Author Archives: Silvia Cademartori

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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Published by Bond Street Books. Three-hundred and five pages.

 

yaa-gyasi-bookThe author captures your attention and makes you want to know what happens to each generation of a family that is unaware the other half exists.

The novel begins with the story of two half-sisters born in Ghana who don’t know about the other. Effia stays in Africa and is married off to a British officer. Her side of the story is about her African descendants. The second half-sister, Esi, is kidnapped and enslaved and brought to the United States. Esi’s story is about her American descendants.

However captivating the narrative, it’s basically a collection of short stories. Each chapter recounts the story of one family member per generation. Sometimes there is only one person born that generation, other times there are many, but we only ever hear the voice of one. The chapters don’t carry forward from the previous. There’s a diagram of the family tree at the beginning of the book, which you’ll need to keep track of all the characters.

At the end of the book. seven generations later, a member of each family tree meet, not knowing they are related. They begin a relationship and end up going back to Africa and stand on the spot where long ago, two half-sisters stood at the same time unaware that the other existed. Effia, in her room overlooking the sea, while Esi is held captive in the dungeon below; the dichotomy that is The Castle.

Though fiction, the story is very insightful into the history of African Americans and their place in America today.The fiction is written around actual historical events.

You’ll be hard pressed to stop reading in the middle of a chapter, so authentic a portrait Gyasi paints.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

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Four-hundred-and-seventy-three pages, Europa Editions.

story-of-the-lost-child-cover-241The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan chronicles recounting the story of Elena and Lina. Reading the book is like cliff-diving off a high cliff and crashing on the rocks below. It’s a sad ending to a glorious story.

I’m not going to spoil the book for you, but the two protagonists become pregnant and raise their children in the old neighbourhood. One of the two protagonists literally loses her child and begins a slow decent into instability if not madness. A lot of ink is taken up summing up of all the characters and where they’re at in their lives when the book ends in 2006. Lina and Elena are in their 60s, as are the majority of the cast of characters who make up the novel.

Elena is a success but she’s crushed by depression, never becoming the confidant person she could have been. She feels that her career has been marred by that. Elena is a success but she’s consumed by self doubt. Lina too, becomes a success but eventually implodes. Lina disappears, we know that in the first pages of the first novel. Here, we get an inkling as to why; she may have been murdered or simply decided to vanish of her own free will. Not knowing why she’s gone missing is an unsatisfying aspect of the novel.

The series has been a stellar trip about the lives of two remarkable women and the people in their lives. However, the ending is a sad ending to an otherwise at times shocking and always eventful series. I expect characters in their 60s to have misgivings, joys and regrets but Elena and especially Lina, loomed larger than life and their senior years are just plain dull.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein.

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Four-hundred and eighteen pages. Europa Editions.

9781609452339Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay reads like a soap opera. You know the entire cast of characters; new and fleeting ones are introduced and they get themselves into dangerous, sad and fascinating situations. You know they’ll get out of the mess they’re in but you don’t know how, so you keep reading.

The third in the four-book Neapolitan series is definitely not pulp fiction, yet it contains lurid and sensational subject matter and its narrative is operatic in scope. The main characters Lina and Elena alone would be comfortable in a Jackie Collins novel; not to mention the characters that surround them. In fact, that may be the broad appeal of the series.

The characters are so richly described and the writing so evocative, that the book is more than typical chick lit about women’s relationships. Ferrante’s talented writing elevates Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay from a light fluffy read at the cottage to literary prose.

The third book becomes more about Elena and how she asserts herself as a person and as a writer, while Lila spins down into a horrible abyss before climbing back up. Characters from the previous two books come together. There’s a reversal of fortune.  At this point, I could give you a synopsis of the novel but I won’t. I didn’t have a clue as to what would happen on these pages and I want to give you the same pleasure.

However, I will tell you that what Lila and Elena go through is almost symbolic of the cultural and social changes that take place in Italy during the late 1960s and 70s, the period the book is set in.

It’s a great read but a thick read at 418 pages. Enjoy.

Dinner thanks largely to organic- vegetable delivery service

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Dinner was so spectacular last night that I just have to share.

Every other Thursday, we head to a grocery-store parking lot and pick up our order of organic vegetables grown on a nearby farm. This is what the farmer gave us this week!

 

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And this is what we did with the string beans, onions, zucchini and tomatoes.

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The veggies were sautéd (the beans, par-boiled first) in butter and pepper, to which we added organic trout broiled with BBQ spices and more tomatoes. Oh and wine. My husband doesn’t even like string beans but he said it was better than dinner in a nice restaurant. I love string beans and I agree.

 

 

Organic-vegetable delivery getting bountiful

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Eight weeks ago, when this experiment started, I thought I had a lot of fresh organic vegetables to content with every week, but really, it turned out to be a small amount. Now that summer is in full swing, my bi-weekly delivery of organic vegetables is humongous!

How is a family of three supposed to eat all this in a week? That was my first thought. Thankfully, we signed up for a bi-weekly service so we have two weeks to eat all this!

 

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