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Cargando... A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000)por Gil Courtemanche
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A very difficult novel to read but I am glad I did. Gil Courtemanche takes us to the days leading up to the genocide in Rwanda and introduces us to people who lived in Kigali at this time. These are real people and through them I am better able to understand what it meant at that time to be a Tutsi or a Hutu which, really, wasn't very different except for some physical attributes. The two tribes had intermarried for a long time and for the ordinary people they were all just Rwandans.I got to know a whole group of people who were good people at a very bad time. People with a passion for life "Each moment stolen from fear is a paradise." Some ordinary people became heroes and those with power and influence turned away. The novel is not just a testamount to the human spirit but it is also a love story to a people pure of heart in Rwanda, in Africa. Half novel and half personal account. ( ) I heard the author of this book being interviewed on Radio National not so long ago. He had a a crusty. gravelly voice, roughened by too many cigarettes and chastened by life and the things he’d seen as a reporter. He was in Rwanda when the genocidal war between the Hutu and the Tutsis broke out, and this book is his homage to the people he knew. What does it do to a man when he is the sole survivor of a catastrophe, and he survives because he is White? The sharpness of his pain cries out above his elegiac tone, and not just when he writes of his beloved Gentille, but also of his friends: little people — stall-keepers, prostitutes, waiters. Wisely, he doesn’t try to explain what happened. It’s both too big and too small for that. He does, however, cast blame, especially on the Belgian missionaries who sowed the seed of ethnic hatred between the tall, fair-skinned Hutu, originating from Ethiopia, and the darker, more squat Tutsi. When the enmity spilled over into what the 20th century calls ‘ethnic cleansing’ the brutality shocked the world, its horror exacerbated by the fact that the UN was already there as a peace-keeping force, and did nothing. Courtemanche is blunt about this: he says that well-trained and equipped UN soldiers could have controlled the situation. It could have been prevented. He is sardonic about the barbarity. The Hutu butchered the Tutsi with machetes. They lopped off the feet of the boys so that they couldn’t become soldiers. They raped the women, hacked off their breasts, and left them to die slowly. Sometimes very slowly, of AIDS. They hated the women especially, because they bred the Tutsi children. Courtemanche doesn’t spare Western sensibilities—he points out that Africans don’t have the luxury of a nice, clean war with smart bombs and quick clean deaths achieved with pin-point accuracy guns. The sense of menace pervades a novel that closely follows what actually happened. Everyone knows what’s coming, and the drunken, pot-smoking militias swagger about boasting about how they will kill the ‘cockroaches’. Yet Bernard Valcourt stays on, making his film about AIDS, because he is passionately in love with the beautiful Gentille. This love he has for her is so beautifully drawn, so eloquently wrought, that it lifts the story onto a new plane. In the midst of the horror, this love is a purpose for living. To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/31/a-sunday-at-the-pool-in-kigali-by-gil-courte... Nel 1777 a Mannheim, in Germania, tra gli ospiti di casa Weber capita un giorno anche Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ed è così che a modesta famiglia di un copista di musica – il paziente Fridolin eber, la tenace Frau Weber e quattro graziose fanciulle – approda al palcoscenico della grande musica. All’inizio è amore a prima vista tra Mozart e Aloysia, la più bella delle quattro ragazze. Il padre di Mozart, tuttavia, incita il figlio a pensare alla carriera e non alle sottane. Stufa di aspettare, la bella Aloysia sposerà incinta un pittore di discreto talento. Mentre la primogenita Josefa, segretamente innamorata anche lei del giovane musicista, si sente superata ingiustamente e se ne va di casa, e la più piccola, Sophie, per sfuggire ai soffocanti “progetti” della madre corre a rifugiarsi in convento, sarà la terza, Constanze, a salire con Mozart all’altare. Romanzo storico in cui la felicità della scrittura si unisce al piacere delle vicende narrate, Il matrimonio delle sorelle Weber ci porta direttamente nel cuore dell'animo femminile, nei sogni, nei desideri e nelle disillusioni di quattro giovani donne e della loro madre, e, insieme, ci offre il ritratto perfetto di un'epoca di grande creatività e civiltà Half novel, half first hand account: this book is both hard to put down and hard to keep reading. Taking place during the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, it is a combination of love story and horror story. The characters' names are of real people the author knew before the genocide and their real life fates are listed in the dedication. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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“Look, for people who’re going to be dead soon, we’re not doing too badly.” “The novel of the year” is what La Presse called this extraordinary book, a love story that takes place in the days leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A first work of fiction by one of French Canada’s most admired journalists, Gil Courtemanche, it was first published in Quebec in 2000, spent more than a year on bestseller lists and won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers’ award for outstanding book of the year. Rights were sold to publishers in over twenty countries in Europe and around the world. This humanist story of an unlikely love affair set against a holocaust has become an internationally acclaimed phenomenon, worthy of comparison with the work of Graham Greene and Albert Camus. The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel, Kigali, in the early 1990s, draws a regular crowd of assorted aid workers, strutting Rwandan officials, Belgian businessmen, French paratroops and Canadian expats. Among them is Bernard Valcourt, a documentary filmmaker from Quebec, on a mission to set up a television station in the capital. Valcourt, who for two decades has earned his living from wars and famines, lingers around the pool drinking warm beer and watching football; but most of all, watching Gentille, a beautiful young waitress, who is a Hutu but often mistaken for a Tutsi because of her family’s strange history. The trouble coming stems from a long conflict, instigated in colonial times by Whites who treated Tutsis as superior to Hutus. The Hutu government is now openly encouraging violence against Tutsis. The physical traits of the Tutsis make them easy prey, but they are not the only ones in danger. Too many people are already dying in Rwanda daily: of AIDS, of malaria, and increasingly at roadblocks at the hands of drunken militia, or pulled from their homes. The hotel staff and prostitutes sense trouble and death drawing closer as they continue providing drinks and meals and sex. The story of this developing catastrophe is revealed through the lives of a handful of Rwandans who befriend Valcourt. They confide in him because he listens, and because his interviews offer them a chance to try to change the way things are by telling the world. Their candour and warmth begin to make his heart glow. He meets people like Méthode, who knows a bloodbath is brewing and would rather die of AIDS in the comfort of a hotel room than by a machete. Threatened, frightened, sick, they don’t want to talk and act like they’re dying. Poor as they are, they want to have some moments of pleasure and celebrate life. As Kigali life continues in its resourcefulness and persistence, Valcourt is falling in love with Rwanda, and with Gentille, who loves him because he sees her as no-one has seen her before. Even as the worst horrors begin, as friends are raped and murdered, he starts to feel a strange peace in this land of a thousand hills, though he repudiates the outside world for its failure to intervene. Because Gentille is thought to be Tutsi, her life is in danger. Still, no-one can believe that the extremists will go too far, that brothers and sisters will kill brothers and sisters, and that 800,000 civilians will be massacred. A hard-hitting chronicle of an overlooked chapter of recent history, told with skill and compassion, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is also a celebration of living in the moment, of the integrity of friendship and the courage of everyday heroes. Harrowing, unsettling, challenging, but beautiful and moving, it is a book that cannot leave the reader untouched; as a Quill & Quire reviewer said, it is “full of real people that demand to be remembered.” No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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