And the most important lesson she gifted Trevor Noah was: “Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she said, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of. pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”
Bachman navigates between the character’s lives and the current circumstances where they find themselves, and this is what makes this book special. Each person’s life’s tapestry could be the next man’s; strangers we meet on the pages, and learn to love, or not. The connections, they engage the mind with a prowess that is unique and make us ponder upon how lives intersect and connect, often without our knowledge.
The power of Lefteri’s lyrical writing, interspersed with wisdom and grief that I resonated with, had me in its hold.
It takes courage to write thus, as much as be provoked into a vulnerable state, allow oneself to feel what one would try and otherwise conceal, even ignore.
The triumph of the human spirit endures.
Who’s to say whether the events occurred the way they did, because to the memoirist, they absolutely did! So here we have Tara Westover’s version of her grasp of what it is to be educated; her trials and tribulations and what led her to an undeniable need to pen her memoir. I’m glad she arrived where she did and I rejoice with her, even as my heart hurt when I put the book down.
No longer cautious,
rekindled camaraderie,
turns into precious blooms
while adult friendships
abandon Solitude ~
it sneaks a hasty retreat.
“People will always yearn for a simple solution to their complicated problems. It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change, rather than to have faith in something you actually can.”
And, “Physical suffering, he’d long ago learned, bonds people in a way that everyday life can’t.” Bang on.
The novel is wrought with violence, both internal and external and noise, that I heard, and shrunk from. Yet there are moments of pause, when I put the book down because I could take no more of the stark imageries that seem to streak the afterlife; dismembered limbs, blood-stained bandanas, eyes in various hues, skulls and ghouls and all that can make you tremble in your sleep. There is unsettling humour that lines the almost-400 page novel.