The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline

Posted on by marjorieseidenfeld

Sallie has always felt dominated by her younger, prettier, and more charming sister, Addie. And now that her reputation has been tarnished by embarrassing circumstances limiting both their marriage prospects, she is truly under her sister’s aggressive thumb. When Addie begins to fall for one of the newcomers to their tiny town – one of a set of conjoined twins who hale from Siam and have proven themselves able farmers and businessmen – she recruits Sallie to consider a life with these two men. Even as Sallie cannot even fathom what their lives will be like, she agrees to the match and life as she knows it is forever altered.

This is a truly wild story, based on the lives of distant cousins of the author. While all the details of their actual lives are not known in full, Baker Kline has researched their history and created a narrative from the perspective of one of the wives of these once famous conjoined twins. Two added dimensions to the story are the timing – the mid-1800’s – and their location – a plantation in the South. Even as Sallie is reconciling her very strange arrangement of being married to one of the conjoined twins while her sister is married to the other, she is also grappling with the concept of slavery, the immorality of owning another human being. Even while she is forced to acknowledge her dependence on those who are working for her, she feels in her very bones that it is wrong. When war comes to challenge the family’s “way of life,” she is singularly ready to be rid of this scourge.

I believe the story might have been told through a more abbreviated path, but overall I thought it was a fascinating read, with complex and challenging ideas, and a powerful narrative about difference, acceptance, and courage.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Posted on by marjorieseidenfeld

This epic tale begins with the birth of Effia, born during a fire that devastated her father’s crops, a harbinger of the impact that fire would have on generations to come. And as we learn about the generations that follow, we also learn about the history of the warring tribes that inhabit the Gold Coast of Africa as well as the movement of enslaved Black men and women to America and their experience through generations there.

This is another work of genius by Gyasi. Through many endearing characters and colorful and impassioned scenes, we learn about the history of the peoples of current day Ghana as well as how so many came to be enslaved in America. We learn, too, about their experience of continued oppression beyond the years of slavery in the US as well. The stories are so tactile and sharply painted, the reader cannot help but feel a connection to the many characters, as if we are traveling along the family’s lineage ourselves, through each generation.

And Gyasi omits nothing. She includes the dark reality for those who migrated north seeking relief from enslavement only to find continued prejudice and rejection in different forms. She includes the ugly truth about our history of replacing slavery with mass incarceration. She writes about our American reality now and how, in spite of some change and advancement, divides persist.

It’s a beautifully rendered portrait of the not-so-beautiful history of Ghana and the history of our country. Yes, another MUST-READ.

 

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Posted on by marjorieseidenfeld
Beloved: Toni Morrison: 9781400033416: Amazon.com: Books

Denver and Sethe have found a rhythm in their isolated existence..  Even while they are haunted by an occasional eerie noise or movement from the unexpected, and even as they mourn the loss of Baby Suggs, their mother/grandmother, they have figured out a way to work and live and get through the days.   It is only the arrival of Paul D who stirs up old trauma for Sethe, throwing her back into her past, forcing her to relive old horrors.  And it is very unclear if their unusual little family will be able to leave the past behind and move forward.  

Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning Beloved, is beautiful, poetic, lofty, erratic, layered, and extremely hard to understand without guidance.   It is likely that repeated readings are necessary to glean the most meaning from the text  Because it was not set up as a traditional story might be, it was hard to get oriented to the characters, — who they were, where they were,  and how they were related to each other.  Once I did muddle through the first, maybe 10%,  of the book, however, I was then able to appreciate the book for all its magnificent power.  

There is a story here, but a non-linear one and one that mixes in much superstition, supernatural, and memory.  In truth, it is a lyrical platform in which to lament the horrors of enslavement, the way in which enslavement robs us of our humanity.  It is loosely based on a true story of a woman who, rather than allow her daughter to be captured and be enslaved, murdered her instead.   This  unthinkable act forces us to examine just how desperate a mother could be to choose death over a life of ownership by another individual.  To choose death rather than not having freedom to choose whom one may love and form attachment to.  To choose death over a life of being chained, both figuratively and literally.  

Most powerful for me were the sparks of memories of Paul D and of Sethe as they went about their day to day on “Sweet Home,” the plantation where they’d originally met.  Paul D harks back to a memory of overhearing an assessment of his monetary worth, as if one could place such a figure on a life.  At another moment, Sethe remembers overhearing Schoolteacher showing his pupils how to list Sethe’s human qualities on one side of a page and her animal qualities on the other, reducing her to only partly human.  There is physical brutality described as well, but I believe these more insidious crimes reveal more about how these individuals were perceived and how these perceptions seeped into their souls– even more so than the physical harm that befell them. 

I feel that I’ve gotten so much from having read this book.  If reading can impart some degree of empathy,  Sethe’s story is an important place to start.