Homegoing - BokDraken

Hardcover, 309 sidor

På English

Publicerades 11 juni 2016 av Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:: 978-1-101-94713-5
OCLC-nummer:: 980876436
Finna ID:: helka.9930476723506253

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as …

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer. --front flap

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Björn recenserade Homegoing av Yaa Gyasi

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4 stjärnor

Homegoing is an excellent and sometimes frustrating novel partly because of what it doesn't do. A story of two branches of the same family that are split apart in the early 1700s when one half-sister becomes a white man's filly and the other gets shipped off as a slave, it's not generally interested in cheap payoffs. Characters get to occupy centre stage for a few pages, then disappear into the fog of history - often violently, and often with little other trace than the blood and the stories they pass on to their children. Instead of telling one person's story, Gyasi uses all those people to tell a larger story of oppression that seems less systematic than cancerous, feeding on itself without even thinking about it, whereas its victims can't not have to constantly try to live with it.

When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether …

Homegoing is an excellent and sometimes frustrating novel partly because of what it doesn't do. A story of two branches of the same family that are split apart in the early 1700s when one half-sister becomes a white man's filly and the other gets shipped off as a slave, it's not generally interested in cheap payoffs. Characters get to occupy centre stage for a few pages, then disappear into the fog of history - often violently, and often with little other trace than the blood and the stories they pass on to their children. Instead of telling one person's story, Gyasi uses all those people to tell a larger story of oppression that seems less systematic than cancerous, feeding on itself without even thinking about it, whereas its victims can't not have to constantly try to live with it.

When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest back in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.

Yeah, there are things about this that feel a little too much like the product of creative writing courses. But there's enough ice-cold anger and compassion with those who were silenced, and a very keen sense of how to recreate history with a few sharp details, to make it work.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.