sandbox, our predictions are better than Will's anyway.
To be continued...
Part 2: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d72fb3934808200affa5052/me-before-you-by-moyes-part-2-5d935b4dc05c7100affa35f9