Let The Right One In

What an absolutely stellar book! I Loved everything about it. 5/5!

We often forget the beauty around us by constantly worrying about what other people think. My looks, my status, my hair! Am I good enough, too old, a wonky smile today? Have I pissed someone off I don't really know or even care about?

Somewhat reminiscent of I Am Legend in its oblique pointlessness and loneliness. Such beautiful sadness, endlessness, doom, death, deceit, destruction. Feelings are whispers in the air, carried away with the wind, dissipated, thrown to the elements, with nothing but ultimate vacuum, gone forever.

It's going badly because it's going well, if you know what I mean? You can't perceive it, but you're madly in love. Life is for living, death is for taking, never giving back. We will all know one day; we are all equal, we will all be called in the end.

If you want to know what this book is about, it's about struggle, it's about love. It's about death. It's about the fleeting beauty of life before the inevitable and, if it's worth expressing, it's worth letting go, not to be held tight but let loose with every breath, each exhalation more precious than the last.

Dostoyevsky said:

"Someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once!"

No matter how painful life is, whatever the cost, longevity being irrespective, we need to grab every ounce we can.

This is an exceptional book because life is exceptional too; it's all we have, nothing else. Every minute is worth a thousand deaths, every laugh a million bleats in the slaughterhouse. Love, more important than an intergalactic implosion.

Phenomenal.

As to the corresponding movies, the fantastic 2008 Swedish version is all you need. Forget the Hollywood remake, learn to love subtitles instead. The TV series? No idea, don't care, surplus to my requirements.

As to the title "Let The Right One In": the permission granted, or not, to a vampire before it can enter your space. The permission granted by Oskar to Eli to enter his room, for them to become close.