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Indlæser... Happiness (original 2018; udgave 2018)af Aminatta Forna
Work InformationHappiness af Aminatta Forna (2018)
  
Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.  froxgirl | Mar 6, 2024 |    ) HelenBaker | Sep 20, 2023 |  ) Andy5185 | Jul 9, 2023 | People who enjoy sweet, thoughtful books. In a nutshell: Two lives collide on the streets of South London. Worth quoting: “He wondered if one day every feeling in the world would be identified, cataloged and marked for eradication. Was there no human experience that did not merit treatment now?” Why I chose it: It was recommended to me as part of a book spa. What it left me feeling: Contemplative Review: This is an interesting book that I found more challenging to read than I expected. The plot: Attila is a psychiatrist originally from Ghana who has traveled around the world to various war zones and other areas filled with trauma, assisting the traumatised. He is in London, where he once lived, for a conference. Jean is a scientist originally from the US who tracks foxes in South London. Their lives intersect when the son of a family friend of Attila’s goes missing after his mother is wrongly detained by immigration authorities. The book takes place primarily where I live and work, so I recognize so many of the geographic markers, which made the book so vivid for me - I go for runs in the part where Jean is tracking foxes, walk along the street where Attila meets with someone caring for another friend of his. I regularly see foxes on my morning runs, and had a fox den with three pups behind the garden of my first flat here. So in some ways I could see the scenes of the book playing out as clearly as if I were watching them on screen. The book deals with so many themes - aging, family, community, immigration, prejudice, racism, love, loss, trauma. It looks at the conclusions people jump to, and the pathologizing of human emotions. It explores how people relate to people they love, how the decisions we make can take us far from what we once thought of as home, and how we build new lives. The book moves through time a lot, but I found it a bit harder to follow in this book than in similar ones. That didn’t make it bad, or wrong, and I can see the thread and the reasoning behind it, but I’m not sure it worked that well for me. That said, it is definitely a book that I will think about for a long while. Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it: Donate it (  ) ASKelmore | Apr 16, 2023 | I love the community that forms in this urban novel. Jean has developed a network of service workers – hotel doormen, street sweepers, and traffic wardens among them – who band together in the common cause of searching for the lost boy. The actions and interactions of these characters challenged me to pay closer attention to my surroundings and the people I encounter on a daily basis. I am intrigued by the psychological aspects of Forna’s writing. As in The Memory of Love, one of Forna’s main characters is a psychiatrist specializing in post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of war. Forna acknowledges the influence of Boris Cyrulnik’s Resilience in shaping her story. I would love to explore this novel with a reading group. I think it could spark a great conversation about resilience and overcoming past trauma. ( )1  cbl_tn | Nov 2, 2022 |
 At its weakest, “Happiness” devolves into a stern lecture, delivered through Attila, arguing that our avoidance of discomfort has become a pathology, one that supports an ever-expanding therapeutic industry. As Attila excoriates our childish pursuit of wrinkle-free lives, Forna even gives him a phrase to describe it: “prelapsarian innocence.” In opposition, Forna offers the examples of certain resilient survivors of war zones and of Jean’s foxes, who outwit the humans intent on annihilating them. Yet I found this dichotomy unconvincing. After all, we lack the resources to identify and treat most psychological victims of war; for the most part, they simply vanish into obscurity. Yet Forna’s finely structured novel powerfully succeeds on a more intimate scale as its humane characters try to navigate scorching everyday cruelties. Pausing to watch immigrant jugglers, Jean finds a bag hidden in the bushes containing worn sneakers and a school exercise book: “Something about it, this pitiful collection of belongings, the ambitions encompassed by the study notes in the exercise book, the men performing for an uninterested public; watching them brought Jean a feeling of pity and strange protectiveness.” Like Jean, we can only guess at the horrors these jugglers have fled, only imagine the terrors of their journey and how much they have endured to come here, to the West, to perform for us, the “uninterested public.”  In his book about the rise of populist politics, The Road to Somewhere, the rightwing thinker and former Prospect editor David Goodhart diagnosed the deep divide that has emerged in Britain between “somewheres” and “anywheres”. Somewheres feel a deep connection to the (often rural) place in which they live, are socially conservative and less well educated. Anywheres are metropolitan liberals, equally at home in Manhattan or Mumbai, university-educated and rootless. Theresa May was describing Anywheres when she said: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world then you are a citizen of nowhere.” Aminatta Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, is the story of two Anywheres, Attila and Jean, and offers a profound and convincing riposte to the narrow-mindedness of Goodhart’s thesis. This is a novel about migration, about the long shadows cast by episodes of historical violence, about the many overlapping and interconnected somewheres created by people on the margins, those who fall outside what Goodhart – and many others – mean when they say British society. In these few scenes, Forna sets her key characters in motion, connecting them first by chance and ultimately by love. The novel’s title is “Happiness,” after all. But Forna is too subtle and knowing a writer to create a straightforward, let alone inspirational, narrative. The action here may revolve around Attila’s search in London for a relative’s runaway child — a pleasingly simple mystery — but the novel has a wider orbit. Traveling elliptically between past and present, it crosses continents and weaves together lives that intersect years later in London over the course of just 10 days. Each intermittent episode seems to materialize as memories do, with sharp and fragile immediacy. HæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
A fox makes its way across London's Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide - Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. In this delicate tale of love and loss, of cruelty and kindness, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the interconnectedness of lives, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (4.15)
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Quote: "The punishment meted out to Adam and Eve by their creator for eating the forbidden fruit was not to be cast out of Eden, nor the knowledge of their own nakedness, but the gift of an intelligence great enough to be able to imagine their own deaths, the awful foreknowledge all humans possessed, not only in the moment of it happening but for every day of their lives." (