"The curious incident of the dog at midnight", a book that shows us what the autistic mind is like
Christopher John Francis Boone she is 15 year old. Meet all the countries of the world, their capitals and each prime number up to 7,057. He loves mathematics, he interacts well with animals, but does not have the understanding of human emotions He does not support being touched and always looks for routine, order and predictability in his day to day, since that makes him feel safe and secure.
The above description corresponds to a child with Asperger's Syndrome, a subtype of Autism within the autistic spectrum, whose main characteristics are difficulty in social interaction, affectivity and communication, lack of empathy and sensitivity to others, tendency to egocentrism , naivety and credulity, lack of knowledge of limits and social norms, as well as restricted and repetitive interests.
As well, a certain obsession for routine, order and for converting everyday acts into rituals . The main difference between Asperger's Syndrome and the other subtypes of the autistic spectrum is that these people do not have a delay in their intelligence , being sometimes higher than the average, as in the case of high functioning autistics. However, this particular child is part of a work of fiction.
The autistic spectrum lived in the first person
Christopher he is the protagonist of the novel The curious incident of the dog at midnight (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is its original title). The story is narrated in the first person by this 15-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome who lives with his father in Swindon (Wiltshire, United Kingdom).
It is a novel by British writer Mark Haddon which won the 2003 Book of the Year Withbread award, in 2005 the Best First Book for Young Readers prize and in 2004 the Commonwealth Writer's Award for Best First Book. When he was young, Haddon worked with autistic people, which allowed him to reliably describe the thoughts of a child with this condition.
The story begins when Christopher finds his dead neighbor's dog in the garden, and is initially blamed for the event. From here, the routine and the order that Christopher had created around his life are falling apart little by little while he investigates who was the true murderer of the dog.
The brilliance of the novel lies in Mark Haddon's choice of the narrator: tortuous moments and full of emotions are described by a child who can not imagine the emotion . The effect is dazzling, making it a fun and moving story, while giving us a different view of human behavior and helping us to understand how an autistic person thinks, lives and feels.
Locked in their world, there is great difficulty in communicating with people with autism, and it can be an almost impossible task to understand why their strange actions, exaggerated reactions or their impassive behavior with respect to different stimuli. Haddon tries to capture the ideas and reasoning that Christopher has throughout the events that happen to him in his life, events seen from a totally different perspective than we are used to .
A didactic and entertaining reading
The curious incident of the dog at midnight it lacks long and tedious descriptions, and its reading becomes agile thanks to the dialogues between the characters and the simple explanations of the protagonist. Also, among the plot of the story, you can find mathematical and logical demonstrations , as the explanation to the problem of Monty Hall, curiosities as much scientific as historical as the fairies of Cottingley, and some literary references, mainly to novels of Sherlock Holmes.
A book highly recommended for those people interested in autism, since they will learn in a fun and playful way what it really entails to experience this behavior disorder without necessarily resorting to theoretical manuals.
