"We are each the love of someone's life."

I first read snippets of this book at an age too young — when I was still in elementary school, in fact. I was eleven years old and had not come from an English-speaking household, so I neither had the proper language skills nor sufficient life experience to fully grasp the scenes described, much less the meaning behind them. Yet, it was one of the very few books in our house, so I sometimes found myself squinting at the pages, trying to extract meaning from what little words I knew.

Every few years since then, I've read and reread the story from front to back. Each time, it would reveal a secret to me — a message or another I had missed from my last reading. Maybe it is this constant revisiting that made me fall in love with the story much like Max meeting with Alice in several, disparate points in his life. It's a story of a romance doomed from the very beginning. The lust for a life well-lived, a desire one cannot satisfy, a contrast of wealth and poverty and old age and youth and tragedy and love — all these come together to hammer in the message: "we are each the love of someone's life."