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Bezig met laden... The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel (editie 2013)door Helene Wecker (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkThe Golem and the Jinni door Helene Wecker
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. I wanted to give this four stars because it was really well written. However, I could not because it was a bit too angsty for my taste. ( ) A very unique book. I loved the fairy/folk tale feel of the book and learned much about these tales in Jewish and Middle Eastern culture. Yet the book was so much more than a magical story; it was about finding your place in this world and the importance of free will. I loved Chava and her journey to find her humanity. I loved this book. Wecker is a master of nuance and the telling detail. I completely fell in love with the flawed, heart-achingly complex characters of Chava and Ahmed. Wecker's beautiful writing made all the characters deliciously fascinating, and the setting was so vivid, every time I set the book down, I felt disoriented. I honestly feel like I have been living in the old Jewish and Syrian neighborhoods of turn of the century New York. I hated for it to end, but it did. And it ended in a way that, unlike so many recent books, did not fizzle or disappoint. Five stars. In middle and high school there were book reports that we'd have to present in front of the class. Every time the straight-A honor students would recite a passionless checklist of all of the required beats expected from them on the rubric. The class was divided in between those who didn't read the book and those who read the words but couldn't care less about the meaning. But the latter category could fake enthusiasm enough to earn perfect grades every time. Meanwhile my impassioned and overlong screed against an esoteric and probably half-imagined theme in the book got me a trip to the principal's office. It was maddening. To this day I can still hear the insincere tone, the forced meter and timbre in the voices of those top students and it makes me cringe. I mention this because The Golem and the Jinni reads like middle school. There was nothing wrong with it in a technical sense, as though the author were given a rubric and a set of instructions and dutifully hit every one. But it used the same plodding, uninspired, and inartistic tone throughout the entire book. The voice didn't change or modulate between different characters, it didn’t convey the excitement or the fear of the fantasy, or the loneliness of the characters. I've read authors who deliberately eschew impassioned or evocative language in order to convey the numbness of their characters. But Wecker clearly wasn't going for something like that. Something is rotten when you describe a genie creating a glass castle out of the desert sands using the same language as a shopping list. Abigail Nussbaum’s review in Strange Horizons makes some excellent points: Wecker wrote a vapid historical fiction and then a vapid fantasy and then accidentally left the blender on.
The title characters of “The Golem and the Jinni” are not the book’s only magic. The story is so inventive, so elegantly written and so well constructed that it’s hard to believe this is a first novel. Clearly, otherworldly forces were involved. You think a relationship is complicated when a woman is from Venus and a man is from Mars? Trust me, that’s a piece of cake compared with the hurdles that a modest golem and a mercurial jinni face when they fall in love. The sometimes slow pace picks up considerably as the disparate characters decipher the past and try to save the souls variously threatened by the golem and the jinni, as well as by the Jewish conjurer and (surprise) a Syrian wizard. The interplay of loyalties and the struggle to assert reason over emotion keep the pages flipping. Onderdeel van de reeks(en)Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Harper Perennial Olive Editions (2020 Olive) PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Chava, a golem brought to life by a disgraced rabbi, and Ahmad, a jinni made of fire, form an unlikely friendship on the streets of New York until a fateful choice changes everything. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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