"with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste..."
"with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste..."
"there would not be a soul left on the island within five years. She'd heard it all before, threats and promises both, threats being far more common than promises, but either way no one had actually set foot on the island to see out their intentions, well-meaning or otherwise."
"no good ever came of being noticed by mainlanders, which always meant being noticed by white people -- plain white, her mother and aunts and cousins called them, to distinguish them from the lighter-skinned Apple islanders..."
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children from the Malaga Island schoolhouse -- from Greenhut Galleries |
"As I do with all my novels, everything I'm reading, all the paintings I see, all the music I'm listening to, everything somehow or another gets thrown into the manuscript, in its earliest stages"
but in my own humble opinion, his time spent with Ethan's slowly-growing awareness of the beauty of the natural world and learning how to capture it in his art just went on too too long to the point where I actually lost interest, wanting to get back to the main throes of the story. I wasn't a huge fan of the biblical allusions/references either -- sometimes they felt a little strained as well as heavy handed. But those are my particular niggles, and to each his/her own.
I probably wouldn't have bought this book had it not appeared as part of the Booker dozen, but in the long run, and for many reasons, I'm glad I did.
"scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts."
"the dogma of a new world, howling and preaching steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass,"
"Moths see light and fly to it... Always searching for the border between deep darkness and the billows of the moon. The moonlight to them is hope. But to a moth, there are many things that resemble moonlight. It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed."
Eventually it becomes very clear that Hema is not the only ghost that haunts these people; there are many others with their own unfulfilled and unfulfillable appetites that ultimately lead them into despair. In the bigger scheme of things though, it's the ghosts of Trinidad's colonial past that are the most haunting of all. "Behold hell" indeed.
Once again, just a barebones look at a fine novel; if I wasn't so behind lifewise I could talk about this book forever. I absolutely loved Hungry Ghosts mainly because of the author's original approach in exploring the history of his homeland and his heritage. While the novel is often brutally violent and emotionally difficult to read, the author's prose is just beautiful, offering readers the sensation that they are there in that time as a witness to a slice of Trinidad's past. Definitely highly recommended -- I will read whatever this author has to offer in the future.
Just wow.
"In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. There are many theories regarding the source of this catastrophe. None have ever been proved."
"There was so much celebration, just the joy of seeing the dictatorship come to an end the way it did. It was complicated, though, because we knew his deputy was going to take over. But we hoped against hope that we had a turned a corner."
She decided that she would go back to Zimbabwe; she also wondered if it was time for her to write a "nonfiction book about this moment, 'too unbelievable to ignore.' " Once there though, she saw firsthand how "the sense of hope turned very quickly into disappointment and devastation," and thought perhaps the book she should write should be more along the lines of a "modern-day parable of Zimbabwe." This is that book, and the players are all animals. Before I actually bought this novel, I had decided to give it a pass, thinking that it seemed like it might be a case of Animal Farm redux. But my curiosity got the better of me, and as it happens, I was completely wrong. In fact, at some point close to the beginning of this story, author NoViolet Bulawayo reminds her readers that this is definitely not that -- as Dr Sweet Mother, the wife of the president of Jidada says while addressing a crowd from the podium,
"...couldn't meet the dawn carrying the sad, terrible baggage of that awful past, no; it absolutely had to find us on a brand-new page and proper ready for a fresh start, best foot forward, no less."
"this country's long, long, long terribly dark night has indeed ended and we now perch on the wings of a brand new dawn..."
"...the children of the nation found themselves standing hungry and thirsty and hopeless and penniless in the queues, tholukuthi Tuvy's eyes watching them from old election posters that promised a new and better Jidada they now understood, with a heartbreaking knowledge, would never come, was never meant to come."