Name: A Trip to the Stars
ISBN: 9780812984798

Nicholas Christopher

A Novel

A Trip to the Stars

sage

“You say you and he only had so little time together as lovers. Whenever I come here, I'm reminded of a story I heard when I visited India. Long before there were telescopes, Hindu cosmographers concluded that the universe was composed of billions of galaxies. They defined the life cycle of a galaxy as an eon. Asked the length of an eon, they replied: Imagine a mountain of solid rock, bigger than the Himalayas, which a man brushes with a piece of silk once every century; the time it would take him to wear away the entire mountain is an eon. When you consider time in that light, days, years, centuries begin to blur, don't you think? How you fill any one day -while emptying it of distractions-is all that matters. It sounds as if you filled your few days to the brim. Also, Mala,” he smiled, “I do believe that there are stars which fall to earth. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to be around when they do.”

“I’ve lost things too. But, as you know, in another way those become the very things that never leave you.”

At a Manhattan planetarium in 1965, ten-year-old Enzo and his young aunt, Mala, are separated, an event that profoundly alters the rest of their lives. In an epic tale of love and destiny, A Trip to the Stars charts their paths over the next fifteen years as they search for each other and, in the process, discover themselves. As Enzo and Mala cross continents and seas on their separate journeys, they encounter a dizzying array of people: an arachnologist in New Orleans, an asteroid specialist, a wounded B-52 navigator in Vietnam, a professional mind reader, a maverick NASA astronomer, and countless others. All of them are searching for things they have lost -- loved ones, opportunities, enlightenment. Through them Mala and Enzo discover a world steeped in mystery, romance, and intellectual adventure. A Trip to the Stars is both a love story and a coming-of-age story that shows us what happens when we lose what matters most. Fusing imagination and suspense with remarkable narrative skill, Nicholas Christopher builds a story of tremendous scope that lingers in detail and sensation long after the last page has been turned.

A Trip To The Stars

Siya S

★★★★☆ 4 METEOR-SHOWER-STARS


  
    We had voyaged far into space and now we were returning. Before leaving the solar system, we orbited the moon and several planets – skating along Saturn’s rings, probing Jupiter’s red spot, and skimming the icy mountain ranges of Uranus. We trailed a comet and threaded a swarm of meteors. And after Pluto, we were among the stars: glittering clusters, bracelets, and crescents that swirled around us.
  


Well, if I thought reviewing ASOIAF was a tough task, then I definitely know nothing. A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher was possibly the most difficult book to review yet, simply because it was such a tightly interwoven story of love, life, dreams, death, and the magic hidden around us and the universe. An epic, no doubt, with an underlying theme of searching for lost things.


  “We are all of us accidents of nature, refined by thousands of graftings … some that take, some that don’t.”


Reading this book left me overwhelmed. It took me a year to finish it just because it was too 'elaborate' for me to handle. It's not everyday that I got to read about the city of Atlantis, astrology, Pythagorean principle, arachnology, vampires and anthropology all in one book, so you get the idea. Throughout the book you'd see countless references to spiders and stars and how the universe played its tricks on the characters' melancholic lives. 


  As often happens, the worst thing that ever happened to me was at the same time the luckiest thing. Fortunately, I realized this soon enough to make the most of it.


While it was fascinating how these topics has interwoven into the creation of such a powerful story, it is unfortunate that the verbose left the characters flat and boring. The portrayal of the parallel in two protagonists' lives over the course of fifteen years apart was somewhat overambitious and at times dragging. After a while, you'd most likely lost interest on the characters. While they're all fascinating in their own ways, there's no solid ground for the readers to relate and have sympathy upon. I couldn't care less about them by the time I entered the last 3 chapters that concentrated on the final revelation.

A great book to read at least once without feeling like a complete waste. But I won't be picking this up again in a very long time, because then it'd be too "excruciating" to experience such elaborate, dragging, overwhelmed plots over again. 

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A Trip to the Stars A Novel

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