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Cathryn_Conroy
A Profound, Elegiac Examination of the Human Spirit with a Transcendent Message of Hope and Love
The intersection of religion and science is crooked if not actually broken. In a way, this book tries to make that intersection whole and seamless. And the result is magnificent.
This is a short but monumental novel that has so much depth, so many profound thoughts, and a message so intricate and intense that I think I could read it over and over and still find something new in it each time.
Written by Yaa Gyasi, this is the story of Gifty, a brilliant 28-year-old woman—Harvard undergrad, Stanford PhD in neuroscience—who is deeply plagued by the death of her beloved brother, Nana, from an OxyContin addiction and overdose. Gifty was born in Huntsville, Alabama, but her parents and brother are immigrants from Ghana. The story begins when Gifty is a graduate student at Stanford, but seamlessly bounces around in time from her childhood and teen years in Alabama, college at Harvard, and back to the present in San Francisco. Gifty's suicidal mother shows up at her San Francisco apartment nearly comatose from grief—even though this is years after Nana's death. As Gifty valiantly tries to care for her clinically depressed mother, she struggles with the big questions of life, especially those revolving around her evangelical Christian upbringing and how God does—or doesn't—fit into the life of a neuroscientist who is researching the brain-based science of addiction.
This is a profound, elegiac examination of the human spirit after it has been crushed by grief and a powerful statement about the ravages of opioids. While parts of the book are absolutely heartbreaking, the ultimate message of hope and love is transcendent.
Juliana
Clash
When we start reading the complex, multilayered novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, Gifty, the main character, is introduced as the eleven-year-old girl sent over to her aunt in Ghana to wait for her mother to recover in Alabama from an illness.
So begins the subjective chronology that threads the novel together between the past of Gifty’s young years and the present of her lab research for reward-seeking behavior in mice. It is a rather confusing chronology, but appropriate for the narrator’s plunge into a messy, complicated world which she did her best to navigate across failure, pain, disappointment and temporary and ephemeral joy. While the big question is how she was able to reconcile her religious devotion with the work informed by theories of neuroscience, Gifty paints brush by brush the portrait of the family and circumstances that have marked her growing up into the person faced with that clash.
Legally, Gifty is an American, as she is born in Huntsville, Alabama, but socially she still feels bullied and marginalized as a black second-generation immigrant whose family emigrated from Ghana years before.
An inquisitive and creative child, Gifty struggles to integrate socially at school, inventing legendary characters and an exotic past in Ghana and to make sense of events in her family life which change the feeling of stability and protection so much needed when growing up. Her family bear memorable names anchored in their ethnicity and traditions: her father is the Chin Chin Man, but he will fail to adjust to their life in Alabama and return to Ghana, her brother Nana grows a talented athlete with his father away and their mother, the Black Mamba struggles to balance her job, an athlete’s mom’s responsibilities and taking care of a younger daughter. When Nana has an accident, the medication and a circle of friends drag him into addiction and the Black Mamba into a mental illness of her own.
Gravitating between the devotion to God both practiced by her mother every moment of her life and independently pursued by Gifty herself on her own terms, and the questions of a scientifically-inclined mind who, as the grad student she becomes, experiments on mice with the tools and theories of neuroscience, Gifty carves a unique, out-of-the-ordinary path for herself in her quest for acceptance, understanding, belonging and closure.
It is the rawness of feeling and the depth of thought that were most moving to me as a reader of Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. Also, interweaving organically the rich beliefs, traditions, misconceptions of the Ghanaian culture with Gifty’s personal quest gave enormous depth and uniqueness to this story of transcendence. An extremely complex and inciting book, worth reading.
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