Eugenia's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 18 Jun 2024 20:48:21 -0700 60 Eugenia's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida]]> 57224204 An epic, searing satire of Sri Lanka. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka's foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a searing satire and state-of-the-nation epic that proves yet again that the best fiction offers the deeper truth.]]> 386 Shehan Karunatilaka 1908745908 Eugenia 0 to-read 3.87 2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
author: Shehan Karunatilaka
name: Eugenia
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> Ignorance 78728 A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they had chosen to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.

Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.

He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech.

Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

]]> 195 Milan Kundera 0060002107 Eugenia 5 3.85 2000 Ignorance
author: Milan Kundera
name: Eugenia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/31
date added: 2020/01/31
shelves:
review:

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