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Homeland Elegies (2020)

af Ayad Akhtar

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
8273926,233 (4.09)102
"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one--least of all himself--in the process."--… (mere)
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» Se også 102 omtaler

Engelsk (38)  Spansk (1)  Alle sprog (39)
Viser 1-5 af 39 (næste | vis alle)
The narrative of this self-proclaimed "novel" (which reads like a memoir) explores the fictionalized lives of various members of the narrator's Pakistani family and friends.

It offers a perspective from the American "other" - Muslim immigrants before and after 9/11 and their experience of "America".
However, unlike in many stereotypical immigrant "underdog" stories, the narrator is (like the author) a Pulitzer winner coming from a well-educated, economically stable family.

It is easy to see why Ayad Akhtar would call this a novel while keeping the deceiving format of autobiographical essays. In an interview, he explained it was his answer to our "illusion of reality" powered by social media and our own fictionalized realities we present to others.

My overall impression, however, was that this wasn't an organic attempt, as it seemed he was really trying hard to be innovative, echoing Rushdie (who he mentions quite a bit in the book) and Roth to varying degrees of success.

The narrator in this novel is often condescending and detached from his surroundings, hence not very likeable. While this was planned by Akhtar in order to depict how success affected the narrator, I did find myself enjoying the novel less because of it.

Where this novel shines is the emotion of love towards his family which really comes through on the pages. Also, knowing the real story about Akhtar's father, the last chapter in the novel is especially heartbreaking.

I want to root for Akhtar and believe he truly is the great American writer of the moment. But, I can't get over the feeling that he is the one who on purpose creates a disconnect with his audience, perpetuating the "age of division". ( )
  ZeljanaMaricFerli | Mar 4, 2024 |
This is a truly fine book, but I’m not sure it’s a novel. That is not a criticism, more like an intuition. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Bellowian multi-course meal ( )
  postsign | Dec 28, 2023 |
This is a challenging book. I like to think I'm a "good" person, but I know my outlook is colored by my white privilege, and my American-centric opinions of the world. (Is there a word for this?) But I try to have empathy for people different from me: different colors, religions, sexual choices, country of origin, etc. Learning about the narrator's (who may be the author?) life, his family, his upbringing, education, prejudices against him, etc. reminds me how little I know of others who have entirely different upbringing and world view.
It is billed as a novel, but I believe most of the stories related are true. There may be some things he has fictionalized, and I think a couple of times he says he's changed the name of someone.
What is it like to grow up Pakistani, in the United States? To have your every thought and action questioned simply because of your name, the color of your skin, and assumptions others make about you? This book will make you ask these questions, but will you come up with definitive answers? ( )
  cherybear | Nov 20, 2023 |
I was so gung-ho about this book because I’d not only enjoyed the play the author wrote but the teaser about his father being a physician of Trump in the 1980’s sounded irresistible. But after that gang bang beginning, the book slipped into political posturing. Thankfully I had a rare case of patience and continued reading. I was rewarded an exploration of what it would be like to be a Moslem after 9/11. The book continued to fascinate after the author became a Pulitzer prize winning playwright and acquired wealth through investments. The writing about his relationships was gripping.
In the middle of the book there was a sequence dealing with the profound feeling of “otherness”when the author looks in the mirror.
In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here.
I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others."

From there, the novel/memoir builds to a overpowering ending.
( )
  GordonPrescottWiener | Aug 24, 2023 |
Viser 1-5 af 39 (næste | vis alle)
Akhtar’s forceful, direct prose conveys a poetic sense of anguish. But while the critical insights are consistently sharp, Elegies’ family portraits linger longest — Ayad’s mother pining for her homeland, his father chasing after an illusory American dream. Donald Trump appears as a character here too, not as the cartoon villain who’s suffocated a good chunk of post-2016 literature but as a man whose deception, empty promises, and (to some) inexplicable appeal get at the heart of a national identity crisis. So maybe this is more than a novel. It’s a document — furious, unwieldy, tragic — of our time.
 
An elegy is a mournful poem expressing regret for something lost. Ayad Akhtar’s brilliant new novel, “Homeland Elegies,” mourns an America that has lost its way in the half century since it welcomed his parents’ generation of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan.... Akhtar — recently named the new president of PEN America — wrote it in “a fever dream” after his mother died, Donald Trump was elected, and his father started showing signs of decline. He wanted to remember what brought his parents’ generation to the United States, how the country changed, and what those changes meant for all of them. The result is a searingly honest, brutally funny, sometimes painful-to-read account of being a Muslim in America before and after 9/11.
tilføjet af Lemeritus | RedigerAssociated Press, Ann Levin (Sep 14, 2020)
 
The presidency of Donald J. Trump, like a motorcycle that sets off two-thirds of the car alarms on a city street, has affected different writers in different ways. Some have gone nearly mad, for worse and sometimes better; some have tightened their noise-cancelling headphones and pretended the moral disruption isn’t there. For Ayad Akhtar, the Trump presidency has led to “Homeland Elegies,” a beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.... “Homeland Elegies” is a very American novel. It’s a lover’s quarrel with this country, and at its best it has candor and seriousness to burn.
tilføjet af Lemeritus | RedigerNew York Times, Dwight Garner (pay site) (Sep 14, 2020)
 
With its sprawling vision of contemporary America, “Homeland Elegies” is a phenomenal coalescence of memoir, fiction, history and cultural analysis. It would not surprise me if it wins him a second Pulitzer Prize.... The interior design of “Homeland Elegies” may include elements of fiction, but the architecture is clearly the author’s life: The narrator is a man named Ayad Akhtar, the son of Pakistani doctors, who writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a Muslim American and then struggles to negotiate the rising xenophobia of the Trump era.... Ayad sees in his father’s unlikely attraction to Trump something essential about contemporary America. It demonstrates, he says, “the full extent of the terrifying lust for unreality that has engulfed us all.” ...We’re living, Ayad warns, through a systemic collapse of confidence fueled by “thoughtless and obsessive suspicion.” ...paradox runs like a wire through this book, which so poignantly expresses the loneliness of pining for one’s own homeland.
tilføjet af Lemeritus | RedigerWashington Post, Ron Charles (pay site) (Aug 31, 2020)
 
One comes to this book not for the pleasures of conventional narrative fiction (though Akhtar certainly can spin a tale); this is a novel of restless exploration that finds no pat answers about what it means to be a Muslim American today. A profound and provocative inquiry into an artist’s complex American identity.
tilføjet af Lemeritus | RedigerKirkus Reviews (Jun 30, 2020)
 
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I had a professor in college, Mary Moroni, who taught Emerson and Melville, and who the once famous Norman O. Brown - her mentor - called the finest mind of her generation; a diminutive, cherubic woman in her early thirties with a resemblance to a Raphaelesque putto that was not incidental (her parents had immigrated from Urbino); a scholar of staggering erudition who quoted as easily from the Eddas and Hannah Arendt as from Moby Dick; a lesbian, which I only mention because she did, often; a lecturer whose turns of phrase were as sharp as a German paring knife, could score the brain's gray matter and carve out new grooves along which old thoughts would reroute, as on that February morning, two weeks after Bill Clinton's second inauguration, when, during a class on life under early American capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke - her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting slacks that were her mainstay - looked up and remarked almost offhandedly that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, were enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. -Overture: To America
My father first met Donald Trump in the early '90s, when they were both in their midforties - my father the elder by a year - and as each was coming out from under virtual financial ruin. -Chapter 1, On the Anniversary of Trump's First Year in Office
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"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one--least of all himself--in the process."--

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