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The Hired Man Introduction of the ebook: The Hired Man
Đánh giá : 3.93 /5 (sao)
The new novel from the winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, The Hired Man is a taut, powerful novel of a small town and its dark wartime secrets, unwittingly brought into the light by a family of outsiders.
Aminatta Forna has established herself as one of our most perceptive and uncompromising chroniclers of war and the way it reverberates, sometimes imperceptibly, in The new novel from the winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, The Hired Man is a taut, powerful novel of a small town and its dark wartime secrets, unwittingly brought into the light by a family of outsiders.
Aminatta Forna has established herself as one of our most perceptive and uncompromising chroniclers of war and the way it reverberates, sometimes imperceptibly, in the daily lives of those touched by it. With The Hired Man, she has delivered a tale of a Croatian village after the War of Independence, and a family of newcomers who expose its secrets.
Duro is off on a morning’s hunt when he sees something one rarely does in Gost: a strange car. Later that day, he overhears its occupants, a British woman, Laura, and her two children, who have taken up residence in a house Duro knows well. He offers his assistance getting their water working again, and soon he is at the house every day, helping get it ready as their summer cottage, and serving as Laura’s trusted confidant.
But the other residents of Gost are not as pleased to have the interlopers, and as Duro and Laura’s daughter Grace uncover and begin to restore a mosaic in the front that has been plastered over, Duro must be increasingly creative to shield the family from the town’s hostility, and his own past with the house’s former occupants. As the inhabitants of Gost go about their days, working, striving to better themselves and their town, and arguing, the town’s volatile truths whisper ever louder.
A masterpiece of storytelling haunted by lost love and a restrained menace, this novel recalls Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. The Hired Man confirms Aminatta Forna as one of our most important writers. …more
Review ebook The Hired Man
The book has been well summarized in numerous reviews here, but I wanted to add a response to some reviewers who feel that this book doesn’t adequately address the atrocities of the Balkan wars, and that the narrator doesn’t specify the political details, or who was killing whom. The author manages to sink the reader so thoroughly into the narrator’s mind that I believe she’s successfully captured the mindset of the people who were caught up in these conflicts, who didn’t see them coming until t The book has been well summarized in numerous reviews here, but I wanted to add a response to some reviewers who feel that this book doesn’t adequately address the atrocities of the Balkan wars, and that the narrator doesn’t specify the political details, or who was killing whom. The author manages to sink the reader so thoroughly into the narrator’s mind that I believe she’s successfully captured the mindset of the people who were caught up in these conflicts, who didn’t see them coming until the storm was upon their communities, and who remained unsure of how to respond. I’m deeply glad that this book was about the psychology of genocidal conflicts, rather than taking a cheap narrative path that wallowed in descriptions of gruesome violence. By putting the reader into the mind of an individual and dealing with his individual relationships and connections and memories, the reader is offered a much more intimate view of what happened – the kind of human story that tends to get lost in the overwhelming and impersonal statistics of deaths, mass graves, and so forth. From a distance, genocidal conflicts appear to be about things like ethnicity, but when you look at things on a community level, you understand that they’re about failures of human relationships, and a lack of order that allows those failures to take on horrific proportions. I appreciate authors who are willing to tackle the enormous task of telling these stories. Definitely not “chick lit disguised as a war story,” as one reviewer accuses. …more
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