The Sweetest Fruits
by Monique Truong (Goodreads Author)
3.24 · Rating details · 375 ratings · 72 reviews
An ingenious reimagining of Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn's migratory life through the voices of the women who knew him best, and who testify to their own remarkable journeys
A Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her father's cloistered house, married an Irish officer in the British Army, and came to Ireland with her two-year-old son in 1852, only to be forced to leave without him soon after. An African American woman, born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation, makes her way to Cincinnati after the Civil War to work as a boarding house cook, where in 1872 she meets and marries an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, a former samurai's daughter is introduced to a newly arrived English teacher, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator.
The lives of writers can often best be understood through the eyes of those who nurtured them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest Fruits, these three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn. With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Truong illuminates the women's tenacity and their struggles in a novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging. (less)
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Hardcover, 304 pages
Published September 3rd 2019 by Viking
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Are the excerpts from Elizabeth Bisland’s biography of Lafcadio Hearn as they can be read in Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits real or imaginary?
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Nguyen Xuan Imaginary.
After all, The Sweetest Fruits is a novel and Elizabeth Bisland only one among its characters. Monique Truong said so in so many words when …more
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Stacia
Jan 05, 2020Stacia marked it as abandoned
I should have liked it. I did like it. But I got halfway through & never really felt the urge to pick it up again. Shrug.
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Annie
Aug 11, 2019Annie rated it it was amazing
At one point in Monique Truong’s novel, The Sweetest Fruits, one of the narrators tells her interviewer that it’s not enough to just get the story of one person: you have to also get the stories of the people around them. And that’s exactly what we get in this novel based on the life of author Lafcadio Hearn and three of the women in his life. (Technically four, if you count the excerpts from Elizabeth Bisland‘s biography of her friend.) While we learn a lot about Hearn, I was more fascinated by the lives of the women who loved him than I was about a man who often struck me as selfish and fussy. The women tell us about love, sacrifice, abandonment, difficult choices, compatibility, and so much more. This book is an amazing piece of writing that, while it hews very close to actual history, amplifies it in ways that only faction can do...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. (less)
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Oceantide74
Jan 11, 2020Oceantide74 rated it did not like it
1.5 stars. I admit I was ignorant about Hearn. I liked the beginning chapters about his mother (what a sad and lonely childhood Lafcadio had) and then it went downhill from there. The sections of the book were not seamless and I was confused by who was who with all the different Japanese names. I especially did not like the biographical parts of Elizabeth. I found myself skimming towards the end and wanting to just finish it.
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Cat
Sep 14, 2019Cat rated it really liked it
I think Truong is a stunningly brilliant writer. Her Bitter in the Mouth is one of my favorite books, and I teach the luminous and melancholy The Book of Salt. Her gift with understated yet indelible narrative voices is displayed to full effect in The Sweetest Fruits, the story of Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whom I did not know at all, told by three women who loved him. That synopsis is accurate and yet utterly misleading; that summary sounds like an exhausting "Great Man" history, and indeed, the New Yorker, mentioning Truong's new book in a recent article, takes up that invitation and starts trying to define what it is that made Lafcadio's voice so memorable, his achievement great. But for me, this book was more about what Virginia Woolf famously called the tale of Judith Shakespeare, the women's stories that fall by the wayside in the construction of the Great Man narrative, and particularly the women of color. Truong does not villainize Hearn, and indeed, she implies that his disability (a childhood eye injury leading to partial blindness) and his dark skin gave him the negative capability to relate to marginalized peoples. He drinks and carouses in black neighborhoods in the US; he takes on a Japanese name and citizenship when he moves to Japan; he cherishes the Caribbean islands and mourns the hurricanes they face.
In spite of this receptivity and charm in Hearn, Truong also charts the sinister power of white masculinity. In the first section, narrated by Hearn's mother, the gradual dismissal of her by her Irish lover and his aunt's bribe to be rid of this inconvenient mother and gifted her boy child who could be the family heir are deeply disturbing. At first, she lives in veritable confinement as a young girl, and then when she seeks companionship and intimacy, her pregnancy launches her into a life of estrangement and isolation with little consolation from the Irish man who loved sleeping with a passionate young virgin in a barn but cherished far less the prospect of a dark-skinned, non-English speaking wife back home. You see the immediate physical and social costs of being a woman in this patriarchal, Anglophilic society, no matter the sympathies the Irishman initially has with languages and identities repressed by colonial powers.
In the second section, it is not Hearn's father who is the embodiment of white masculinity's privilege and cruelty, but rather Hearn himself. An African-American book named Althea describes her courtship by this unusual young man, the drawings he would make for her, casting himself as a crow alighting on her branch. Hearn devotes himself to Alethea and to her foster child, but after marrying her, resents the limits that her color places on his career and status. He internalizes the shame of a white supremacist society, and he ultimately abandons her. But Truong makes it clear that Hearn is not merely responding to external pressures; he imagines himself her author and instructor: he renames her, never calling her Alethea; he rejects her Southern cooking and insists that she prepare European fare (and then denigrates what she comes up with). The sweetness of the man who scribbled her drawings and insisted that color was no object to their love gives way to the autocratism of unearned arrogance. She is disillusioned when she realizes the full extent of his alcoholism and philandering. The whole section is also cast as a letter defending her legal rights to claim him as a husband, which underscores how she has been erased from the official narrative. (Truong extensively quotes Hearn's first biographer, which is a beautifully pointed reflection on historiography's power.)
Finally, the last section of the novel is narrated by Setsu, Hearn's Japanese wife. She is the mother of his children and his ambassador to a new world, which he would become famous in the West for documenting and preserving. Setsu's section establishes Hearn's figuratively blindness, which comes from his own sense of himself as a European explorer in a quaint, Oriental, authentic land. He blunders into rural regions and insists on viewing their folk traditions; Setsu lies to him in order to protect him from the villagers' rage and violence. Hearn cannot imagine that any of these religious and ritual observances should not belong to him. He coopts Setsu's personal stories in his literary works, rarely referring to her (as his son resentfully realizes). He also overlooks the blossoming love between his wife and his best friend and translator, who dies young of tuberculosis. Setsu skillfully allows her husband to believe in her unwavering and exclusive devotion, a loyalty that he both counts upon and discounts as he sees her as a tool establishing his own authorship and paternity.
Because I don't know Hearn's work at all, my overwhelming impression from the novel was of his arrogance and unwitting cruelty. I suspect that Truong has more sympathy with Hearn than I ended up feeling. Men get to tell the story and reap the rewards; Hearn writes a Creole cookbook (claiming Alethea's territory) and Japanese ghost stories (claiming Setsu's). Maybe there will be a point in my life where I see more pathos in the condition of the white dude caught between imperialism and alterity, nationalism and expatriatism, privilege and marginalization. But for now, I was much more taken--thanks to Truong's artistry--with these women and their stories of survival and insight. (less)
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Laura
Nov 10, 2019Laura rated it liked it
I loved the first 2/3rds of this book so much! I found the last third, the final narrator, impenetrable. It took me weeks to get through that last section. I can appreciate the monumental task of this book and the first sections were truly great.
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Mrs C
Jun 08, 2019Mrs C rated it it was amazing
This is a reimagined life of Patricio Lafcaido Hearn, a Greek-Irish writer with a storied life as told by three women. The first is his mom, a Greek woman who was later forced to abandon Hearn when he was 2. The second is Hearn’s first wife, a black cook whom he married while he was a young reporter in Cincinatti. The third is his second wife, a high-ranking Samurai’s daughter who was half Hearn’s age whom he married while living as a teacher for boys in Japan. Majestic and lyrical. Great for fans of Ernest Van der Kwast.
Thanks to the publisher for the advance copy. (less)
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Moumita
Oct 13, 2020Moumita rated it it was amazing
I did not like the man. I liked those around him. You can tell that this story was meticulously researched and I really enjoyed the range of voices.
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cat
Dec 20, 2019cat rated it it was ok
Shelves: read-in-2019
SO BUMMED! Her novel the Book of Salt was one of my favorite books and I was incredibly excited to read this one. Nope. I can see how others may love it, and she is obviously an incredibly talented writer, but I could barely make myself care enough to finish the book. This is probably the saddest review of the year for me. I had such expectations. Both of her other novels won rave reviews from me and I recommended them to everyone I know, and then this book, which I could not connect with at all. Seriously bummed AND still excited for anything else she writes... (less)
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Ming
Dec 25, 2019Ming rated it really liked it
"Wait, are we talking about the same person?" Ever hear that when two or more people compare notes about a supposed "common" other who is unrecognizable to each.
In three sections, women in different countries and cultures describe Lafcadio at different spans of his life. Each depiction could not be more distinct from the other two. The constants are food and an Elizabeth character. Each section is actually the story about a woman than the man they had in common. He, the professional storyteller, is used as an instrument in the service of the women with the stories.
Truong's writing is beautiful and clever; and her imagined perspectives on Lafcadio sharp and witty. She performs, in writing, a kind of channeling, rich with the flaws of humanity and insights into its irony and contradictions. There's an affectionate acuity in Truong's writing. (And I often think about her book, Bitter in the Mouth, the only book I reread immediately after turning the last page on the first go. And thus, I anticipated this book and will eagerly wait for more from her.)
Several quotes:
...When my father was not an echo, he spoke in circles, a snake swallowing its tail.
At midmorning, the aromas , which hung like damp laundry over the street of villas, were the same as those coming from Kanella's kitchen. Onions and olive oil. The whole island by noon was a pan of sweet onions melting....
I was spare with my words when I was with Charles, as the fewer that I used, the better we understood each other.
....We understood one another. I understood them so well that I soon despised them both....
Believing a man doesn't mean making a fool of yourself. that was Aunt Sweetie talking. Molly taught me my kitchen skills but Aunt Sweetie taught me--or she tried to--what I would need to know in the other rooms of the house. She never married, and she told me that made her wiser than most women.
Religion, Pat had said to me and then I had repeated it to Charlotte, was for people who needed to believe that death was better than life. I was afraid to tell her what else Pat had said, but I did. Heaven is a good story, Mattie, and good stories get retold....
...Pat was a terrible storyteller, and I told him so. Pat looked up, his eye aglow. On the contrary, he said. He was a very good storyteller, as the listener wanted to know more, which was the point of storytelling.
When you've been taught that you are lesser, there was another way to empty yourself of anger, the stubborn kind, the kind closer to shame. It was cheaper than drink, but it cost those around you more. I didn't tell Pat about this other way. he came to it on his own.
...I don't know what Creole cooking is, but if these are colored folks, then I know a thing or two about what's on their tables. What I want to know is whether these were the dishes that they cooked in their own kitchens or whether these were dishes that they cooked in the kitchens of others. The two aren't the same. The first is what they hunger for, and the second is what their hunger make them do.
..."Facts are akin to fish bones," he said. "If what you want is to serve the flesh, then the bones can be discarded," he suggested. (less)
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Toni
Sep 11, 2020Toni rated it it was ok
Shelves: a-likely-story-book-club-read
Barely 2 stars!
OMG it took reading almost 1/2 of the story before the line of writing became evident and made some sort of sense (that a journalist was taking the story of three women and their life connections to Patrick Hearn). Google Patrick Hearn to learn who he was; that's what I had to do in order to understand this story. I actually got more about the story from the GoodReads synopsis than from the book itself!
Truong has a very unorthodox writing style; I didn't particularly enjoy it. The beginning of the story and the end alike 9the stories of Casi and Setsu - mother and wife 2 ) were very confusing. Plus the interjections of Elizabeth (the journalist) only added to the confusion. It was like putting together a tough jigsaw puzzle.
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - I give Althea's story and almost 3 stars and the rest of the book I can only give one star which averages out to barely two stars! I wouldn't consider reading other books by Tuong. (less)
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Laurie
Jan 04, 2020Laurie rated it it was amazing
Shelves: adult, literary-fiction, relationships, historical-fiction, family, strong-female-characters, cultural-conflicts, marriage, americana
Yes, I was immediately drawn to The Sweetest Fruits because Lafcadio Hearn (what is it that makes him so fascinating?) is the subject....but this is not a book about Lafcadio Hearn, or only tangentially. What the book is really about is the inner life of the women in Hearn's life and through telling their tales of their lives with him, we see their love, loss and pain; and Hearn's as well. Each woman, first his Greek mother, Rosa Antonia Cassimati, then his African-American wife, Alethea Foley and finally his Japanese wife, Koizumi Setsu share their reminiscences of life with Hearn with his first official biographer, Elizabeth Bisland. But that's only the story for the public; what makes this book so good is the second story that each woman relates; the story they've held back to keep just for themselves. Monique Truong brings to her characters an individual voice and pathos which makes each woman equally as fascinating as Lafcadio Hearn. (less)
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Rachel
Feb 18, 2020Rachel rated it liked it
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn is not fictional character, I did not know that until reading the other reviews of this book on Goodreads.
His life was peripatetic. His mother abandoned him and set him up for a lifetime of trying to feel at home. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland he always seemed to be a stranger in a strange land.
His life is recounted for us by the women who loved him. I found the first two thirds of this book fascinating and beautifully written. The work begins in 1823 and ends in the early years of the twentieth century. The women are his mother, his first wife and his last wife.
The last third, written by the last woman in his life to be confusing, as others have noted.
However, I found the book fascinating and I am glad that I read it. (less)
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Eric
Jun 21, 2021Eric rated it it was amazing
Excellent. Such good decisions about how to tell this story, and the cumulative effect makes for a really pleasing and (if the metaphor holds) thought-provoking aftertaste. This is a book about Lafcadio Hearn, and a book about so much more, as he is seen and heard and grieved by three (four?) women whose own lives are partly but by no means entirely involved with his. For me the Koizumi Setsu section is a masterpiece.
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Beth
Sep 29, 2020Beth rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Elizabeth Bisland is writing a story on the life of author Patrick Hearn as told by his mother Casi, his first wife Althea, and his second wife Setsu. I found the format of this book confusing with the sections of Elizabeth added in between the other three. It took me a while to follow along with the style of writing.
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Elizabeth
Sep 16, 2019Elizabeth rated it really liked it
Shelves: japan
An interesting idea and format though, because I chose to read it mostly because of an interest in Lafcadio Hearn, I finished it feeling somewhat shortchanged.
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Nguyen Xuan
Dec 20, 2020Nguyen Xuan added it
The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong
As I read it by Nguyen
The Sweetest Fruits relates a saga that apanned three generations and three continents around Lafcadia Hearn, also known as Yakumo Koizumi, by way of testimonies from his mother and his two successive wives.
Warning: SPOILERS
The saga started in the late 1940s on an island then under British rule in the Ionian Sea. Rosa, of noble descent, was a prisoner in her father’s house. Until she was twenty five “[he] forbade her everything except for the Villa Cassimati [where they lived] and a church in the Fortezza.”
But Rosa was not the kind of woman her father wanted her to be. She secretly dated a young Irish surgeon for the British army and they married when she was pregnant with Lafcadio. The child was two years old when Charles was reassigned to Dominica and he sent him and Rosa to Dublin to be taken care of by his mother. But nothing worked in Dublin, the coupled got estranged and Rosa returned to her home island, leaving his son, four years old, in the care of her husband’s family.
Lafcadio met Mattie in Cincinnati in the aftermath of the Civil War when she was a cook at a boarding house and Lafcadio became a boarder. She was a former slave and illiterate and he had arrived in the U.S. at nineteen with no money, left to fend for himself. By then he was a fledgling reporter for one of the city’s leading newspapers. They married when she was twenty and he was twenty three but life was complicated for a young mixed couple. He lost his job when the newspaper found out he lived with a black woman,and being together in the street was a risky venture. “If there were two or more of us, they would spot us without fail. Then, without fail, there would be trouble.” Their marriage lasted three years, more short-lived than his mother’s.
Lafcadia arrived in Japan at the age of forty in 1890, after the proclamation of the Meiji Constitution. He married Setsu, twenty two, a Samurai’s daughter, a year later. By then he had had a solid reputation in the U.S. as a writer and a journalist and he started a career as a teacher, eventually as a professor at prestigious universities. He also got Japanese citizenship and a Japanese name. Setsu and he had a happy, uneventful life, raising three sons and a younger daughter.
His only unhappy experience related to his work. Toward the end of his life “[he] wrote to friends in America for aid to find work there.” He then applied for a sabbatical leave he was entitled to for his travel to the U.S. and resigned when the leave was refused, “[c]convinced that [the refusal] was intended as a slight by the authorities in their purpose to be rid of him.”
The three testimonies are laced with large excerpts from The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn by Elizabeth Bisland- for a reason.
Whereas Setsu’s testimony covers all the years she had shared with her husband until he died, Rosa’s last sight of her son had been of a four-year-old and Mattie had lived with LafcadIo only for three years. However close he had been to their hearts, Rosa and Mattie’s testimonies alone would not have been sufficient to shed enough light on the first four decades of his life.
Let the reader make no mistake, though. If there actually existed a biography entitled The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn by an American writer and journalist named Elizabeth Bisland, the excerpts
in the novel are fiction, just like the women’s testimonies. Monique Truong said so in so many words since by her Acnowlegment all four protagonists including Bisland “kept Hearn’s secrets and theirs so close” and “divulged so little” “they made me work for every word.”
Ms. Truong’s mischievous sleight of hand notwithstanding, readers may find indeed hard to distinguish fact from fiction but they are warned beforehand: “Tell all the truth but tell it slanted” is the quote from Emily Dickinson that adorn The Sweetest Fruits’s frontispiece.
(less)
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Lisa
Dec 22, 2021Lisa rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: usa, c21st, vietnam, 21review
What a pleasure it was to read this book!
The Sweetest Fruits, by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong, is a fictionalised life of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Of Greek-Irish heritage, Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkada; was abandoned by his father and then by his mother who unwisely left him under guardianship in Ireland. From there he was tutored in Wales and educated in France; but learned the craft of journalism and translation in the US; and subsequently in Japan became a teacher who introduced its culture and literature to the West. As we learn from the Afterword, Truong discovered the bare bones of his life story during research for a previous book Bitter in the Mouth. The novel had to have an authentic cornbread recipe from the South not the North, and the brief but intriguing bio that she found in an encyclopedia of food alerted her to Hearn's La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes (1885). As a child refugee from Vietnam, Truong is fascinated by people who choose to live in exile from country, family, language, and the physical and emotional assemblage of home so she had found the topic for her next novel and The Sweetest Fruits is the result.
A deft mixture of fact and imagination, Hearn's story is told in the distinctive voices of three women who were crucially important in his life, punctuated by the contrasting voice of his real-life biographer Elizabeth Bisland. The effect is not to make the reader doubt the veracity of these women but to acknowledge that people present different versions of themselves to others for all sorts of reasons, dubious or otherwise.
BEWARE: MILD SPOILERS
The first narrator is the illiterate (real-life) Rosa Antonia Cassimati, (1823-1882) dictating her story to Elesa, who is nanny to her second but (so far) only surviving child, Patricio Lafcadio Hearn. En route to Dublin where she hopes to reunite with the father of this child, Charles Bush Hearn, Rosa has escaped the bullying and cruelty of her childhood home where she was held to blame for her mother's premature death and destined to live out her days in a convent. Naïve and inexperienced in the ways of men, Rosa has to learn the hard way that men like Charles care more about their military careers in far-flung places than they do about their families.
Commemorative plaque to Lafcadio Hearn, 48 Gardiner Street Lower, Dublin, Ireland. (Wikipedia)
The reader does not learn about the betrayal of Rosa's hopes in this part of the story. That comes later in the second narration, which is by (real-life) Alethea Foley (1853-1913) in Cincinnati.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/23/t... (less)
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ManOfLaBook.com
Jul 23, 2020ManOfLaBook.com rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2020
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong is the imagined story of three women who were all attached to Greek-Irish writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn. Ms. Truong came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam, and is an award winning, bestselling author.
The novel is divided into three parts, three women talking about their relationship to Lafcadio Hearn. The first is his mother, a Greek woman who married an Irish officer in the British Army to get out of her father’s house. She followed her husband to Ireland, only to be forced to leave him.
The second, a former slave, an African-American woman from a Kentucky plantation. Making her way to Cincinnati after the Civil war working at a boarding house cook. At the boarding house she meets, and marries Hearn who is trying to make his name as a reporter.
The third, a Japanese woman named Matsue who got married to the new English teacher… Mr. Hearn. Matsue, a samurai’s daughter, gives birth to four children and collaborates with Hearn in his literary ventures.
I knew nothing about Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, I actually only found out he was a real person after finishing to read this book. The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong is the author’s attempt to tell the readers about the Greek-Irish writer through the women who knew him throughout his life, through their words, acts, and deeds.
The book has its ups and downs, the last third took a bit of concentration and perseverance, but overall I though that the writing was witty, and the narrative sharp. The author does not shy away from showing the humanity and flaws in the women who tell the story, as well as Mr. Hearn who had a tremendous impact on each one of their lives.
I almost skipped this book because the synopsis made it seem like it would be a history of one of those “great men” no-one had heard about. Instead we get different view points of what made Mr. Hearn’s voice so memorable to his fans, through tales from the women who fell by the wayside, but have had as much an impact on the writer as he had on himself.
What I thought was remarkable is that the author did not make Mr. Hearn the villain, nor the antagonist even though the story is told through the eyes of the women who loved him, the ones he loved back, and did wrong during his life. The author simply implies that due to childhood disability and dark skin he can relate to people who were marginalized at the time, and some are still marginalized today.
Frankly, I had no sympathy for Hearn, I am not familiar with his work and – even though I don’t think it was the author’s intention – he comes off as a jerk, arrogant, and even cruel. Even though Mr. Hearn is the focus of the book, the women telling it, survivors one and all, are the ones to give the reader insight. (less)
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Brigid said...
