Carregue numa fotografia para ir para os Livros Google.
A carregar... The Buddha in the Attic (original 2011; edição 2011)por Julie Otsuka (Autor)
Informação Sobre a ObraThe Buddha in the Attic por Julie Otsuka (2011)
Books Read in 2023 (65) » 18 mais Top Five Books of 2013 (797) Top Five Books of 2015 (686) Books Read in 2018 (1,012) Books Read in 2013 (636) Historical Fiction (812) Nightmares Not Included (117) To read (7) "We" narration (4) A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Great freaking book ( ) This was a rare first person plural narrator that I found to be executed well and actually essential to the plot. How else to properly pay respect to a whole generation of picture brides in the early twentieth century, getting the reader invested in a life that would inevitably be cut short without leaving us unmoored in a narrative? The plot hurtles through a carousel of lives, losing some, picking another up, following one through for longer, all the while presenting a unified and yet multitude of experiences. I only learnt some years ago that there was a huge migration of Japanese men to the Americas as cheap labour during the early 20th century. I appreciated how this book brought the women's experiences to the forefront, humanising and personalising the stories that history books had tended to relegate as a postscript to a postscript in American immigration history. On the downside of knowing some history, I can't tell if the book intended for the reader to feel the tension of knowing what laid ahead for these women, specifically the internment camps in WWII. It was very good strategic planning to use the first person plural, that the narrative did not let the reader linger long on atrocities since the characters themselves also couldn't if they wanted to survive. They were mentioned almost as if being rattled off a list, to form a collective scar that underpinned all the characters' experiences, and to show how even though those stories cannot be truly told, those experiences reverberated through the surviving women. This book would be a very good introduction to a less-talked-about part of history, and very suitable to high schoolers and up. Non posso fare a meno di iniziare questa recensione con un po’ di sconcerto nel registrare che questo romanzo fa parte di una collana dedicata alla letteratura giapponese, quando l’autrice è nata in California e tuttora lavora e vive negli USA. È vero che le definizioni di cosa rientra e cosa no in un certo tipo di letteratura sono sempre lasche, ma vivere in questo Paese mi ha insegnato il disagio che lз italianз provano nel (non) gestire i cambiamenti demografici e sospetto che il cognome Otsuka in questo caso pesi più del suo luogo di nascita e crescita. Comunque, sono contenta di aver letto Venivamo tutte per mare, sia perché racconta una storia – l’immigrazione giapponese, in questo caso soprattutto delle donne, negli USA e il successivo internamento nei campi – ancora poco conosciuta, sia per il modo in cui lo fa. Venivamo tutte per mare, infatti, è un racconto corale che racconta questa pagina della storia statunitense attraverso le esperienze di numerose donne di origine giapponese, spesso senza dare loro un nome o un volto, ma identificandole di volta in volta con la loro esperienza e il modo in cui i grandi eventi storici impattano sulla vita di ognuna. Probabilmente deluderà chi è in cerca di un romanzo che lǝ aiuti a capire quella fetta di storia, visto che è fatto più di punti di vista che di racconto omogeneo: è più una lettura per chi sa, anche solo a grandi linee, cosa è successo e può lasciarsi trasportare da Otsuka nel sentire di queste donne giapponesi trapiantate negli USA. L’autrice è stata anche molto brava a evitare il sentimentalismo e a riprodurre quel modo di raccontare che associamo alle nonne e a chi ha vissuto in un’epoca a noi (relativamente) lontana. Il romanzo si conclude con la solita riflessione sull’immigrazione, sull’integrazione e sulla facilità con la quale lasciamo che le istituzioni facciano del male a intere categorie di persone. Dico la solita non tanto perché mi sia seccata di leggerla, ma perché sono amareggiata dal fatto che una raccomandazione così presente in letteratura viene drammaticamente ignorata ogni volta: sappiamo che non va a finire bene, in un modo o nell’altro, ma noi niente, non riusciamo mai a fermarci prima del disastro. Poi piangiamo sul latte versato e ci chiediamo come sia stato possibile. Che orrore. I LOVED this book. It shows us the lives of these anonymous women starting off from one similar point - mail order brides on a boat from Japan to America in the early 1900s - and how each experience could go lots of ways and they all are just one tiny thread in the tapestry of life. Here is an example: "Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and top beets and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never before held a hoe. "Easiest job in America," we were told. Some of us had been sickly and weak all our lives but after one week in the lemon groves of Riverside we felt stronger than oxen. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row." A subtle book, with flashes of sadness and flashes of goodness, all building to a quiet intensity of emotion. By the end of the book I felt my heart racing because it felt like I had truly seen how life goes, the good and bad and the sheer blind chance of it all.
This passage may give a clue as to how Julie Otsuka's book is to be read. She calls it a novel. It is closely and carefully based on factual history/ies. There are novelistically vivid faces, scenes, glimpses, voices, each for a moment only, so you cannot linger anywhere or with anyone. Information is given, a good deal of it, in the most gracefully invisible manner; and history is told. Yet the book has neither a novel's immediacy of individual experience, nor the broad overview of history. The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry.....I am sorry that after it, in the last chapter, she suddenly changes her narrative mode and ceases to follow her group of women. The point of view changes radically and "we" suddenly are the whites: "The Japanese have disappeared from our town." Narrated in the first-person plural, The Buddha in the Attic is a slight, but powerfully moving piece of prose. It tells the story of a group of Japanese mail-order brides, from their journey to America, through marriage, work, childbirth and motherhood, until they and their entire communities are rounded up at the beginning of the war....Some might find the plurality of voice troubling, suggesting that it does little to restore individual identities to those whom history has forgotten, but I would argue the opposite. A host of individual characters and experiences crystallise as families and communities take root But the book’s plural voice is particularly effective at capturing their long, giddy conversations on the ship as they wonder if American men really grow hair on their chests, put pianos in their front parlors and dance “cheek to cheek all night long” with their lucky wives....But no story in the conventional sense ever develops, and no individuals emerge for more than a paragraph....Had we known them as full individuals — as real and diverse and distinct — we couldn’t have whisked them away to concentration camps in the desert. A great novel should shatter our preconceptions, not just lacquer them with sorrow. PrémiosDistinctionsNotable Lists
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
Current DiscussionsNenhum(a)Capas populares
Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
É você?Torne-se num Autor LibraryThing. |