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Cargando... The Other Americans: A Novelpor Laila Lalami
   Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  SqueakyChu | Jan 27, 2024 |    ) florrrrr12 | Aug 31, 2023 |  ) GordonPrescottWiener | Aug 24, 2023 | ) viviennestrauss | Sep 9, 2022 | ) BibliophageOnCoffee | Aug 12, 2022 |
 For the reader, the novel presents something of a Rorschach test. Will our belief and sympathy depend on the speaker’s racial or gender identity, or perhaps his or her age? What if the perpetrators have no interest in being forgiven? What if we never really believed in truth, only persuasion?  Throughout the novel, Lalami’s attention to contrast and contradiction is stunning. Her prose is incisive and lived-in, as though culled from decades of listening in on private conversations between older family members. In this, Nora’s chapters are the strongest. Through her voice, readers most clearly feel the central tension of the novel: the Guerraouis’ deep desire to belong to a country that vilifies people like them. “The Other Americans” manages to be many books at once: a gripping literary thriller, a complex love story and a sharp critique of an America wracked by war and hatred, divided against itself, constantly near a breaking point. And Lalami succeeds admirably on all fronts: The novel is intricately plotted, up to its shocking but unforced end. There are no unnecessary plot twists; Lalami is an intelligent author who’s not in love with her own cleverness. [Lalami] shows how we are all "other," not just to our fellows, but to ourselves. A person capable of a ghastly crime might also be capable of deep feeling for other creatures. People who were once closer than lovers can drift apart, and lovers can become strangers within weeks, or decades. The Other Americans demonstrates brilliantly, in ways foreseen and unforeseen, as often denied as acknowledged, how the personal and political enmesh in all our lives. PremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
"From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Told by multiple narrators--Nora herself, Jeremy (the Iraq war veteran with whom she develops an intimacy), widow Maryam, Efrain (an immigrant witness to the accident who refuses to get involved for fear of deportation), Coleman (the police investigator), and Driss (the dead man himself), The Other Americans deftly explores one family's secrets and hypocrisies even as it offers a portrait of Americans riven by race, class, and religion, living side by side, yet ignorant of the vicissitudes that each tribe, as it were, faces" -- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Autor de LibraryThingLaila Lalami es un Autor de LibraryThing, un autor que tiene listada su biblioteca personal en LibraryThing. Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.87)
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I had a very hard time getting into this story, though. Each short chapter was narrated by a different character. I much dislike this form of novel and did not know this about it until after I started reading it. Though this story concentrated mostly on Nora, a young woman whose family is from Morocco and her adjustment to the sudden death of her father by what she felt was premeditated murder, I could not get interested in it they way I had hoped to. I simply read it to get through to the end so I could then read another book.
Last, what was the purpose of having Efraín in the story? We learned very little of him. Why try to handle racism against Moroccans, American blacks, and Hispanics in one novel? It waters down racism too much and eliminates the deeper experience of just one person.
I must say that this author has the ability to express herself well. It’s just that I hated this story. I will read another of her novels (because I bought one after I heard her speak). I’ll give her another chance. :) (