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Homegoing Introduction of the ebook: Homegoing
Đánh giá : 4.47 /5 (sao)
An alternate cover edition can be found here.
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 hera An alternate cover edition can be found here.
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. …more
Review ebook Homegoing
“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”
4 1/2 stars. Homegoing is an incredible and horrific look at history, colonialism and slavery in Ghana and America, across 250 years. How the author managed to create such rich characters, cover so much history, and tell such a complex, but compelling story in only 300 pages, I do not know.
I recently said in my review of East of “What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”
4 1/2 stars. Homegoing is an incredible and horrific look at history, colonialism and slavery in Ghana and America, across 250 years. How the author managed to create such rich characters, cover so much history, and tell such a complex, but compelling story in only 300 pages, I do not know.
I recently said in my review of East of Eden that I love family sagas. Those epic tales spanning generations and pulling you into the lives of so many interesting characters… yeah, they are some of my favourite kind of stories. Spending so long with the same family, watching them grow through the years and seeing their children face their own problems – it just feels so personal. I feel like I’ve grown with them.
This book, however, is possibly the most ambitious family saga I have ever read. Most books like this feature three generations. Homegoing follows seven generations, fourteen perspectives in total. It all begins with two half sisters – Effia and Esi – who will never know each other. One’s experiences lead her and her family to slavery in America, the other’s family find themselves mostly in Ghana.
Each chapter is from the perspective of a new character; first Effia and Essi, and then six of their descendants, as the story tracks the cultural changes in both Ghana and America – through colonialism, racism, and attitudes to slavery. Through the characters, we experience life during the tribal wars of the 1700s, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the ways in which prominent leaders in Ghana aided British and American slavers, the fear created by the Fugitive Slave Act, and much more.
I can’t quite reconcile the knowledge that I’ve read only 300 pages with the amount of history and rich characterization I’ve just experienced. Considering that I usually grumble when a book has more than two perspectives, it’s quite something that none of these fourteen perspectives felt lacking. Gyasi is just a great storyteller; she takes important subjects like slavery and colonialism, and peppers them with perfect little conversations and insights into human nature.
“All people on the black continent must give up their heathenism and turn to God. Be thankful that the British are here to show you how to live a good and moral life.”
Also, the British really sucked back then. Thank god we got over that, pulled our heads out of our arses, and started embracing other cultures.
Oh, wait.
As is to be expected, there’s a lot to be disgusted about in this book. True to history, it is full of blood, whippings, racist language, British superiority and other scenes that will turn your stomach. However, Gyasi handles it with sensitivity for her subject, ensuring that the violence is a honest portrayal of history, not gratuitous.
A gritty, detailed story about the long-standing effects of the colonization of Africa and the slave trade. A real accomplishment to cover so much history in so few pages without feeling rushed.
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