The life of Eva Thorvald, from her conception onwards, is le fil rouge that stitches together ‘The Kitchens Of The Great Midwest’.
‘Kitchens Of The Great Midwest’ was a wonderful find, a book that lived up to its catchy title and striking cover and delivered an accessible, memorable, moving story framed around an intriguing storytelling conceit. It’s simply a stark exposition of a global corporate culture that treats people as things. And none of it sounds like an exaggeration or a distortion. And the so-taken-for-granted-we-don’t-think-about-it racism. The assertion of the rights of the owners over the needs of the people. Turning local people into second class citizens. While staying a very human, quietly told but emotionally rich story, it showed me the ways in which modern Corporate Colonialism carries the ethics of slavery with it. Myrna’s narrative was hard to take at times. When I finally understood what the Bench Stories were, their power was increased immensely and they ended-up re-framing the whole novel. They’re basically short stories with a common context and they are so intense. We don’t know until the final chapters of the book who the stories are being told to or why but they’re no less powerful for that. Myrna’s narrative is interspersed with chapters called ‘Bench Stories’ Each has an islander sitting on a bench, telling a story from his or her life. Most of the story is told from the point of view of Myrna, a young islander who spends her days supporting herself and her mother by working as a maid at the resort and spends her nights using her machete to cut her way into the thornbush-choked inland in search of all the things the older generations refuse to speak of. This is a novel that is firmly centred in the experiences, hopes, loves and frustrations of the people living on a small, formerly British, Caribbean island that once had a Plantation at its centre and the blood of slaves on its stones, and is now dominated by a foreign-owned, American-run holiday resort, built on the site of the plantation. This is not a polemic or a thinly-written anthem for the newly-woke.
”Fingerprints of Previous Owners‘ is an exceptional book: diverse, credible characters beautifully crafted descriptions and perfectly inflected dialogue, and an innovative structure work together to deliver a view of the legacy of slavery, its modern faces and the ways in which a community descended from slaves deal with their heritage and their present challenges.
0 kommentar(er)
