withrosie wrote a review...
With all its shortcomings, and there surely were some, this novel is incredibly perceptive. It's uniquely structured, a novel mimicking a collection of short stories, glued together by a Nigerian man (doing his PhD in History in the States) who moves to Berlin to accompany his American wife who receives a prestigious grant as a painter in the city. Made up of six books in total, taking us from Berlin to Basel to London, this book is a brilliant exploration of displacement in its purest form, with refugees in their rightful spotlight. "Often I'd look around me and ask myself, Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?"
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Travelers
Helon Habila
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Travelers
Helon Habila
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withrosie wrote a review...
I donāt think I read a book as annoying as this one before
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My Sister, the Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite
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My Sister, the Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite
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Ah to be a prisoner of your own mind
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
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Of course, each book offers more than what is written on its pages but The Remains of the Day does this more so than I have read elsewhere. Stevens is a very entertaining unreliable narrator to read; the reader has to decode the story hidden behind his words, alongside the actual journey, and this keeps the mind busy even as Stevens rambles on and on about very particular details of his work.
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
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A torturous masterpiece
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The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
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Classic Literature from the United States
Silver: Finished 10 Main Quest books.
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Longest 40 pages I've ever read. It's just SO repetitive. The narrator is also... almost comically evil and lacking empathy to an extreme degree. If you're going to try to hold up a mirror to the west's dehumanization of migrants, why would you make the symbol of this dehumanization someone the average person can so easily disassociate from? It just makes it so the western audience can say "thank god I'm not like this" and feel good about themselves for being someone with basic empathy, instead of doing any sort of reflection on the harmful western attitudes that literally cost lives. That's not holding up a mirror to anything, it's just more liberal circle-jerking.
It's very possible this gets turned on its head later in the book, but honestly, I don't care to find out. The repetitiveness is just too much for me.
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The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
Viet Thanh Nguyen