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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
Notes on grief. La perte d'un être cher est toujours bouleversant et Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a su mettre les mots sur ce chagrin qui la dépasse.
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
sad
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
I just have to admire Adichie's portrayal of the human condition - how she puts into words the complex and profound feelings of grief that eat away at you when you lose a loved one.
It's a deeply poignant and sentimental read that captures the pain, denial and acceptance of loss.
It's a deeply poignant and sentimental read that captures the pain, denial and acceptance of loss.
I received this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. As always, this did not affect my review.
This is a gorgeous essay. In 80 short pages Adiche tells us about ugly grief. She provides a chronicle of the body blow of trying to say goodbye to a beloved person and of doing so from thousands of miles away during Covid lockdowns/travel bans. Most importantly she tells us about how to parent and how to live through her brief memories of her luminous father, a man of pure decency and intellect, worthy of honor, down to his smallest molecules. This is a tall order for any author given any number of pages, but Adiche, the most adroit of writers, does so in the number of words it takes most writers to describe a mundane dinner party. Her observations are razor sharp. She said this about her father:
In my later teenage years, I began to see him, to see how alike we were in our curiosity and our homebody-ness, and to talk to him, and to adore him. How exquisitely he paid attention, how present he was, how well he listened. If you told him something he remembered. His humour, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged
Isn't that amazing, evocative, beautiful? In a few brief sentences, we see the father he was, we envy her for having had him, and we understand how world changing his loss must have been. Also, as someone who just loves great writing, "crisped deliciously" rocked my world.
I said that receiving this book free had no impact on my review, and I am pretty sure that is true, that even if I had paid the $16 list price I would have felt just as grateful to have had the chance to immerse myself in this book. That said, it is notable that this is a tiny book. The 80 pages are physically small, perhaps 7x5, the line spacing is substantial, the font generous and the margins large -- I would estimate this is perhaps 30 normal pages long. I am not a super fast reader, perhaps on the upper end of typical, and I read it in 4 subway rides, which is less than 2 hours. $16 is a lot for that. Still, it was a really good 2 hours.
This is a gorgeous essay. In 80 short pages Adiche tells us about ugly grief. She provides a chronicle of the body blow of trying to say goodbye to a beloved person and of doing so from thousands of miles away during Covid lockdowns/travel bans. Most importantly she tells us about how to parent and how to live through her brief memories of her luminous father, a man of pure decency and intellect, worthy of honor, down to his smallest molecules. This is a tall order for any author given any number of pages, but Adiche, the most adroit of writers, does so in the number of words it takes most writers to describe a mundane dinner party. Her observations are razor sharp. She said this about her father:
In my later teenage years, I began to see him, to see how alike we were in our curiosity and our homebody-ness, and to talk to him, and to adore him. How exquisitely he paid attention, how present he was, how well he listened. If you told him something he remembered. His humour, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged
Isn't that amazing, evocative, beautiful? In a few brief sentences, we see the father he was, we envy her for having had him, and we understand how world changing his loss must have been. Also, as someone who just loves great writing, "crisped deliciously" rocked my world.
I said that receiving this book free had no impact on my review, and I am pretty sure that is true, that even if I had paid the $16 list price I would have felt just as grateful to have had the chance to immerse myself in this book. That said, it is notable that this is a tiny book. The 80 pages are physically small, perhaps 7x5, the line spacing is substantial, the font generous and the margins large -- I would estimate this is perhaps 30 normal pages long. I am not a super fast reader, perhaps on the upper end of typical, and I read it in 4 subway rides, which is less than 2 hours. $16 is a lot for that. Still, it was a really good 2 hours.
Only just feeling ready to read this but it was comforting in its portrayal of grief, warts and all. I would have liked to have met her father myself, he sounded like a rare but wonderful man.