While I enjoyed the 1980s strand, there's a near-contemporary story-line that's not compelling additionally, there are a lot of secondary characters we don't get to know very well and the details of Yale's art deal slows down the narrative." - Rebecca Foster, BookBrowse "Unfortunately, I found The Great Believers hard going. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself.
Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. She has borne unblinking witness to history and to a horrific episode already in danger-among Americans, that is-of becoming a horror story out of the past.A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. Although I can’t help wishing the two stories had worked together more potently, that doesn’t detract from the deep emotional impact of The Great Believers, nor does it diminish Makkai’s accomplishment. The question 'What happens next?' remains pressing from the first page to the last. It would be futile to try to convey the novel’s considerable population, or its plots and subplots, though both population and plots are ingeniously interwoven.
Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors. The Great Believers is, as far as I know, among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present-among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades.
0 kommentar(er)
