Saturday, November 01, 2025

Book 2 - The Bee Sting

I finished reading The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and gosh the ending :| The story is about this family of four and chapters are from the point of view the daughter, her younger brother, her mom and dad. This is not a well-functioning family though on the outside they may look okay but in the inside they all have their own struggles which they're not really dealing well in their own solitude. The book opens with the daughter and her so-called BFF contemplating why a dad in the town over would kill his own family and then himself. The book ends with a possible answer to that that he's doing it for love (or at least that's how I intepreted the last line), and I call bullshit on that. The immediate feeling that I got reading the ending was that it's a tragedy, which made me rather sad because these people with all their miseries worn me down and as they rushed towards each other in the cold dark stormy forest with some sort of clarity that they want to be with their family, I wanted the best for them, but the end though - it made it feel like a close loop to how the book begins. Then some minutes later still dwelling in the ending, the movie / TV loving watching me thought well I watched enough things to know unless a death is spelled out, i.e., we see the actual dead body, then nothing is confirmed. The shot may have missed. Like this week I watched One Battle After Another, which is really good - even there, a guy who I thought yep dead turned out not dead. All bloodied, but still he walked out alive.

From my perspective, at the end of the book at most 3 people died, at least there's one. I trawled the Internet and some people think the dad kills himself which is an interesting take, because I didn't think of this at all. Sometimes a book doesn't end where the last sentence ends, because the readers may continue with their own take about what happens after the last sentence. So different people can have a different take. The optimistic side of me, which in this case hope it would be the case, think the four of them came out of the forest and be a better family. On the other side, if the dad did indeed somehow kill his son and the daughter get killed too - I don't know, I never get the feel the dad would be someone who would kill himself. He most probably would devote his remainding life to take care of his wife who's the most frantic mentally. Chapters from the point of the view of the mom contains no punctuation whatsoever which makes reading quite difficult. Words fly in right after the other, non-stop, which made me think of me and my thoughts going all over the place, but on the contrary when I write my thoughts here I over-punctuate. Anyways, I asked 4 different AI models and all of them said no confirmed death.

Sometimes when I read something, my mind would wander to a different path, like what would happen if instead of this they do this and this also happened when I read this book. The dad was blackmailed by a guy who was described as handsome beautiful - if ever this book is made into a movie or TV series, I wonder who would be cast. So anyways, maybe this is my dark mind, I was like he has to die. Like, how do you deal with a blackmailer? If you cannot blackmail the blackmailer back, then you need to eliminate him. In the book this guy was also hooking up with a girl who was the mistress of another family man. As I was reading this plot point of the blackmail which I didn't really like because of the of-course this was gonna happen and the nature of the blackmail itself which made you sink in your guts, my mind branched out to seeing the movie of what if this dad found out the other man was also blackmailed and they teamed up to kill this guy, but they were inept, and as they planned there's the whole male-bonding thing about why they're failing in their family. I don't know if it's gonna make a good movie. Given the right actors, maybe?

The Bee Sting is a thick novel and when I was buying books that I was going to read after, I began to appreciate it more from the value-for-money point of view. The books that I was getting where way thinner but they cost around the same :( Like right now, I am reading James by Percival Everett and it's half as thick, but cost like a dollar more. Seriously, books are not cheap. I've become my mom who when I was a kid insisted not buying comics because she wanted more words than pictures. On that recent outing of mine I got 4 books and ended up paying more than 80 bucks and I was like, is this right we're doing this :( My heart broke a little. You could get shoes which has actual use, but if I don't read, what will become of me. I suppose I can borrow the books in the library. One of the nearest libraries to me has many interesting books, so many books that there's not enough lifetime (at least mine) to read a whole shelf of them. When I venture to it from time to time, I do get sad sometimes that no one reads these books. They just sit there. I wonder how many people even wander at these shelves.

:) eKa @ 11:23:00 AM •