The silver lining we all want exists in anne of green gables by lm montgomery

Faded by the time I pick up to read it, Anne of Green Gables is such a delightful book that I felt myself falling in reveries every time I sat, lied down or walked up and down to read it.

Childhood is full of glorious things that you think up amidst the mystery of the world that surrounds you; but by the time you grow older, you seem to forget most of it. A buildungsromane by all means, Anne gave me every impetus to feel purely and imaginatively; and she also somewhere made me realise how reveries are deeply embedded in realities characterised by many losses and absences.

To my utter shock, in the cold winter days when I picked up this Puffin edition to comfort me, hazed by the slowly moving fogs, I fell into day dreaming, so much. And it alarmed me, after all I am not the 13-year old Anne, but a 28-year old woman, by society’s all engulfing standards.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Published by Puffin Classics.

But I fell into long expansions of time in my room nevertheless, letting my mind go from one memory to another resulting in connections that amazed and jolted me from those time warps.

The book swims in and out of endless series of episodes, each one being a learning experience and a deep excercise in romance. How Anne sees the bright side of every bad thing has happened to her as a child is something you don’t usually come across nowadays in novels (my last read, Story of A New Name being a case in point).

There is this one incidence that struck me in particular in the novel and which ties the whole narrative so beautifully that there is definitely a lesson to learn here if writing a story is what you’re after. In the course of the many imaginings that Anne has, her own stint as a teenage writer she prefers to end the story that she writes on a somber note. For all her romance and imaginings, a sad ending to her is much more preferable than a romantic one. And so it is with the novel, which rises high on the wings of fancy but ever so softly is closed on such a real note that you feel if not life is such: always a thing made bearable by our dreams.