Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
|
Chargement... Homeland Elegies: A Novel (original 2020; édition 2020)par Ayad Akhtar (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreHomeland Elegies par Ayad Akhtar (2020)
   Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  ZeljanaMaricFerli | Mar 4, 2024 |    ) MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |  ) postsign | Dec 28, 2023 | It is billed as a novel, but I believe most of the stories related are true. There may be some things he has fictionalized, and I think a couple of times he says he's changed the name of someone. What is it like to grow up Pakistani, in the United States? To have your every thought and action questioned simply because of your name, the color of your skin, and assumptions others make about you? This book will make you ask these questions, but will you come up with definitive answers? (  ) cherybear | Nov 20, 2023 | In the middle of the book there was a sequence dealing with the profound feeling of “otherness”when the author looks in the mirror. In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here. I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others." From there, the novel/memoir builds to a overpowering ending. ( ) GordonPrescottWiener | Aug 24, 2023 |
Akhtar’s forceful, direct prose conveys a poetic sense of anguish. But while the critical insights are consistently sharp, Elegies’ family portraits linger longest — Ayad’s mother pining for her homeland, his father chasing after an illusory American dream. Donald Trump appears as a character here too, not as the cartoon villain who’s suffocated a good chunk of post-2016 literature but as a man whose deception, empty promises, and (to some) inexplicable appeal get at the heart of a national identity crisis. So maybe this is more than a novel. It’s a document — furious, unwieldy, tragic — of our time. An elegy is a mournful poem expressing regret for something lost. Ayad Akhtar’s brilliant new novel, “Homeland Elegies,” mourns an America that has lost its way in the half century since it welcomed his parents’ generation of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan.... Akhtar — recently named the new president of PEN America — wrote it in “a fever dream” after his mother died, Donald Trump was elected, and his father started showing signs of decline. He wanted to remember what brought his parents’ generation to the United States, how the country changed, and what those changes meant for all of them. The result is a searingly honest, brutally funny, sometimes painful-to-read account of being a Muslim in America before and after 9/11. The presidency of Donald J. Trump, like a motorcycle that sets off two-thirds of the car alarms on a city street, has affected different writers in different ways. Some have gone nearly mad, for worse and sometimes better; some have tightened their noise-cancelling headphones and pretended the moral disruption isn’t there. For Ayad Akhtar, the Trump presidency has led to “Homeland Elegies,” a beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.... “Homeland Elegies” is a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and at its best it has candor and seriousness to burn. With its sprawling vision of contemporary America, “Homeland Elegies” is a phenomenal coalescence of memoir, fiction, history and cultural analysis. It would not surprise me if it wins him a second Pulitzer Prize.... The interior design of “Homeland Elegies” may include elements of fiction, but the architecture is clearly the author’s life: The narrator is a man named Ayad Akhtar, the son of Pakistani doctors, who writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a Muslim American and then struggles to negotiate the rising xenophobia of the Trump era.... Ayad sees in his father’s unlikely attraction to Trump something essential about contemporary America. It demonstrates, he says, “the full extent of the terrifying lust for unreality that has engulfed us all.” ...We’re living, Ayad warns, through a systemic collapse of confidence fueled by “thoughtless and obsessive suspicion.” ...paradox runs like a wire through this book, which so poignantly expresses the loneliness of pining for one’s own homeland. One comes to this book not for the pleasures of conventional narrative fiction (though Akhtar certainly can spin a tale); this is a novel of restless exploration that finds no pat answers about what it means to be a Muslim American today. A profound and provocative inquiry into an artist’s complex American identity. Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one--least of all himself--in the process."-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4.1)
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4
It offers a perspective from the American "other" - Muslim immigrants before and after 9/11 and their experience of "America".
However, unlike in many stereotypical immigrant "underdog" stories, the narrator is (like the author) a Pulitzer winner coming from a well-educated, economically stable family.
It is easy to see why Ayad Akhtar would call this a novel while keeping the deceiving format of autobiographical essays. In an interview, he explained it was his answer to our "illusion of reality" powered by social media and our own fictionalized realities we present to others.
My overall impression, however, was that this wasn't an organic attempt, as it seemed he was really trying hard to be innovative, echoing Rushdie (who he mentions quite a bit in the book) and Roth to varying degrees of success.
The narrator in this novel is often condescending and detached from his surroundings, hence not very likeable. While this was planned by Akhtar in order to depict how success affected the narrator, I did find myself enjoying the novel less because of it.
Where this novel shines is the emotion of love towards his family which really comes through on the pages. Also, knowing the real story about Akhtar's father, the last chapter in the novel is especially heartbreaking.
I want to root for Akhtar and believe he truly is the great American writer of the moment. But, I can't get over the feeling that he is the one who on purpose creates a disconnect with his audience, perpetuating the "age of division". (