opinion

The river and understanding: on reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven
by Silvio Sirias

Recently, friends invited my wife and me to spend a weekend at a serene retreat next to the Río Zaratí, on the outskirts of the city of Penonome. This privately-owned paradise has an open-walled shelter located on a slight hill next to the river bank, at a spot where the waters form a gentle, swirling pool, perfect for swimming. It was in this shaded area, resting in a hammock and enjoying a steady, cool breeze, that I read Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

As a reader, I’m attracted to books that deal with spiritual awakenings --- just as long as I don’t feel the narrative is preaching to me. And as a novelist for whom spirituality is an important theme, I’m well aware of the danger of being overly-sentimental while relating a character’s quest to discover that which is holy. In writing about the mystical element of the human soul, avoiding bathos --- as literary scholars refer to excessive sentimentalism --- is a difficult task.

Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven explores the pivotal spiritual question of what happens in the afterlife lucidly, without once becoming maudlin. In Albom’s brief, fast-paced, and intriguing novel --- he puts his experience as a former award-winning sportswriter to good use --- the reader witnesses, as if he or she had front row seats, the central character’s journey. At the moment of Eddie’s death, when he is in his mid-eighties, he has lived his entire life believing that his existence had been a drab, ordinary affair, without glamour or consequence.

In Albom’s fictional construct, the initial stages of the afterlife consist of five encounters with persons with whom the recently-deceased was connected, sometimes without knowing. Because of the lofty drama of these reunions, what is likely to go unnoticed is the vital importance of their location --- the locus being almost as significant as the identities of the people the central protagonist meets. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, whether the encounters take place in an amusement park, a mountain diner, or a round room of many doors whose exits always lead to weddings from highly diverse cultures, the setting situates the readers at a vantage point above the symbolic realm of Eddie’s existence that bestows his meetings with multiple layers of meaning.

The final encounter --- the one that finally makes Eddie’s raison d'être perfectly clear --- takes place, fittingly, next to a river. At once I was reminded of Herman Hesse’s Siddartha, where the central character’s awakening, the moment he discovers the meaning that he has long been seeking, takes place as he gazes into a river and listens attentively to its flow.

The river --- a universal symbol of life, time, change, movement, mystery, wisdom, and connectedness --- facilitates Eddie’s understanding of his purpose, and this leads him to inner peace. It’s then, when one reads Albom’s vivid description of the role his character played in the lives of thousands and the narrative clearly shows how all of humankind is intimately linked, that The Five People You Meet in Heaven becomes profoundly touching.

Upon finishing the book, I closed the cover, stroked it for a while, remained still in the hammock and, in a fleeting imitation of Siddartha, spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to learn to listen to the river.

Silvio Sirias is an award-winning novelist who resides and writes in Panama. For more information visit his website at http://www.silviosirias.com