I have to be honest, i was slightly disappointed by this reading!

While the interviews that are part of this project are worthy of reading, and tells very moving stories that deserve to be telled, the whole book seemed pretty messy to me.

The alternance between the stories the protagonist wants to tell us and the stories of his own life is sometimes not very clear, which caused some confusion for me at some points. It was not easy to follow, and while I usually like a good stream of consciousness and the alternance of points of view, here these elements do not seem to work very well, even if it was maybe the author’s intention to make it seems blurred (what is reality and what is fiction?)

However, I would say that it was worth reading for all of the accounts of people lives and how they were affected by war and migration: their traumatic experiences really leave a mark in the consciousness of the reader, and are for sure not easy to forget.

✨ « The only time I heard people talk about depression was when they were using it as a synonym for sadness, and so I never thought of it as a disease »
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✨ Synopsis
The story is told by Gifty, an American neurology researcher with Ghanaian origins. She finds herself living with her mother and taking care of her as she struggles with depression
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✨ The book is a beautifully written story raising a lot of issues : from depression, to the relationship to religion, and the difficulties of growing up in the USA being black.
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✨ I found the story very touching and the insight on religion very deep and interesting to read. On the other side, reading about Gifty’s mother depression was not always easy, and if you know someone suffering from depression or you yourself suffer from it, it might trigger some negativity for you. The same goes with drug addiction and family abandonment.

🌟 After having heard so much about Elif Shafak, I finally did it and read one of her books, and let me tell you: WOW!

🌟 Not only the writing is divine, but I was amazed by her incredible ability in telling so many stories, from so many different points of view: how amazing it is for a single person to be able to represent so many various feelings and emotions that are so opposite from each other?

🌟 Also, the story alternate past and present, basically giving us not one but two novels all in one. This book is a delight and I devoured it.

🌟 “Little by little, one turns Forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there’s no place to arrive at”

⭐️ It’s 1975 and Angola is on the road for independence. Ludo, a Portuguese woman living in Angola, decides to wall herself in her apartment after her sister and brother in-law disappear. And there she will survive for three decades, with absolute no contact with the outside world, growing food on her terrace, burning books and furniture.
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⭐️ However, we also get a glimpse of the outside world by following some other characters which stories will all connect in a really smart way to Ludo story.
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⭐️ The short chapters and multiple storylines all coming together at the end gave a really interesting spin to the story, and I simply could not get the book down once I’ve started reading it!
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[Spoiler alert]
⭐️ It was interesting to see how Ludo was at first really racist (not wanting to eat “black food” and complaining about Angolan Portuguese not being real Portuguese and so on), while later on not even wanting to go back to Portugal, considering Angola was her country now. It’s interesting but also I have to admit kind of bizarre, considering she never set foot outside of her apartment, I don’t fully understand how this change happened 🤔
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🌟The thing that I appreciated the most about this book was its structure that allowed for a variety of voices to clash between each other’s, highlighting how true it is that history is written by the winners. The clashing of the two scripts (the one written by Chiara and the one revisited by Magsalin) is even more interesting considering how the author never clearly say which is written by whom, leaving it up to the readers to guess and understand who’s saying what.
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🌟 Cherry on the cake: at the end of the book we are gifted with an author essay where she talks about her mixed heritage: Philippine and USA. It is a jewel to read, and allows a more deep connexion with the novel itself (which is why I would suggest to read it before the novel, the essay is titled “How do we know the things that make us”

⭐️ The writing is simple but gripping. While the characters are all well written, I have to say I struggled to feel any empathy with the mother. While I get her surviving instincts and her desire to give her daughter a better life, sometimes it felt like she wanted it more for herself and the rest of the family, and that she’d rather turn the other way when confronted to her daughter suffering - even if she does come around towards the end, I would say it was a little too late.

⭐️ On the other side I absolutely loved Ana growth: even if it’s linked to her suffering, she ends up developing a very strong character, all while remaining attentive towards people she loves.

🌟 I read this *amazing* book for my first ever book club, the #translatedgemsbookclub by @translatedgems 

🌟 The writing of Amara Lakhous is witty, and WILL make you laugh out loud, literally!

🌟 The story takes place in a building in Rome, where various tenants give their opinion about the suspect of a murder case that took place in the elevator of the building, and while doing so they will also give their unfiltered opinions about immigrants in Italy, Italian decadent economics, mafia, Italian society and most of all how they were surprised to learn that Amedeo (the suspect) is actually an immigrant himself: it is impossible, because you see he speaks such good Italian (🙄)

🌟 As an Italian myself I cannot stress enough how the author of this book is spot on on what I personally see as the main disease of this country: the Italian habit of always blaming “the other”, whether it is the immigrants, or some immigrants rather than other, the Italians from the South, the Italians from the North...

🌟 It also perfectly captures how deeply Italian society is divided and how intolerance and racism runs in this country, division between Italians depending on which region you are from, but also division between good and bad immigrants, depending on how well they “integrated”

🌟 Finna is a short story taking place in a box furniture store (which if reminds you of IKEA it is because it was indeed inspired by it, which I found kind of funny 🙃)

🌟 I very much enjoyed the premises of this megastore where everyone gets lost that sees the sudden appearance of a portail to another dimension, however I was a little disappointed as after this premises I was expecting a little more humour and irony throughout the story, which remained instead more focused on the romance between the two characters.

🌟 However, the short story remains very much enjoyable, and if you like romance more than science fiction/adventure, this could be a nice mixture of the two for you. On the other side, if you are looking for a story more focused on the science fiction/action (as I was), while this will be an enjoyable short read, it probably won’t be that exciting for you.

🌱 In this introspective novel we slowly enter the mind of the protagonist and into her complicate/toxic family.

🌱 While I enjoyed the second half of the book, the first one let me very frustrated. It was indeed difficult to feel empathy with the main character in her hatred for her father as I did not know why the hatred was there. Maybe even more frustrating was the fact that the author hinted heavily to what her father fault was, yet we have to wait until half of the book to have a confirmation.

🌱 Maybe it was intentional (surely so), to make the reader feel the difficulty of the main character in talking about her trauma, but it did not work for me (it could for others).

🌱 The second half of the book was for me the real treat, and the themes that are tackled, are so in a delicate yet raw way, and letting go of the secrecy that characterises the first half of the book was what did the trick in my opinion - just hoped that happened earlier in the story

🌱 However, all together the book is very repetitive (intentional maybe, but still did not like it as it felt forced) and could easily have been half the length. Some repetitions serve the stories, but in most cases I found that the events that are described multiple times bring nothing new to the story (no different point of view, no new relevant details…)