Then there’s Fola, once his bell-bottom-denim wearing wife, law-school-graduate-turned-florist, irrevocably let-down, and letting down. The novel opens with the death of Kweku, an excellent surgeon who suffers a wicked injustice in his workplace, a catalyst that turns him into an outcast in his own life. As far-reaching as the novel feels, at its heart it is the story of one family their sorrows and rupture, and their attempts at healing. (Mar.One of my favourite quotes on the subject of the craft of writing comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Katherine Anne Porter: ‘Get so well acquainted with your characters that they live and grow in your imagination exactly as if you saw them in the flesh and finally tell their story with all of the truth and tenderness and severity you are capable of.’ In Ghana Must Go, Taiye Selasi gives us a cast of characters who pull apart and come together to tell a story with an immaculate sense of truth, tenderness, and severity.
Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri but with even greater warmth and vibrancy, Selasi’s novel, driven by her eloquent prose, tells the powerful story of a family discovering that what once held them together could make them whole again. And the youngest, Sadie, feels inadequate in the shadow of her successful siblings.
Olu, the eldest, emulates his father in business but wants his marriage to be “something better than” the family he knows. The twins, Taiwo and Kehinde, once inseparable, have not spoken in 18 months wounded by something neither will disclose, their bond has been eroded by anguish. This emotional reunion reveals to what extent Kweku fractured his beloved family by leaving them.
After his death, Fola and their four grown children gather in Ghana for the funeral of the man who abandoned them 16 years ago. Years later, now 57 and married to another woman, Kweku, back in Ghana, is dying in the garden of his home in Accra. After arriving in America from Ghana, a promising but penniless young man, Kweku Sai, becomes a famed surgeon living in Boston with his wife, Fola, and children, proof of the American dream. Selasi’s gorgeous debut is a thoughtful look at how the sacrifices we make for our family can be its very undoing.
0 kommentar(er)
