Maybe this is what we need to refocus on the current and ongoing crisis that the government evades. What has been done with the incarcerated hundreds of unaccounted children taken at the border ?
19
"how much we are prepared to accept....."
Seems to me, we are not prepared. Therefore the amount is next to nothing. What are the benefits of accepting P & S of others? (except reading about it in a novel). IF we just wait long enough the "lost children" will become a more manageable memory. Individually I can't accept enough of my own pain and suffering to do much good helping others. However I believe in the power of small communities to compensate for one another's shortcomings. These can offer shelter, protection, nurture of some kind, hope of some kind. Unfortunately my own life at this moment is as an isolated unit separated from the shared strength of others. I am basing my optimism on rose colored memories.
8
What's most surprising here is that no readers have commented on this review, while thousands do on the front page news and Op-Eds chronicling the political battles of our day.
Wars and warring grab us. Narratives of life -- more real even if told through fiction -- do not.
Maybe it is just too much "... for people to stare hard at their own families, to examine their complicity in other people’s suffering."
Or perhaps we have lost our "panoptic curiosity."
15
This is a book I hope to read. I don't know this author, but the review describes someone responding to the tragedy of Central American refugees.
6
20 page, single sentence climax?
Ugh, I might as well go read Faulkner.
5
Should there be a Spoiler Alert at the start of the review? Readers may want to discover that plot twist reading through the book instead of in the review of the book.
17
"Is it ever defensible to make art out of someone else’s suffering?" Well if it isn't, someone better go wake the dead authors of yesteryear and let them know. As Aristotle said, the business of tragedy is to evoke, terror and pity through tales of the miseries of other people. Examples, the Hebrew Bible, the Greek epics and tragedies. Tales of betrayal, exploitation, lust, rape, murder, war and pillage. We experience them vicariously through literature. "There but for the grace of God go I." In more modern times, there's the literature of the industrial revolution the exploitation and misery of the lower working classes. There's Hugo's "Les Miserables."There's Holocaust literature. White authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe' in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Joseph Conrad' in "Heart of Darkness" tell the miseries of Blacks, exploited and enslaved at the hands of Whites. Ms. Sehgal asks if such stories are even theirs to tell and even if they are "how on earth to keep it from turning pious and dully moralizing." Not to worry. Such literature is fascinating and edifying reading. More than 2 million people joined Victor Hugo's funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the French Pantheon where he shares a crypt with Emil Zola another novelist speaking out for the poor and downtrodden.
30
"the book breaks out of the meandering rhythms of the road trip and into a heart-stopping 20-page, single-sentence climax"
And then you reveal the climax?? Couldn't you at least have put "spoiler warning" at the top?
11