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Sto caricando le informazioni... Slash and Burn (edizione 2020)di Claudia Hernández (Autore), Julia Sanches (Traduttore)
Informazioni sull'operaSlash And Burn di Claudia Hernández
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. A profound story of a woman whose participation from a youthful age on the side of the guerillas in a civil war in an unnamed country in Central America highlights the traumas that plague and empower her through the aftermath of wartime. Superbly translated, the reader is privy to the trial and tribulations of the fraught mother/daughter relationships, the raging patriarchy, cultural norms, and classism that oppress women and stifle their dreams for themselves and their daughters. I appreciated the namelessness of the characters and places (only proper name is Paris, France), as this anonymity allows for the story to be an universal one and knowing the characters only by the female relationship to another character (her mother, her daughter, etc.) keeps the focus on the aftermath of wars from the female perspective. While I liked this storyline format, I did feel this format did drag on a little too long in places. Hernandez gives a distinctive and transfixing voice to an issue that is important and timely. Il n’y avait pas moyen de lui faire entendre que ce que sa sœur avait, elle l’avait obtenu avec ses propres ressources. Elle avait trouvé les jours, les gens, la manière. Et inventé un moyen d’obtenir les choses sans mendier – le cauchemar de sa mère – et sans rien faire d’indigne non plus – ce qui aurait été le cauchemar du grand-père. C’est peut-être bien le premier roman salvadorien que je lis. Petit pays d’Amérique centrale surtout connu pour la guerre civile qui l’a déchiré dans les années 80. Et c’est de cela dont il est question, ou plutôt, des années qui suivent cette guerre. Il me faut commencer avec le parti-pris littéraire de l’autrice qui, dans ce livre, ne donne pas de nom à ses personnages, c’est toujours la femme, la première fille qui vit avec elle, la mère, la voisine, rien de plus précis. Aucun pour les lieux non plus, puisque c’est la capitale, le village qui a un nom de cheval, de fleur ou d’insecte. Cette façon de désincarner les personnages, de les anonymiser est assez déstabilisante pour le lecteur, elle le met à distance, rend l’expérience des personnages difficile à approcher. C’est peut-être ce que l’autrice cherche, montrer à quel point l’expérience de la guérilla (mot qui n’est jamais prononcé d’ailleurs, on ne parle que des combattants) met à part, coupe du reste de la société, et que toute réinsertion n’est finalement qu’illusoire, jamais complète, jamais achevée. Cela donne un livre aride, dur mais c’est un parti-pris qui sert le propos même si dans le dernier tiers du livre, avec l’augmentation du nombre de personnages et de générations, j’ai un peu fini par m’y perdre et par me lasser. Mais cela ne m’a pas empêché d’apprécier cette lecture. Une lecture dure, une lecture qui nous fait sentir à quel point l’empathie a ses limites. Comment croire que l’on peut comprendre ou partager ce que ressent une personne qui a fait la guerre, qui a tué et a vu tuer, depuis le confort de notre fauteuil de lecture au coin du feu ou, pire peut-être, du fond de notre lit où nous nous pelotonnons pour notre lecture du soir avant de nous endormir tranquillement sur nos deux oreilles ? C’est un livre qui a ses faiblesses peut-être, mais un livre qui m’a fait réfléchir, qui m’a bousculée dans mes certitudes, certitudes d’être humain qui pense partager une sorte de destin commun avec les autres êtres humains qui peuplent cette terre, certitudes de lectrice aussi, de cette lectrice qui se gorge de littérature mondiale en se disant qu’elle comprendra un peu mieux les choses. N’est-ce pas un peu futile et condescendant ? Cette femme sans nom qui se bat pour assurer son existence journalière et celle de ses filles, cette femme qui a ses démons et ses peines mais qui pourtant toujours reste droite, continue à me hanter plusieurs jours après que j’ai refermé ce livre. Ce n’est pas ce que l’on appelle habituellement de la grande littérature, mais Claudia Hernández fait un sacrément bon boulot pour décrire cette vie (et notamment, je n’en ai pas assez parlé, pour faire sentir ce que c’est que cette pauvreté toujours sur le fil du rasoir, où l’expression « chaque sou est un sou » est une maxime du quotidien, je n’ai jamais, je crois, vu la pauvreté ainsi décrite, et, couplée à la mise à distance du lecteur, cette description fut une sorte de petit choc intérieur pour moi), et donne un livre qui ébranle, qui fait vaciller, qui, et c’est surprenant, nous tend un miroir pour nous demander qui nous sommes face à ces femmes. Je remercie mille fois les éditions Métailié pour m’avoir permis de lire ce livre via netgalley. Je n’ai pas trouvé dans ce livre ce que la quatrième de couverture me faisait espérer, mais j’y ai trouvé une lecture qui m’a emportée sur des chemins que je n’avais pas vus tracés sur une carte. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiAnd Other Stories (91) Premi e riconoscimenti
"Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe. As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, traveling across the Atlantic with meager resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution. Hernandez' narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma."--Provided by publisher. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution.
Hernández’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I think you'll get the real gestalt of this read, of this review and possibly...just possibly...this story, if we listen to Author Horacio Castellanos Moya (my review of his book, Senselessness, will give you a feel for his own emotional-overload storytelling chops) praise Author Hernández:
Castellanos Moya links Author Hernández to men marginalized by their poverty, and sexual natures, whose immense talents were never appreciated in their lifetimes. They were foundational figures in the creation of a magical realist Latinoamericano fiction, famously and fully developed in the hands of Julio Cortázar and García Márquez. That's some heady company Castellanos Moya puts Author Hernández in...and not without reason.
But let me be clear: This read is not a spoon-fed milk-toast cinch. I know a number of people found [[Anna Burns]]'s name-free labels of her characters in her 2018 Booker-winning novel of civil war, [Milkman], to be difficult and off-putting. I am not among their number. Heck, I enjoyed [[Robert Pinget]]'s [The Inquisitory], and that has no names and no punctuation at all. This read is spang in the middle of a continuum between Burns and Pinget. There aren't names ("A name was just a name. In times of war, it served the same purpose as a number or a tattoo or a dog tag you wore around your neck: it was a way of identifying the dead," we're told very, very early in Slash and Burn), but you've got dialogue tags and punctuation...just no clear path to knowing instantly and unequivocally who's speaking, when we are supposed to be...it all makes a lot of sense, in my opinion, as the entire point of reading a woman's take on war is about getting into the stakes of her participation.
She's not anything more than one woman among the thousands, the millions, the billions whose world is trying to defend the girls she's doing her goddamnedest to get through childhood into their own womanhoods.
These aren't happy-clappy figures of Survivorhood. These aren't the women who run charities and organize microlending cooperatives. Author Hernández's women are the ones that make the world, the vicious one they inhabit, function in spite of and in parallel to the wars destroying the world.
It's simple, to her. It's the world, it's not going to do her a blind bit of good to do more than make her odds, of being murdered by these uncontrolled armed fearless and foeless monsters, as low as she can. But there is nothing in this world that isn't violent and abusive on levels unthinkable to most of us reading the story in our warless, unchaotic surroundings.
This is just...life. Life the way people in a war zone that hasn't been anything but a war zone for a generation know it, and so how they do the mechanics of living. It isn't sweet, it isn't about redemption or Coming To The Realization That x; this is what gutting it out, putting food on the table and a roof of some sort over your heads, means.
I've said I don't find the unmoored "she"s troublesome. The reason is that I don't do more than the minimum to associate the references to a general roster of possible identities. I think the read made sense to me because I realized these aren't Characters. These are types, a sort of massive and mostly undifferentiated Woman-ness. Author Hernández isn't telling Maricela's story then Marisol's story then Ludivine's; she's telling their story as the topology of the War they're doing their individual bests to avoid dying in brings them into relevance.
It isn't easy to adjust the novel-reader's expectations to this, or the wealthy-country educated book-consumer's preferences for delineated and labeled identities. Accustoming myself to a more base, earthen interchangeability, fungibility of women playing similar roles at different times was the best adaptation I could make. It felt unnatural for about 30 pages, 10% of the Kindle file. But thinking it through and considering the magical-realist underpinnings of flexible identities and the feminist rage of reducing women, the centers of this unnatural Life, to faceless nameless utilitarian labor units added a nauseating note of indifferent and amoral cruelty to the entire tale. And that is, I strongly suspect, a good deal of Claudia Hernández's point. The title...Slash and Burn is sort of the sense of it, "Roza tumba quema" or "fondle fall burn" in that order...feeling indicative to me of a soldier checking out the goods, knocking them over, not-quite accidentally, not entirely purposefully, but carelessly in all its senses, setting them on fire. This is a solid preparation for the hard, unyielding world that the mass of women, the Woman if you will, simply bends herself into whatever shape she has to so as to make her way into another morning, through its day, and out on the other side of another night.
I found great value, solid art, and a seriously important and timely reminder of the way that war's costs are distributed is violent and unconscionably cruel, in this intense read. ( )