Sinopse
"Dear Husband, I lost our children today."
The startlingly blunt opening words of Tahmima Anam's much-anticipated debut novel are addressed to a dead man by his widow, Rehana Haque, whose children have been taken from her by her brother-in-law and his wife; they convince a judge that she is an unfit mother, based on a combination of her financial situation and her bad parenting skills, as displayed by her decision to take her young children to watch Cleopatra. Her son and daughter are taken from her, for a year, to another part of Pakistan - a more dramatic physical separation than a present-day map might suggest, since this is 1959, when Pakistan was divided into two wings. Rehana is left in Dhaka, East Pakistan, with all the great mass of India separating her from her children in West Pakistan's port city of Karachi.
By the second chapter the novel has moved forward to 1971, the year when civil war in Pakistan led to the formation of Bangladesh. Yet the muted power of the earlier section serves to ground this moving story of war and brutality in a tale of motherhood - not with any clichéd parallel of mother and Mother Country, but rather with a reminder that the verdicts handed down in courtrooms can be as devastating as anything that occurs on a battlefield. As the novel makes its way through stories of guerrillas and refugees and torture, we remain within Rehana's consciousness, central to which is the memory of temporarily losing her children. There is a powerful feeling of tension as we wait to see how that story of domestic loss will work its way into the narrative of civil war, and when it does the result is heart-shattering. (retirado do The Guardian)
By the second chapter the novel has moved forward to 1971, the year when civil war in Pakistan led to the formation of Bangladesh. Yet the muted power of the earlier section serves to ground this moving story of war and brutality in a tale of motherhood - not with any clichéd parallel of mother and Mother Country, but rather with a reminder that the verdicts handed down in courtrooms can be as devastating as anything that occurs on a battlefield. As the novel makes its way through stories of guerrillas and refugees and torture, we remain within Rehana's consciousness, central to which is the memory of temporarily losing her children. There is a powerful feeling of tension as we wait to see how that story of domestic loss will work its way into the narrative of civil war, and when it does the result is heart-shattering. (retirado do The Guardian)
Minha opinião
Uma mãe narrar uma guerra não é fácil de ouvir e se não fosse pela narradora - Madhur Jaffrey - teria desisitido do livro. De romântico não tem nada, de dramático tem quase tudo, que faltou então a este livro para ser perfeito? as pontas soltas que ficaram por unir. Imagino que escrever sobre a guerra é querer criar memórias de um todo que faz/fez história, mas temos que ser selectivos e se a escritora tivesse se focado mais em determinados pormenores, o livro não teria tido, para mim, apenas 3 estrelas.
Dramático e realista, a história é contada por uma mulher independente, viúva, mãe, heroína.
A Golden Age CD: A Golden Age CD by Tahmima Anam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
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