Griffin & Sabine

A trilogy of books lent to me. Its main feature is the fact that the entire story happens within a correspondence between two people. The reader experiences the pseudo-thrill of going through another person’s mail, something that is considered almost as personal as one’s diary. However, for me, that is not the book’s most remarkable feature. What I loved best about it was the amazing dynamic between Griffin and Sabine, the two characters.



Reading the letters they’ve exchanged gave me a sense of an enigmatic intimacy. They fell in love without ever even having seen each other. The only connection they had was a fragile one-sided telepathy that allowed Sabine to ‘see’ Griffin’s art. And it was enough. Their words came across to me from a distance that spanned both their worlds, across the many vast oceans and undiscovered dimensions. They kept questioning each other, “Are you real?” Was it this uncertainty that fueled the intensity of their love; this unquenched thirst for the other but not having any means to be in each other’s presence? The surreal possibility that perhaps they only ‘made’ each other up, that they both exist only in each other’s madness, made their relationship even more poignant and all the more hopeless. Yet the entire time I read the three books, I had hoped so hard that they would be together eventually. I wanted them to be real; wished for their letters and their love to be real. And how I envied them such love! They spoke with a passion that seemed too vast and ethereal to be contained. I kept telling myself, “It cannot be real.” But oh, how I wanted it to be!



Eventually I was left with too many questions. I tried to go back, to look more intently at the images they drew, trying to decode the secret messages therein. And soon I was left with nothing more than what I had from the first - a wish… I wish I could be Sabine, who lives in a place no one could reach, and who finds her Griffin who will love her back with as much intensity as she loves him. She who kept the secrets, saw through windows only she can find, kept searching unendingly for ‘he’ who sees her as no one else can; she had the key to all the secrets. The answers were all hers; and she had everything she needed. She had Griffin.


(posted elsewhere 7 Dec 2005)