Half of a Yellow Sun - Rilegato

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1400044162 ISBN 13: 9781400044160

Casa editrice: Knopf, 2006

Riassunto

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

            With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.           

           Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.

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Recensione:

“This prize-winning author’s place in literary history is secured with [Half of a Yellow Sun], a tribute to her people, the Igbo, who after being massacred in 1966 broke away from Nigeria to create the Republic of Biafra. [But] this novel is not a standard war account: Though we are not sheltered from its horrors, Adichie excels in the way she tells about war . . . . Her characters’ strengths are in their complexity and their flaws . . . . Throughout the story, Adichie insists on accountability and then forgiveness as the only option for redemption . . . By the end, after breaking our hearts, she uses her last sentence to blindside us with a gift. We never see it coming. With it, she offers hope in the future.”
–Marie-Elena John, Black Issues

“[It’s] hard not to place Adichie alongside a new generation of post-postcolonial writers who, while paying due respect to Achebe (and, for that matter, Kincaid, Naipaul, Gordimer, and Coetzee), are moving beyond them on their own terms . . . . Adichie’s nuanced prose takes great pains to undo the reductive attitudes many in the West harbor toward African people . . . And yet Adichie does not rant against the West . . . [Criticism] and compassion coexist. She understands that it takes many hands to shape war . . . For Adichie, pain unifies us, and it’s often that same pain that keeps us from recognizing that unity . . . Adichie’s novel [has], a narrative humility coupled with an epic ambition . . . Are there any easy answers in [Half of a Yellow Sun]? Certainly not. But Adichie, in the process, asks the hell out of her questions, rendering them in all their haunting, beautiful silence.”
–Stephen Narains, The Harvard Book Review

“A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal during the Biafran war.”
–Time magazine

“Rich, lyrical . . . Incorporating the lives of diverse tribes and a looming political war, [Adichie] engages readers with a story that is intoxicatingly addictive from page one.”
–The Ave magazine

“Half of a Yellow Sun, which follows a group of upper-class Nigerians during the social upheaval of the Biafran war of the 1960s, is a protean work of the imagination that is all the more remarkable at having been written by someone who isn’t yet 30. The novel is Tolstoyan in its grasp of history and in its ability to traverse various ends of the social spectrum from a village manservant to the daughter of wealthy bureaucrats.”
–David Milofsky, Denver Post

“The Nigerian author’s masterful novel uses the 1967 genocide in Biafra as a backdrop for a nuanced tale about decent people in moral chaos.”
–Michelle Green, People

“Alluring and revelatory . . . eloquent . . . Prize-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is quickly proving herself to be fearless in the tradition of the great African writers . . . . She has a keen ability to capture the nurturing and destructive nuances that permeate human relationships. Her characters surprise themselves and the reader.”
–Aïssatou Sidimé, San Antonio Express-News

“Compelling . . . The author lyrically interweaves the stories of twin sisters, their families, friends and servants into a single story that is riveting political, social and human history . . . Insightful.”
–Jane Ramos Trimble, Panache / Fort-Worth Star Telegram magazine

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proves herself a talented and ambitious writer with [this] far-reaching and engrossing historical novel about the 1967 Nigerian civil war . . . [It] encompasses a large cast whose individual dramas are set within the panoramic landscape of war. Adichie’s fully realized and finely observed characters hook the reader and carry the story through wrenching events to its sorrowful, tragic conclusion . . . . Adichie’s clear-sighted examination reveals how quickly national loyalties, even when rooted in seemingly just causes, can become entangled with self-absorption, denial and even cruelty. By venturing so fearlessly into complex moral territory, Adichie reveals her talents as a novelist as well as her gifts as a perceptive observer of human behavior.”
–Heather Hewett, Newsday

“A whopping good read. It’s like Gone with the Wind, except in Nigeria.”
–New York magazine

“A novel that [uses] fiction to its best advantage, telling the stories of ordinary people–loving, fallible, passionate and vulnerable–ineluctably caught in savage circumstances of chaos, breakdown and violence . . . . Adichie has immense sympathy for her characters, embracing them, faults and all . . . By the time military coups explode into mass killings, and the creation of the Republic of Biafra collapses into a vicious civil war later in the decade, you willingly follow [them] as their lives change drastically . . . . Written with unflinching clarity, what Adichie’s novel offers is a compassionate, compelling look at the nearly unfathomable immediacy of war’s effect on people . . . . Half of a Yellow Sun [ensures] that precious memories have been given eloquent and far-reaching voices. [A] heart-stopping [tribute] to that unbreakable human bond, love.”
–Daneet Steffens, Chicago Tribune

“In her sweeping novel, Adichie creates a masterful tale of Biafra’s hopeful birth and terrible death.”
–The Sunday Star-Ledger

“Half of a Yellow Sun entirely absorbs the reader . . . [and] leaves you reeling at the horrors people can inflict on one another. Set during the internecine Nigeria-Biafra conflict, it is a bootless, toothless cry against the wickedness of what one character describes as ‘the custodians of fate.’ The stark maturity of its vision is so startling that the great African novelist Chinua Achebe refused to believe the book could have been written by someone so young . . . From the very first page you understand just what he means. Adichie resolutely refuses to show off. She writes in a stately, almost grandiloquent manner–the mode of eons-old epics about civilizations battered by war–and relies on the potency of her story rather than flashy phrase-making to sustain the interest of her reader . . . . Adichie dramatizes the savage diurnal grind as her characters struggle to survive Biafra in the face of bombing raids, starvation and the constant threat of being overrun by Nigerian ‘vandals.’ Atrocity is ever-present, included not for shock value but simply because such horrors happened . . . Masterfully understated . . . the book takes on an urgent, visceral power . . . . [Over] the course of the book the characters burrow into your marrow and mind, and you come to care for them deeply.”
–Alistair Sooke, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

“Adichie uses layers of history, symbol and myth . . . . [and] uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry, and the narrative is cross-woven with Igbo idiom and language. The novel reflects on language both as a means of communication, and of identity, which may be a threat or a means of belonging. Speaking Igbo instead of Yoruba may lead to a beating or death, as war erupts . . . . Adichie returns again and again to the idea of belonging. What does it mean, how do cultures create networks of belonging and exclusion? The novel circles these questions, although they can never be resolved.”
–Helen Dunmore, The Times (UK)

“After her outstanding first novel Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel was eagerly awaited and doesn’t disappoint. It is again set in her homeland of Nigeria, but this time, during the 1960s and the fratricidal Biafran war . . . . [Nigeria] has been riven by wars, saddled with military dictatorships, endemic corruption and is characterized by huge economic disparities. It has, though, also produced more than its fair share of Africa’s best writers and Adichie is undoubtedly among them. This is not an ‘African’ book in the narrow or parochial sense, but belongs in the mainstream of humanitarian world literature, even though it is firmly rooted in Nigeria. Adichie writes with a maturity that belies her mere 29 years. In her eloquent and passionate prose, the heat, the smells, the sensuality and color of Africa leap from the pages. Her characters are finely drawn and vibrantly alive . . . . Through her main characters, [Adichie] teases out the class, race and economic conflicts that are endemic in her country. Her novel explores the issues of moral responsibility, the legacies of colonialism, the consequences of ethnic ties, class and race and how relationships on a personal level intertwine and interact on these. This is a novel which does more than tickle the taste buds, it takes the reader deep into African reality and the souls of our brothers and sisters in a part of the world that rarely figures on our world map unless there is a catastrophe or calamity of enormous proportions.”
–John Green, Morning Star (UK)

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s luminous and formidable talent was first seen in Purple Hibiscus. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes its title from the emblem for Biafra, the breakaway state in eastern Nigeria that survived for only three years, and whose name became a global byword for war by starvation. Adichie’s powerful focus on war’s impact on civilian life, and the trauma beyond the trenches, earns this novel a place alongside such works as Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Helen Dunmore’s depiction of the Leningrad blockade, The Siege . . . . As Biafran secession ‘for security’ brings a refugee crisis, a retaliatory Nigerian blockade and all-out war, and world refuses to recognize the fledgling state, the focus is on the characters’ grief, resilience, and fragmenting relationships . . . . A landmark novel, whose clear, undemonstrative prose can so precisely delineate nuance . . . [A] rare emotional truth . . . . Adichie is part of a new generation revisiting the history that her parents survived. She brings to it a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory.”
–Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (UK)

“Set in 1960s Nigeria, this novel provides a historical record at the same time as giving an insight into the experience of living through a bloody civil war . . . . Adichie is a beguiling author . . . . Full of drama and characters you care about . . . Educational and enlightening.”
–The Works (UK) (four stars)

“Set during the Nigerian/Biafran civil war in the late Sixties, this moving and thrilling book centers on the lives of two twin sisters and those close to them . . . . Adichie has the rare gift of being able to create a whole person in a couple of lines. Her compassion for her people is all-embracing as she gently mocks their little foibles and refuses to judge what war makes them capable of. This book paints a massive canvas through intimate detail. It is funny, heartbreaking, exquisitely written, and, without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic.”
–John Harding, Daily Mail (UK)

“In her richly imagined new novel, Adichie recounts [the] explosive time [before and during the Biafran War] through the tales of several people linked through love, loyalty and birth . . . bringing alive events that remain for many of us remote both in time and place . . . [All] of the main characters share [the] same fevered patriotism for their new homeland. But as the horrors of war mount, they must fight to keep their relationships together, as their world and their ideals are torn apart. The power behind this novel lies in how seamlessly Adichie melds the personal and the political in her narrative. War is defined not only by the casualties of civilians and soldiers, but by the death of a collective dream. The Republic of Biafra may be gone, but thanks to Adichie, it is not forgotten.”
–Amy Woods Butler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Conflict and corruption, exile and loss. The new novelists chronicling modern Nigeria and its place in the world shy from none of it. But it’s not just their attention to the big issues that these literary heirs to Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe have in common. There’s the food . . . [In] describing the textures and smells of the kitchen and the way the making and eating of meals can define an individual’s place in society, the novelists find the universal in the details. And in hunger, they find a metaphor for other human yearnings–for peace, for justice, for home . . . While several common themes run through their work, these new Nigerians are a diverse group. Their rise brings to mind the late 1990s prominence of debuting Indian writers like Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai who explored similar issues in starkly different ways . . . ‘For me, it was gratifying to hear from people who are not Nigerian, not African, that they saw themselves in the novel,’ Adichie, perhaps the best known of the new voices from Nigeria, said of her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. This year, Adichie followed with the even more ambitious Half of a Yellow Sun, which was named a New York Times editors’ choice.”
–The Associated Press / International Herald Tribune

“Powerful . . . a complex tale of human passions and flaws . . . The main characters share the proud desire to build a new nation out of the chaos of postcolonial Nigeria. Yet [Half of a Yellow Sun] deftly avoids becoming a political manifesto . . . Adichie subtly nods at those responsible for the massacre without sliding into polemics. [She] refuses to turn away from the past’s ugly reality, mourning not just the lives lost but a time when ‘people believed deeply in something.’ Through her dazzling storytelling, that time will not be easily forgotten.”
–Amber Haq, Newsweek International

“[Half of a Yellow Sun] spans the decade to the end of the Biafran war, in which more than a million people died. Its focus is the impact of the war on [Adichie’s] characters and the characters they interact with. A story striking for its speed . . . Direct . . . It works, mysteriously, and is strange and new.”
–Eleanor Birne, London Review of Books

“Based loosely on political events in nineteen-sixties Nigeria, [Half of a Yellow Sun] focuses on two wealthy sisters, who drift apart as the newly independent nation struggles to remain unified . . . After a series of massacres targeting the Igbo people, [their] carefully genteel world disintegrates. Adichie indicts the outside world for its indifference and probes the arrogance and ignorance that perpetuated the conflict. Yet this is no polemic. The characters and landscape are vividly painted, and details used to heartbreaking effect.”
–The New Yorker

“Richly drawn . . . We develop great sympathy and affection for [Adichie’s characters] as the story moves along, and come to care very much about what is in store for them, as all the very best novels make us do . . . . [This] is not primarily a political novel, but a novel about a group of people undergoing a catastrophe and somehow enduring . . . desperately clinging to their belief that they will prevail . . . A moving tribute . . . [It] will not be long before Half of a Yellow Sun becomes a classic [and] comes to take its place in world literature, alongside the masterpieces of the post-colonial world.”
–Richard Stack, New Haven Independent

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has delivered a big novel about life in modern Nigeria during war time. The war in question is the Biafran War of the 1960s, during which the southern region of Biafra fought unsuccessfully to secede . . . The book mainly follows the fortunes of Olanna . . . a beautiful, well-e...

L'autore:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and The Iowa Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She is a 2005–2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Knopf
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400044162
• ISBN 13: 9781400044160
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 448