Reviews for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The average rating for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-11 00:00:00 Catharine Lisle Coping With Conscience My 34 year old daughter is severely autistic, and has been since she was seven. No one knows why and the condition has never varied in its intensity. So she is stuck in time. She knows this and vaguely resents it somewhat but gets on with things as best she can. Each case of autism is probably unique. My daughter has no facility with numbers or memory but she does with space. As far as I can tell any enclosed space appears to her as a kind of filing system which she can decipher almost instantly. When she was twelve I brought her into a cavernous Virgin megastore to get a particular CD. She had never been in the place before, but after standing in the doorway for three or four seconds, she walked immediately to the correct aisle and bin and picked out the desired CD without any hesitation. I have a theory, probably rubbish, that autistic people perceive the world as it actually is or, more precisely, within strictly limited categories that might be called 'natural', somewhat in the vein of Kantian transcendentals - space, time, numbers, etc. Most, like my daughter and Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident, have no facility with purely linguistic manipulation - metaphor, lying, irony, jokes, complex allusion, actually fiction of any sort. The world is not just literal, it exists in a way that ensures words are always subservient to things and without imagination that it could be any other way. In my experience autistic people tend to become upset when non-autistic people attempt to reverse the priority by making things subservient to words. This makes the autistic person confused, anxious, and often angry. They appear resentful that such liberties can be taken with what is so obviously reality. In effect, the autistic life is devoted to truth as what is actually 'there', stripped of all emotional, figurative, and cultural content. This makes autistic people often difficult to live with. They insist and they persist about things which appear trivial to others. They nag and needle until they obtain recognition. In those areas that interest them, they are capable of splitting the finest hairs to avoid abandoning their perceptions of the world. They may on occasion conform in order to gain a point but they never really give in. They are stalwart in being, simply, themselves. Adaptation occurs elsewhere, not in them. It is, therefore, probably impossible for non-autistic people to live without tension among autistic people. The latter are maddening in the solidity of their selves. They are, in a sense, elemental, for all we know formed in the intense energy of a star in some distant galaxy. Fortunately, the fact that most of us cannot understand their elemental force is not something that worries them very much. Their emotional reactions may be intense but these attenuate rapidly, leaving little damaging residue. Ultimately, perhaps, autistic people are the conscience of the world. And conscience is always troublesome, not because it threatens to judge but because it reveals.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-09 00:00:00 Tim Miller The Prime Reasons Why I Enjoyed Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: 2. Death broken down into its molecular importance. 3. Clouds, with chimneys and aerials impressed upon them, and their potential as alien space crafts. 5. Black Days and Yellow cars. 7. Red food coloring for Indian cuisine. 11. Christopher's reasons for loving The Hound of the Baskervilles and disdaining Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 13. White lies. 17. The patience of Siobhan 19. Father's frustration, and Father's love. 23. "I reasoned that...." 29. Metaphors are lies and similes are not. 31. The intimacy of fanning out the fingers and pressing the hand of another. 37. Christopher punches a policeman and later decides he doesn't like policeman much after all. 41. My empathy for Father's pain. 43. Mystification through demystification. 47. Father admitting one of his "crimes" before he was caught. 53. Did I mention Christopher? 59. A Level Maths. 61. The London Underground as a scary, thrilling adventure. 67. Toby the rat. 71. Wellington forked. 73. The book has yet to be discovered by Oprah. 79. Behavioral Problems 83. Maps 89. Prime numbers = Prime chapters 97. That every day life, if seen from a certain perspective, can provide the conflict for a compelling novel.