Granskningar och kommentarer

Comprehensive, anecdote-laden, neither overly critical nor overly respectful history of Amazon and its founder. And like too many modern biographies of successful men, focuses a little too myopically on its subject, with only cursory glances at the larger context, and not nearly enough attempts to describe what it means for the future of the businesses that get disrupted - whether by Amazon and their both innovative and questionable business practices, or by "the future" as Bezos would have it.

"I didn't know I was black until I moved to America." Adichie's story of a Nigerian woman moving to the US and then returning home again is a strong novel, and much like Half Of A Yellow Sun it's very hard to put down once you get into it. A believable star-crossed (or rather pride-and-accident-crossed) lovers' tale framing a story of identity, adaptation, prejudice and communication (or lack thereof), centered around one woman trying to keep track of and establish who she is in the eyes of everyone around her; is it even possible for a woman of colour to simply be her, not whatever people (and she herself) projects on her?

"Saying 'the question of race is complicated' is the biggest simplification of all."

At the risk of sounding like a character in the novel, there are times when the novel's constant dissection of race becomes almost a little single-minded, and Ifemelu and her blog always getting the last word on it in-story - but then again, I'm one of those who don't have to face it myself, and considering all the other single-minded novels I've read, what's to complain about? Adichie picks and picks and picks at the relationship between her characters, between their images of where they and the others come from and what they are, the different sets of expectations and limitations placed upon people in different contexts, the clash between old images and new, argues her case extremely well, paints a multi-faceted picture both of the things that are said and the things that are pointedly NOT said, and delivers one hell of a novel. This is a novelist reaching her peak, still having reserves to draw on.

Also, the US concept of 'race' really is all-pervasive, isn't it?

Well, it's a good novel. Probably not a great one, but a far worthier follow-up to The Secret History than the mediocre The Little Friend. A boy orphaned after a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum is thrown into a 21st-century Dickens tale, drifting from well-meaning but busy foster parents to various crooks and gamblers, all the while unable to tell anyone that when he woke up in the rubble of the Dutch Masters wing, bleeding and in shock, he for some unfathomable reason stuck the titular 17th century priceless masterpiece in his bag and has been keeping it ever since... While the story could have done with a bit of tightening up, as there's really very little plot as such, I blazed through all 800 pages of it in under a week and enjoyed the whole ride, both the portrait of upper-class Manhattanites clashing with struggling Russian immigrants and of the underlying question of just WHY he must hold on to a piece of art that he can never show to anyone. Tartt's good at balancing characters and the way they're unknowingly trapped by the story they create for themselves; Greek tragedy in TSH, Dickensian-DeLilloan bildungsroman here. Not great, but quite good.

I wish I could say the same for the translator, though. The Swedish translation is a complete hatchet job, rushed out to compete with the original, and if I didn't have to write a review specifically of the Swedish edition I would have tossed it aside the second the translator mistakes "Native American" for "domestic". And that's far from the worst example. So that's **** for the original, ** for the translation.