Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar, A Book Review by Rebecca Moll
What do you choose to carry?
If you believe there is merit in perspective, that life’s hardest lessons and cruelest moments have value in how they refine us, whittle us down to just what we can hold in one breath, feel in one heartbeat, grasp in one hand, then Take What You Can Carry will resonate deeply with you.
Set in the late 1970s, we look back in time when women in the American workplace struggled against the status-quo male dominated hierarchy. And if that rewind refines your perspective on such struggles today, then hold on. In short order the story line turns sharply with life in Northern Iraq and the Kurdistan women who lived on the brink of survival. Suddenly, we can no longer hold with what we understood to be inequality.
And on this road of life where we pack and repack experiences, where what we choose to carry steers our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live, that which doesn't break you, makes you stronger. Upon broadened shoulders you heft what you can and forge ahead into the unknown.
Olivia, a young, American, aspiring photojournalist, grabs with both hands the opportunity to accompany her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to a wedding in Northern Iraq, hoping to bring back a photo that will launch her career. Torn apart by war, danger and peril bring opportunity, yet Olivia’s camera remains in her bag, her first thought, survival. As she falls in love with his family and a little girl next door, Lailan, Olivia struggles with not only with the question of whether such heartbreaking moments should be captured, but if she has the instinct and guts to do so. Insecurities deepen as does her love for a land and its people whom she feels she cannot betray. And then, the moment arrives, capturing on film not only the beautiful landscape for which she focused, but a horrifying tragedy that alters lives forever.
Sardar writes with a transparency that transports you into the hearts and minds, the place and time of her story, a beauty that cleaves you to the very characters that reach for your hands, pull you along, while you wallow in emotions that you cannot fathom how to carry. Olivia and Delan, Hewar and Gaziza, Soran, and Miriam. And most of all, little Lailan, who like you, upon turning the last page, feel your heart too big.
My second of Sardar’s books, I look forward to a third, You Were Here. Typically, not one to monopolize on a single author, I will give it time, foray into other works and genres, collecting this and that along the way, like puddles in my palms, ephemeral, I must choose.
Take what you can carry? It’s good enough for me.
If you believe there is merit in perspective, that life’s hardest lessons and cruelest moments have value in how they refine us, whittle us down to just what we can hold in one breath, feel in one heartbeat, grasp in one hand, then Take What You Can Carry will resonate deeply with you.
Set in the late 1970s, we look back in time when women in the American workplace struggled against the status-quo male dominated hierarchy. And if that rewind refines your perspective on such struggles today, then hold on. In short order the story line turns sharply with life in Northern Iraq and the Kurdistan women who lived on the brink of survival. Suddenly, we can no longer hold with what we understood to be inequality.
And on this road of life where we pack and repack experiences, where what we choose to carry steers our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live, that which doesn't break you, makes you stronger. Upon broadened shoulders you heft what you can and forge ahead into the unknown.
Olivia, a young, American, aspiring photojournalist, grabs with both hands the opportunity to accompany her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to a wedding in Northern Iraq, hoping to bring back a photo that will launch her career. Torn apart by war, danger and peril bring opportunity, yet Olivia’s camera remains in her bag, her first thought, survival. As she falls in love with his family and a little girl next door, Lailan, Olivia struggles with not only with the question of whether such heartbreaking moments should be captured, but if she has the instinct and guts to do so. Insecurities deepen as does her love for a land and its people whom she feels she cannot betray. And then, the moment arrives, capturing on film not only the beautiful landscape for which she focused, but a horrifying tragedy that alters lives forever.
Sardar writes with a transparency that transports you into the hearts and minds, the place and time of her story, a beauty that cleaves you to the very characters that reach for your hands, pull you along, while you wallow in emotions that you cannot fathom how to carry. Olivia and Delan, Hewar and Gaziza, Soran, and Miriam. And most of all, little Lailan, who like you, upon turning the last page, feel your heart too big.
My second of Sardar’s books, I look forward to a third, You Were Here. Typically, not one to monopolize on a single author, I will give it time, foray into other works and genres, collecting this and that along the way, like puddles in my palms, ephemeral, I must choose.
Take what you can carry? It’s good enough for me.
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