Homegoing
I have to admit that I was a little wary coming into this book. Sure, everyone loved it. It's been recommended to me countless times. But I'm used to family sagas being a lot longer than this. I'm used to authors spending at least 500 pages with three, maybe four generations of a single family. To follow a family for eight generations? And to do it in 300 pages? I worried that the book would jump too much, that I'd be bitter about not spending more time with some of the characters.
I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects today, for both those people who stayed in Africa and those who were taken to America.
As I said, I was worried about the book being thin. But Gyasi avoids this by focusing on turning points in her characters' lives. A chapter might be about a marriage or the birth of a child, escaping enslavement or addiction, throwing off the family legacy or embracing it. The only chapter I really struggled with was Akua's, which keeps jumping back and forth in time in a way that left me a bitt baffled. But she ended up being one of my favorite characters and was instrumental in the story coming full circle.
By taking the long view, Gyasi is able to show how devastating each setback is on this family and their legacy. A bit of bad luck can throw an entire life off course, and it can take a generation or two to catch back up. Gyasi plays with the idea of a family curse, but it's hard to believe in that when the hardships are hardly unique to a single family. Still, the reunification, and the better fortunes of both Marjorie and Marcus at the end of the book, points to an optimistic future. That hope is directly tied to acknowledging the past, lest we make the same mistakes or fail to exorcise the evil of our ancestors. And that's really what the book is all about.
I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects today, for both those people who stayed in Africa and those who were taken to America.
As I said, I was worried about the book being thin. But Gyasi avoids this by focusing on turning points in her characters' lives. A chapter might be about a marriage or the birth of a child, escaping enslavement or addiction, throwing off the family legacy or embracing it. The only chapter I really struggled with was Akua's, which keeps jumping back and forth in time in a way that left me a bitt baffled. But she ended up being one of my favorite characters and was instrumental in the story coming full circle.
By taking the long view, Gyasi is able to show how devastating each setback is on this family and their legacy. A bit of bad luck can throw an entire life off course, and it can take a generation or two to catch back up. Gyasi plays with the idea of a family curse, but it's hard to believe in that when the hardships are hardly unique to a single family. Still, the reunification, and the better fortunes of both Marjorie and Marcus at the end of the book, points to an optimistic future. That hope is directly tied to acknowledging the past, lest we make the same mistakes or fail to exorcise the evil of our ancestors. And that's really what the book is all about.
Comments
Post a Comment