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Cargando... Homesick (edición 2012)por Roshi Fernando
Información de la obraHomesick por Roshi Fernando
Best Books Set in London (121) Cargando...
InscrÃbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I stuck it out as long as I could. Just couldn't get into the writing style. Some of the stories I couldn't find a character to be invested in. It happens. On to things that I find more enjoyable. ( ) So many characters were introduced in so few pages that I had trouble keeping them straight. And when I did learn more about them, I didn't like them and, ore importantly, didn't care what happened to them. For me, that means the book is a failure. The writing was disjointed, probably intentionally so that the various stories come together. To me, it just seemed choppy. The story was filled with cruel people doing stupid things. I've read quite a few novels about emigration and assimilation or lack thereof, and I like reading those stories, so I expected to like this one. However, between the writing style and the characters, this one just didn't work for me. Reading it became a chore. I was given an advance copy of the book for review. "Homesick" is described as "kaleidoscopic" and this certainly fits. It's the story of a Sri Lankan family, immigrated to London, that moves back and forth in time and setting. Each chapter is narrated by a different character and the cast includes family, extended family, and friends. It actually reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel. The work's greatest strength is how poignantly it captures the sense of being "homesick." Some characters are homesick for the country they have left behind, others for a country to which they have never been, but which somehow calls to them. The feeling of being between worlds, the longing for a sense of belonging that is thwarted by the characters being "both" and "neither" Sri Lankan and British, is beautifully captured in the writing. The difficulty lies in the kaleidoscopic nature of the work. Ultimately the scope was so very broad, that I was left feeling a bit adrift in a very large sea of characters. There were so many that at times it was difficult to remember who was connected and in what way, and the frustration of this created an emotional distance from the characters. The transitions between chapters were sometimes jarring; it felt as though you had just settled in with one group of characters in one place, and gotten a feel for things, when it was time to move on to another group or place in time. Perhaps the constant sense of displacement was intentionally created by the author to elicit in the reader the experiences of the characters themselves, but this unfortunately made it difficult to connect in a deeper way to the story. By the end, one can see how the threads tie together, and how the larger theme of homesickness plays out in each of the characters' lives. It's an admirable book, but it didn't grab me in the way that I think it could have had there been fewer characters and a deeper connection with each.
Roshi Fernando is a powerful new voice of the Asian immigrant experience. Her debut comprises a series of linked stories centred around a cast of characters, some of them Sri Lankan migrants. The book offers complex, mosaic characters and compelling storylines rather than racial stereotypes and sententious proselytising. Roshi Fernando, winner of the 2009 Impress prize, doesn't shirk from the harsh realities of the outcast, but this collection of stories is tender, uplifting and funny, too. Roma Tearne has written perceptively and poetically about the experience of Sri Lankans living in Britain: now she has a rival. Fernando's book is a sequence of interconnected stories charting an extended family of Tamil exiles, from a party in the early 1980s to a funeral in the present day. The stories frequently crystallise around a single luminous detail, a jarring intrusion of violence or a bizarrely unexpected development, such as a young boy concealing a turtle's egg which hatches as his family is about to board a plane.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:In this stunningly assured debut work of fiction, Roshi Fernando weaves together the lives of an extended Sri Lankan family. At Victor and Nandini's home in southeast London, the New Year's Eve celebration is under way. Everyone is gathered aroundâ??clinking glasses of arrack and whisky, eating freshly fried poppadoms, listening to baila musicâ??waiting to ring in 1983. Upstairs, The Godfather is playing on repeat for a bedroom filled with teenagers drunk on pilfered wine. And in the middle of it all is sixteen-year-old Preethi, tipsy on youth and friendship and covert cigarettes, desperate to belong. But what does that mean, to belong? As Preethi moves through her lifeâ??befriending the local outcast, revealing her brother's deepest secret, struggling with her own unhappiness and through a souring marriageâ??this desire for acceptance remains the one constant, both for her and for everyone she knows. Homesick moves back and forth in time, between London and Sri Lanka, circling the people in Preethi's world: her brother Rohan; her friends Nil, Clare, Deirdre, and Lolly; her aunty Gertie; and terrible cousin Kumar. Together, they are bound by this shared need to fit in somewhere, this rootless desire for a place to call home. Gorgeously drawn, told with wit and pathos, this poignant narrative blends love with loss, politics with pop culture, tradition with youthful rebellion. Homesick is rich with insight and a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary immigrant life that introduces us to the work of Roshi Fernando, a remarkable new talent. This eBook edition includes a Reading No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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