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Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

Start date: July 15, 2021

Finish date: August 1, 2021

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What Members Thought

Jul 12, 2021 Ann D rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book was very well written. The main character, Gifty, is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants in Alabama. She grows up in a family wracked by severe mental illness, drug addiction and abandonment. They are the only Black members of a rigid Pentecostal church, and Gifty's religious questioning becomes a central part of the novel.

Gifty is a star student who goes to Stanford to study neuroscience and the possibility of controlling the compulsion of addiction. The detailed description of her wo ...more

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Apr 07, 2021 Jane rated it it was amazing

Shelves: recentfiction, read-this-book-again, education, health, family-story, womans-story, psychology, race, coming-of-age-novel, immigrant-story

I read Yaa Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, which won the America Book Award. I understand why people loved it. It traces two young women whose lives take completely different directions. One stays in Africa, the other is sent to America as a slave. For me, the lives of these characters made it feel that they were ciphers rather than fully embodied characters. I wanted to stay with the first two characters we meet and stay with how they're lives unfold.

I was surprised that Transcendent Kingdom's I read Yaa Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, which won the America Book Award. I understand why people loved it. It traces two young women whose lives take completely different directions. One stays in Africa, the other is sent to America as a slave. For me, the lives of these characters made it feel that they were ciphers rather than fully embodied characters. I wanted to stay with the first two characters we meet and stay with how they're lives unfold.

I was surprised that Transcendent Kingdom's book jacket has blurbs by famous authors about Homegoing, but nothing about how extraordinary Gyasi's newest book, the one the reader holds in her/his/their hands...actually is. It's an exploration of Ghana, and America...but told through the story of a single Ghanaian woman and her family. I love that focus, and the way the protagonist's (Gifty's) story is told in alternating sections about her childhood, her teenage years, her college years, and her current life as a scientist. The threads of Gifty's life felt completely integrated and believable, in a way that her first book didn't, at least for me. I was utterly moved by Gifty's struggle to reconcile her belief in God and religion with her experience of her family's hardships and her scientific studies and her grief. Even the ending, which felt a bit abrupt, seemed right. So many passages spoke to me...many having to do with grief and loss. Although I was rarely as lonely as Gifty was, my own childhood and teenage years were punctuated by grief and loss.

Over and over I found myself noting passages that gutted me, or stunned me with their echoes. I think the interweaving and repetition of stories and themes is utterly brilliant. This is a book I will read again. It's strange. This is a book in which depression is an important theme, but part of me always felt stunned by the interweaving of Gifty's search for meaning, even in the midst of her pain. The fabric Gyasi weaves is brilliant and tragic and beautiful.

These passages may be spoilers:

32 The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained, Are we going to be all right? 33 Mrs. Pasternack, my biology teacher, was a Christian. Everybody I knew in Alabama was, but she said things like "I think we;re made out of stardust and God made the stars." Ridiculous to me then, weirdly comforting now. Then, my whole body felt raw, all the time, like if you touched me the open wound of my flesh would throb. Now, I'm scabbed over, hardened. Mrs. Pasternack said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, "The truth is we don't know what we don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science, but that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions." 37 In those first years of college, I become dismissive of anyone who cries about breakups, who spent money frivolously, who complained about small things. By that time, my mother had already "healed through prayer," as Pastor John put it. Healed, but in the broken bone that's healed still aches at the first sign of rain. There were always first signs of rain, atmospheric, quiet. She was always aching. Nana was the first miracle, the true miracle, and the glory of his birth cast a long shadow.I was born into the shadow left behind. I understood that, even as a child.My mother made certain of it. She was a matter-of-fact woman, not a cruel woman exactly, but something quite close to cruel. When I was young, I prided myself on being able to tell the difference. 52 I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my bible cover to cover...I wanted, above else to be good, I suspected that is why I excelled in math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step. 60-61 The next passages are about Chin Chin mans delight in his son's accomplishments. I would always have something to prove and nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it. 69 Chin Chim man: in my country (Ghana), people will greet you instead of turning their heads away...In my country, you can eat food fresh from the ground. Corn, hard on its cob, not soft like the spirits of these people. In my country, there is no word for half-sibling, step-sibling, aunt or uncle. There is only sister, brother, mother, father. We are not divided. In my country, people may not have money, but they have happiness in abundance. In abundance. No one in America is enjoying. 70 If Ive thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callous is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was. 91 People would tell me, "You have to ask Jesus to come into your heart." And I would ask Jesus to come into my heart and spend the rest of the service waiting to see if he had gotten my invitation. 159 Once Gifty tells her friend about how her brother died, she lets Gifty know she's not allowed to play with her anymore. She doesn't tell anyone until she finally tells a lab mate. The lab mate is intrigued that her brother's addiction and death drives her research, the woman tells Gifty she should give a Ted Talk. This person has no idea how horrible it was to drive with her mother searching for Nan. She has no idea of the enormity of G's grief.

160Nana is the reason I began this work, but not in a wholesome, made-for TED-Talk kind of way. Instead, this science was a way for me to challenge myself, to do something tryly hard, and in so doing to work through all of my misunderstandings about his addiction and all of my shame. Because I still have so much shame. I'm full to the brim with it. I'm spilling over. 162 Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and thenI work towards that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering until I find what I am looking for...

169 Excuse me professor, " I said. He started laughing, leaning against the desk. "Yes, Gifty?" "are you telling me that when I get a 'like' on my Facebook posts, dopamine is released?" "Why, yes, right you are," he said. 195 about Lazarus and being dead. 198 the Lord had primed e t to believe in the great mystery of our existence, but the closer I got to it the further away the objects moved The fact that I can locate the par of the berain where memory is stored only answers questions of where and perhaps even how. It does little to anser the why. I am always, I am ever, unnerved. 211 What I can say for certain is that no case study can capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kin and generous he was, how much hr wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live, ...more

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May 04, 2021 Sheila rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-groups

This is an ambitious novel, a well crafted story about lives shattered by drug addiction, by depression and by dealing with people suffering from both these illnesses. At the same time, it is an author's homage to a friend and her work which she uses as the basis for her central character Gifty's research.

The big things in the life of Ghanian - American Gifty have been religion, family and science. She looses her family - her father back to Ghana, her brother's life to opiods, her mothers to sub This is an ambitious novel, a well crafted story about lives shattered by drug addiction, by depression and by dealing with people suffering from both these illnesses. At the same time, it is an author's homage to a friend and her work which she uses as the basis for her central character Gifty's research.

The big things in the life of Ghanian - American Gifty have been religion, family and science. She looses her family - her father back to Ghana, her brother's life to opiods, her mothers to subsquent depression; she looses her faith along the way but finds it again; her science always seeming to be the questioner, the doubting Thomas, and yet the embodiment of all her hope.

The novel's structure is complex, lots of flashbacks, a hotchpotch or the past and the present, of reality and her internalisation of it, her constant quest for answers to questions which are often in themselves questions, all rendered in the first person. And therein lies my dilemna as a reader because I can see her achievements in this as a writer, but also its flaws for me as a reader.

For me, all the internalisation of her thoughts, the detail of the science and the education system in which the character grows up in the southern state of the US where evolution is not because of fundamentalist religious beliefs and the Pentacostal Ghanian church's repetivitive evangelicism made it an oppressive read. When she is describing the Ghanian pastor and all his shouts of "Amen?" to his loud and responsive Hallelujahs of his congregation, and having witnessed this myself in a Nigerian church, I am reminded of the United Free Church in Scotland where I once saw a vicar with equal fervour condem fire and brimstone from a pulpit to an equally deafing but totally silent congregation, likewise bowed in conformity. Perhaps readers of a more spiritual disposition will not be so impacted by this and see the novel very differently.

Whilst I felt the character of Gifty, but I also felt the book only came alive when she spoke about her brother, to a lesser extent her mother, with the other minor characters of Raymond, Anne, Katherine and Han only serving to fill out, round off her life story.

I would have loved to have given this book a 4 for ambition but alas for this reader some parts of it didn't come off 100%, so it is a 3 for a read. ...more

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