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Pam Durban

Forfatter af So Far Back: A Novel

7+ Works 171 Members 2 Reviews

Om forfatteren

Pam Durban is the author of The Laughing Place and All Set About With Fever Trees. She has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer's Award. She teaches at Georgia State University, where she is one of the founding editors of Five Points Magazine. (Bowker Author Biography)

Værker af Pam Durban

So Far Back: A Novel (2000) 69 eksemplarer
The Laughing Place: A Novel (1993) 50 eksemplarer
The Tree of Forgetfulness (Yellow Shoe Fiction) (2012) — Forfatter — 31 eksemplarer
Soon : stories (2015) 5 eksemplarer
Soon 1 eksemplar

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000) — Bidragyder — 1,552 eksemplarer
The Best American Short Stories 1997 (1997) — Bidragyder — 351 eksemplarer
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1997 (1997) — Bidragyder — 34 eksemplarer
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1988 (1988) — Bidragyder — 6 eksemplarer

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[The Tree of Forgetfulness] is the story of a lynching in South Carolina in 1925. Told from multiple points of view through time after the event, the novel explores mob mentality, how lies and truth become confused, and redemption. Many townspeople were involved in the lynching, but afterward no one is sure exactly who – after all, it was a dark night.

As we move from narrator to narrator, back and forth in time, we see how difficult the idea of “truth” can be. One of the men involved, Howard Aimar, claims: “They all knew how murky things could get when what really happened got so tangled up with what should have happened, it was hard to tell them apart, especially when a man mistook what he’d meant to do for what he’d actually done.” The advantage of using several viewpoints is that we get different pieces of the story from each person – and they don’t always mesh.

Durban, in creating people who are not monsters yet who do monstrous things, gives us something to think about. As one of the character tries to understand: “Maybe she wants to piece this story back together, to make it as whole and true as it can be, because she believes that stories can act as antidotes to amnesia and complacency; that telling stories is one way to remember what we’re capable of doing to one another.”
… (mere)
 
Markeret
BLBera | Oct 6, 2013 |
"The Laughing Place" is the antithesis of Chick Lit bestsellers and their smart, piercing wit. It goes deep into painful places and pulls at them like an insistent fingernail at a scab. Durban prods gently at the most cherished human foibles – pride, vanity, grief, and betrayal. She doesn’t laugh so much as look sympathetically on while we squirm at being found out, and I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. It moves slowly and with warmth, deceptively calm as quicksand. It is full of ugly truths in clothed in beautiful words, which although a welcome relief from the glaring directness of harsh reality, is no less uncomfortable when taken in and swallowed. It is probably more dangerous for that very reason.
Putting aside the deeper lessons of The Laughing Place, it is at the least full of chokingly moving prose stripped of the annoying intellectual pretense I find in say, Barbara Kingsolver or Alice Sebold. Her voice is gentle, sympathetic, and refreshingly simple as it carries us on a journey of loss, endurance and eventual salvation. I didn’t want to keep reading, but found I could not put it down.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
melissagridley | May 13, 2006 |

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Statistikker

Værker
7
Also by
5
Medlemmer
171
Popularitet
#124,899
Vurdering
3.9
Anmeldelser
2
ISBN
15
Sprog
1

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