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Indlæser... How Much of These Hills Is Gold: A Novel (udgave 2020)af C Pam Zhang (Forfatter)
Work InformationHow Much of These Hills Is Gold af C Pam Zhang
  
Books Read in 2020 (389) Books Read in 2021 (2,497) Books Read in 2023 (2,902) » 1 mere Overdue Podcast (563) Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.  caedocyon | Feb 23, 2024 |   Not a cheerful ending, but contemplative. (  ) Daumari | Dec 28, 2023 | These siblings, Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11, children of Chinese laborers, take their father's body on a journey through the California hills in the middle of the Gold Rush. The quest for burial, the family strife, the smell of death, the hot sun, the dust, the storms, all recall Faulkner. Ba (Mandarin for "dad") haunts the narrative as Addie Bundren did, first as voice and then ultimately as a corpse, awful, unwieldy, and decomposing. “How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is an aching book, full of myths of Zhang’s making (including tigers that roam the Western hills) as well as joys, as well as sorrows. It’s violent and surprising and musical. It's a book that doesn't provide easy answers. And it's one that quietly confrontational. Zhang wants you to remember the forgotten Chinese laborers, the very laborers who helped build the transcontinental railroad. More importantly, Zhang wants you to realize that they belong to this land too, even if they quite don't feel that way and even if their own individual ideas of what constitutes a home, a body, etc. may differ. Zhang characters are flawed. Ba, is one mean-spirited but well meaning individual. And Lucy, tragically in the end, might be looking for a home in all the wrong places. Zhang does interesting things with genre too - subverting the Western to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence. Alongside Sam and Lucy’s family story are the stories of the genocide and persecution of Native Americans, the colonization of the west and the compulsive exploitation of the land by desperate settlers and greedy opportunists. This is not your American history course from high school. This is poetic truth. How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a beautiful and daring debut novel from a promising novelist. The novel doesn't necessarily have a neat ending. It's up to you to decide if Lucy and Sam ever truly find a home to call their own. ( ) ryantlaferney87 | Dec 8, 2023 |  ) mkapij | Nov 13, 2023 | two strong girls with different ideas, different nature or nurture. how life treated them great story ( ) nankuo | Sep 5, 2023 |
 In this outstanding debut, Zhang does more than just push against the cowboy narrative: She shoves it clear out of the way.....Misdirection abounds here, but the novel’s grave tone seldom wavers. Eleven and 12 years old, respectively, when the novel opens, sisters Sam and Lucy are 3½ years past the loss of their mother when their father, Ba, dies one night...If anything puts the cowboy narrative out to pasture in this novel, it’s Sam.... Sure to be the boldest debut of the year, How Much of These Hills Is Gold by American writer C Pam Zhang grapples with the legend of the wild west and mines brilliant new gems from a well-worn setting..The story is heavy with layers of trauma, starting with the grim humour of the children, Lucy and Sam, dragging around their own father’s rotting corpse... Through Zhang’s deep attention, the classic western is given a rich new shading as race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence come into play. The novel is thick with detail, metaphor and oblique allusion – so much so that the story has to fight through the language. But at its core is a chilling sense of the utter loneliness and isolation felt by Lucy and Sam. How Much of These Hills Is Gold is an impressive debut. Though sometimes weighed down by the sheer heft of its language and atmospherics, it rewards patient reading. The prose carries an airless, uniquely pungent flavour. By the end, it has built into an epic, powerfully wrought journey, and it is refreshing to discover a new author of such grand scale, singular focus and blistering vision. Like William Faulker's As I Lay Dying, C Pam Zhang's debut novel opens with a body in need of burying...Zhang's style can be densely, airlessly lovely. Self-conscious lyricism fills the page like all that California dust, sometimes making it hard to breathe....The novel also depends so heavily on foreshadowing that it feels like we might be in a de Chirico painting. For Zhang's characters, any good thing — a baby, a new friend, sudden money — spells disaster, a feature which drains suspense and makes it impossible to sustain any hope for them. To read this novel the way it wants to be read — earnestly, wholeheartedly — would be to be in a perpetual state of longing and disappointment...... With Zhang, we hear the shredders coming from miles away — and it's hard not to resent that emotional manipulation. But Zhang also unspools sophisticated ideas about land, ownership, rootedness, and history. HæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.71)
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Dec 2023: Also, this will forever remain in my memory as The One Where