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2+ obres 89 Membres 5 Ressenyes

Obres de Tope Folarin

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Narrator Tunde was born in the United States a few years after his parents immigrated from Nigeria. He and his younger brother were born in Utah, not a typical place for the Nigerian community to reside. While his father is college-educated, he finds it difficult to find and keep employment. His mother gradually slips into a mental illness. She begins to abuse Tunde and later returns to Nigeria.

Tunde, his father, and his brother continue on in Utah. A couple of years later, his father brings over a woman from Nigeria and her two young children. All of a sudden, Tunde has a step-mother and two step-siblings. Life was pretty good for a while, though Tunde never feels true love from his new mother. After moving to Dallas, his new mother and siblings leave his father for another man.

Tunde excels in academics, but has difficulty socially. So much moving and his natural awkwardness made it hard to make and keep friends. When he goes to college, things improve. He falls in love, and she encourages him to visit his mother, who he hasn’t spoken to since she left. He finally begins to discover who he really is rather than who he thinks others want him to be.
… (més)
 
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Carlie | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | May 23, 2023 |
I had to keep reminding myself that this was not a memoir -- at least in the first part of the book, all narrated in the first person. This isn't really (just) a coming-of-age story, and this is beneficial as it allows the author to keep the deeper themes as a through line. There's a lot here about identity and particularly, agency--agency to define oneself (outside of and inside of categories), agency to grow, to move. It is a book about distances, both metaphorical and geographical. The story is multiple stories, although Tunde is the protagonist. It is a story of many lives and the choices that shape them. As Ravi Howard describes it, the books shows the "deeply personal geography of migration." That's a beautiful description. What happens when "home" constantly moving, shifting, and perhaps absent or wholly constructed from fragile memories?

There is a brief interlude that switches to an altogether different style to relate Tunde's first experience of falling in love. Because of the impact and deeply insightful narration up to that point, these passages (often one or two sentences to a page) felt forced--as though I was reading a different book. Perhaps that was the point, but as a reader I found myself engaging less and moving quickly to get back to Folarin's full and deep writing. And finally, in a (potentially comic) turn that seemed to come out of nowhere but ends up leading us to one of the most beautiful (yet heart-wrenching) moments, Folarin tells us what home truly is.
… (més)
 
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rebcamuse | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Jan 24, 2023 |
I had no idea how to be black...The few times I told my father how I felt he responded the same way: he told me not to worry, that if I worked hard enough and became successful, people would want to be like me. I took solace in his words for many years.

Then I started eighth grade.


Tunde is a second-generation Nigerian-American boy, born in Utah, where the singularity of his blackness gives him no perspective whatsoever on how to be black in America. His parents can't help him--they belong in Utah even less than he does. His mother returns to Nigeria without him. His father struggles along from one job to the next, consistently underemployed and the object of prejudice and ridicule.

And the boy Tunde grows up.

This is a remarkable Bildungsroman, full of quiet humanity. The prose felt simple as I read it, but the story is actually told in a way that illuminates some very rich ideas about identity and memory.

The narrator is direct and clear-eyed when describing the failures and flaws of his family. There is a particular-ness about the details in each small scene, where the title--a "particular" kind of black man--seems to acknowledge that Tunde is sum of all of the small details he has shared with us; his identity is unique, no matter how many times the people in his life try to make him match their prejudices about him, or to make him meet their hopes for him.

This is a remarkable novel.
… (més)
 
Marcat
poingu | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Feb 22, 2020 |
This (short) story is a gentrified literary journey. I don't wish to spoil it for anyone who wishes to read it so I will leave any review without description of the actual story.
Had the style been more alive, less polished, it would have been more appealing to me as a story I can relate to in my own life experience, a definite 4 or even 5 star rating but the truth is, I found it heavy and distanced the writer from what he was writing about, what should in the first place be a personal experience. Tope Folarin is a talented writer who has written many good pieces but as in most writers these days, the need to please the literary crowd, if often, to me, evident in the writing. The provocative and the straightforward is wrapped in cotton and looses it's reality, looses its feeling, in what we so desperately need, the stories in our humanity, whether they are good or bad. It's like watching a painting people say is great - without feeling it.… (més)
 
Marcat
mmmorsi | Aug 24, 2018 |

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Estadístiques

Obres
2
També de
3
Membres
89
Popularitat
#207,492
Valoració
½ 3.5
Ressenyes
5
ISBN
8

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