Recitatif by Toni Morrrison

Hmmmm.

Still thinking....

How do I feel about this? A little cheated perhaps? Well yes. This is not a novella, it is a piece of writing to be used as an experiment and it turned out that I, the reader, was the subject of the experiment.

Let me explain. In 1980 Toni Morrison wrote this very short story about two eight year old girls who have been placed in the same room of a girls' shelter. The reader is told that one of the girls is white and the other black, but it is never made clear which is which. You have to make your own mind up and that is the point of the experiment. What criteria are you going to apply in order to make your decision? What if the stereotypes flip back and forth from one girl to the other? What if the whole process starts to make you feel a bit itchy?

Zadie Smith wrote the introduction and I had to stop reading it after a few pages because she was analysing chunks of the text and telling me what to think before I even had a grip on what I had got myself into. The introduction is 36 pages long, and the story a mere 40, so I really thought the publishers were putting the cart before the horse here.

Now that I have read it (and the introduction) I'm not sure I have gained anything from it. Is it a good thing to suppress our diversity? Can we not have some differences in our cultural identity? I like to think that if we grow different people together then everyone wins.

Comments

Violeta by Isabel Allende

Published: 2022, Bloomsbury Genre: Fiction Themes: South America, family relationships, business My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If I ever tell my life story, I will take a leaf out of Violeta's book and make sure you understand that everybody loved me, and despite all sorts of questionable behaviour on my part, I leave the world as a winner. This is the story of a hundred year life. Violeta is approaching the end, but before she goes she is determined to write out her life story for someone she loves dearly. You don't get to know who that special someone is for most of the book, but that just serves to give the narrative a little twist. I didn't much like the character of Violeta but I understand that people who don't go round upsetting the apple cart don't make for very interesting stories. With such a great time span to play with, Isabel Allende had plenty of scope for changing Violeta's circumstances and adding in references to world events to keep the reader...

Holding by Graham Norton

Published: October 2016, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: fiction Themes: Ireland, crime, secrets, relationships, family My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ I went into the library looking for a book by Graham Norton as I keep seeing positive comments about his books on Twitter, and I felt I might be missing something. Holding seems to be his first book, and the library copy has a Radio 2 Book Club sticker on it, and I think it's fair to say that it's a perfect book for that reading group. It's a chatty style of writing that I could imagine would be how Graham would recount a tale if he was in conversation with someone, and there are sufficient strong elements to the plot-line to keep it interesting to the end. When I first started reading I thought it was going to be a bit thin on plot, as much of the story involved character descriptions, and I was starting to wonder how it was going to pull together. Then the dramatic events began to unfold and, once I could see how everyon...

The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper

Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2021 Genre: Fiction Themes: Ancient Pompeii, slaves, brothel My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If, like me, you spent most of your history lessons looking out the window and didn't really absorb very much about the ancient Roman Empire, nil desperandum, as you will still manage perfectly well with this book. Set in first century Pompeii, the story follows the life of Amara, a young Greek woman who has been shipped to Pompeii as a slave and then bought by the owner of The Wolf Den brothel. As the daughter of a doctor, she was bought up in relatively comfortable circumstances, but a series of terrible events turned her life upside down and she is now trapped in an endless cycle of fear and degradation with almost no hope of escape. Amara is one of a group of slaves working in the Wolf Den, and they do what they can to protect one another from serious harm, but Amara knows that if she wants anything better for herself, she must make the brothel ow...

dittybox

Search This Blog