Kirjanurkkaus

Lukijani, minun on nyt kuiskattava sinulle totuus. Tulehan lähemmäksi ja paina korvasi vasten tätä sivua. Vielä hiukan lähemmäksi. Aion nimittäin kertoa sinulle rehellisesti erään asian koskien edellä olevaa lukua, jonka olet juuri lukenut. Kuuntele nyt tarkkaan, lukijani, niin saat kuulla tärkeän tosiseikan. Jamaikan valkoisilla miehillä ei toden totta ollut tapana käyttäytyä tuolla tavalla. Toisinaan vannon lukevani jonkin kirjan toisenkin kerran, mutta harvoin oikeasti teen niin. Andrea Levyn Pitkä laulu on siinä mielessä poikkeus, että se on ensimmäinen kirja, jonka tuon blogiini jo toista kertaa - tällä kertaa suomeksi. Luin The Long Songin lähes viisi vuotta sitten ja muistan, että rakastin sitä. Ihastuin sen suorasukaiseen kertojaan, tonimorrisonmaiseen kieleen ja moniulotteisiin henkilöhahmoihin. Kirjoitin tuolloin arvioni lopuksi, että en voi uskoa, ettei yhtäkään Andrea Levyn teosta oltu suomennettu. Onneksi nyt on. En kuitenkaan rynnännyt pää kolmantena jalkana osta...

If war can ever be said to be just, then this war is so; it is action for a moral cause, with the most rigorous of intellectual underpinnings. And yet everywhere I turn, I see injustice done in the waging of it. And every day, as I turn to what should be the happy obligation of opening my mind to my wife, I grope in vain for words with which to convey to her even a part of what I have witnessed, what I have felt. Geraldine Brooks has taken one of the classics of American literature, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women , and re-written the story from an entirely different perspective. This time, the main character is Mr. March, the father of the four "little women" who is absent for most of Alcott's novel as he is off fighting in the American Civil War. I have never read Little Women , but I have watched the film with Winona Ryder , Claire Danes etc. dozens of times. I remember wondering about the missing father who always seems distant although the girls read his ...

July was born upon a cane piece.  Her mother, bending over double, hacked with her cane bill into a thick stem of cane. [...] So intent was she upon seeing that the weeping cane was stripped of its leaves - even in the dampening rain its brittle edges flew around her like thistledown - that she did not notice she had just dropped a child from her womb. July was born right there - slipping out to fall bloody and quivering upon a spiky layer of trash. This is the first novel by Andrea Levy that I've read, although her name was vaguely familiar to me before. The original reason why I grabbed this book from the library was that it was one of the Booker Prize nominees this year (although it didn't win). I'm glad I did read this, it's a brilliant book with language that is nothing short of amazing. The Long Song is written in the form of a memoir and the narrator takes on a very prominent role from the beginning of the novel. As soon as you open the front cover of th...

'There is no need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name. Because we cannot say in words what an apple is, it is not forbidden us to eat the apple. It is enough that we know the names of our needs and are able to use these names to satisfy them, as we use coins to buy food when we are hungry. It is no great task to teach Friday such language as will serve his needs. We are not asked to turn Friday into a philosopher.' The basic setting of this novel is clear enough in the beginning: a woman, Susan Barton, is shipwrecked onto an island. She discovers that the island is inhabited by an elderly white man named Cruso, who has a black slave, Friday. Sound familiar? Yes, this is the old Robinson Crusoe story told from a female perspective. But the island and its inhabitants are...