Peter Jalesh
Published: 2013-09-19
Total Pages: 460
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The novel portrays three main characters in pursuit of their dreams. The main character is Molly, a woman that becomes a jockey and pursues her dream to win the Triple Crown derbies trophy. As the story evolves she proves to have an enormous resilience in the face of a disabling illness that affects her life and her career. What becomes predominant in Molly’s quest for glory is the tie between her and the champion horse. Their love for each other – either in good fortune or in tragedy - reaches further than their aspirations to achieve glory. The next character in line is Uncle Bill, who comes to realize one day that his life lacks a higher purpose. To make up for it he designs an ultimate adventure for himself which he calls “Project Everest”. Eventually Uncle Bill goes and climbs Mt. Everest and never returns from there. Reaching that peak becomes an end in itself. Did Uncle Bill succeed to arrive at that peak? Later on, a salvage team finds on the mountain peak Uncle Bill’s watch, hidden under a rock. What belongs to a larger than life story is that Uncle Bill’s preparation for climbing Mt. Everest becomes a vital activity at all population levels. It looks as if each life prepares itself to help Uncle Bill triumph over defiance. What Uncle Bill’s project proves to others is that conquering the impossible is a human trait that belongs to all of us, an aspiration of all of us to overcome the impossible. The third character that gathers attention is the teen author that lives though those events and discovers what love is. The background of the story is made up of farmlands, a bunch of neighboring farms on which the principal activity is growing animals like pigs, burrows and thoroughbred studs. It is not difficult to interpret the motives interleaved by the story as being symbolic. Molly’s desire to win the Triple Crown begins with a fortunate chance and ends with another chance – an unfortunate one, an accidental chance. Uncle’s Bill’s climbing of Mt. Everest is the result of a careful planning that ends in an illusive victory. Both fates described above are metaphors. The sense implied here is that the pursuit of fame, success, and victory is beyond life. That is, happiness is doomed to failure in the quest of the impossible; also that the boundaries of what is given to us to live are finite, prone to chance and accident.
