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jbingb 's review for:
Homeland Elegies
by Ayad Akhtar
3: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar.
Wow.
This book. I am not certain I have ever read anything quite like it. And it's going to take me a while to figure out I really think about it in its entirety.
It's a novel. But...the main character shares his name with the author...exactly. And "facts" of the main character's background and experience match, completely, the background and experiences of the author's. He was raised in Brookfield, Wisconsin...just down the highway from here. He is a year younger than I am, so I thought lots about our parallel childhoods...trusted him as the teller of those stories and all that I could learn from the major differences between the two, primarily that his life as a brown man in America has been quite different from mine as a white woman. But there are certainly places where things intersect: love of reading, for just one. But while his was inspired by a high school English teacher, mine was fueled by becoming a high school English teacher. Regardless, I bought in...to believing all that he is then sharing is "true."
So as I am sucked in and pondering all of these details he shares, I find myself doing my own research, looking up authors he mentions who are unknown to me, and at one point researching the name of a particular person--not an author--whom he is saying things about making me think: wait...what happened to him? Did he die? How in the world is Akhtar saying these things about him--fairly incriminating things--if he is, himself, alive and kicking and seemingly would defend himself, not allow this all to be told.
And then I learn that I have been com-plete-ly pulled into this fiction as non-fiction and am buying it all 100%. But. Some is true. What is not? I have no clue.
And does it matter, really? I'm not sure.
He hasn't fibbed (like Frey in his Million Little Pieces, claiming as memoir, even, what is not substantiated). But he hasn't fully created fiction either. What's true? What's made up? Does it matter?
It does not matter, my new day's thinking says. Akhtar says profound and interestingly thoughtful things, relevant and meaningful things--about America's foundations, about politics, about race, and more--and whether they come through his own person or his created character really does not matter an iota, ultimately. I greatly appreciate the playing with rhetoric--the logos, ethos, pathos manipulated a little or a lot--that Akhtar does here. It's smart and deliberate, and it works.
I'll be eager to hear what others think.
Wow.
This book. I am not certain I have ever read anything quite like it. And it's going to take me a while to figure out I really think about it in its entirety.
It's a novel. But...the main character shares his name with the author...exactly. And "facts" of the main character's background and experience match, completely, the background and experiences of the author's. He was raised in Brookfield, Wisconsin...just down the highway from here. He is a year younger than I am, so I thought lots about our parallel childhoods...trusted him as the teller of those stories and all that I could learn from the major differences between the two, primarily that his life as a brown man in America has been quite different from mine as a white woman. But there are certainly places where things intersect: love of reading, for just one. But while his was inspired by a high school English teacher, mine was fueled by becoming a high school English teacher. Regardless, I bought in...to believing all that he is then sharing is "true."
So as I am sucked in and pondering all of these details he shares, I find myself doing my own research, looking up authors he mentions who are unknown to me, and at one point researching the name of a particular person--not an author--whom he is saying things about making me think: wait...what happened to him? Did he die? How in the world is Akhtar saying these things about him--fairly incriminating things--if he is, himself, alive and kicking and seemingly would defend himself, not allow this all to be told.
And then I learn that I have been com-plete-ly pulled into this fiction as non-fiction and am buying it all 100%. But. Some is true. What is not? I have no clue.
And does it matter, really? I'm not sure.
He hasn't fibbed (like Frey in his Million Little Pieces, claiming as memoir, even, what is not substantiated). But he hasn't fully created fiction either. What's true? What's made up? Does it matter?
It does not matter, my new day's thinking says. Akhtar says profound and interestingly thoughtful things, relevant and meaningful things--about America's foundations, about politics, about race, and more--and whether they come through his own person or his created character really does not matter an iota, ultimately. I greatly appreciate the playing with rhetoric--the logos, ethos, pathos manipulated a little or a lot--that Akhtar does here. It's smart and deliberate, and it works.
I'll be eager to hear what others think.