HOMEGOING, Yaa Gyasi

Someone sent me the manuscript of this book before it came out in print. It sat on my desktop for a solid year and a half before I finally got around to reading it. And ohmygod, I'm blown away. I picked it this time because I wanted to see how Gyasi treated the passage of so much time and the excerpting of stories from this massive possible narrative. How do you decide what makes it in and what doesn't when you're covering hundreds of years? I'm grappling with the same questions, so decided to turn to Homegoing for some answers. I couldn't put the book down, so addicted was I to the unfolding of these tragic and beautiful characters. Toward the end--in a truly satisfying moment of everything coming full circle--one character has this thought: "How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it--not apart from it, but inside of it" (296). It is this expansiveness and this unseeing (because how could one ever grasp the magnitude of such things) that I felt at every moment in the book, even as we zoomed in so tight to the very specific lives of each character. Much respect. So much to steal.