The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan
My rating: 4/5 cats
i have figured out all the low ratings on this book. it is “sad.” that seems to be the major complaint about this book. its sadness.
well.
shrug.
i mean, yeah, this is a sad book. a very very sad book. and for those of you who like books in which an ambitious character gets everything they want and ends up happy as can be with their family and their reputation intact, this would definitely be a two-star book for you.
because the reality of the immigrant experience and the demands of family upon a man who is struggling with his guilt over having abandoned his country in order to pursue his dreams, and the racial tensions that rise up when an african man moves into a small tight-white-knit community when he ALSO has evil-twin daughters?
there isn’t going to be a happy ending, here.
and FOR THE RECORD, this is not just my personal prejudice rearing up – these twins are bad bad baaaad.
and our saumel is a gloomy gus to begin with, even apart from the bad things that happen to him.
his take on marriage:
He admonished himself for not taking advantage of her good mood when he’d had the chance. But that was the nature of marriage, he thought solemnly, an argument that only ends with death.
on the emptiness of life:
…all of life’s ambitions were mere diversions. Politicians sought refuge in conflicts, the immoral sought it in sex, and many men just worked until they dropped. You did everything to keep yourself from seeing the futility of it. But Samuel had joined that class of men who, having attained a major goal, suddenly see the vanity in wanting it.
on the freaking sunrise:
…he meditated on how pointless it was that sunrise was so beautiful when so few men saw it anyway.
this is the character we are dealing with – no matter what happens in his life, if these are his various outlooks, he isn’t ever going to be happy, even if everything were to work out for him. spoiler alert: it will not!
another complaint i am seeing when reading the review of others are the characters – that they are shallowly written. and while i can understand where a criticism like this comes from, in this book, i would have to respectfully disagree. in samuel’s case, i think it is a matter less of his being underwritten and more of his having been beaten down so much by his life there is nothing left. he is definitely someone to whom life happens, rather than a heroic man of action, but while he is few of words, his guilt and frustration jumps right off the page at you. this is a story of a man harassed at every turn, who ultimately retreats into a kind of stasis and emotional hidey-hole, who continues to make questionable decisions that haunt him to the bitter end.
my only complaint is the situation with the twins. early on, these were shades of the spooky and the supernatural, which never came to fruition. my stance is, if you are going to drop spooky hints, you have got to follow through, otherwise, it just leaves the reader wondering what the point of those scenes were. although i was glad to see that i am not the only one with a twin-fear:
When the pregnancy assailed them, Maud had already reached thirty-one, a distasteful age for a first child, both by Gold Coast and Western standards of the time. Her failure as a nanny also haunted her. So it devastated her when not one, but two babies arrived, and not even boys at that. Twins. Both Samuel and Maud were embarrassed to admit that not even an ocean could distance them from their superstitions. For twins were a kind of misfortune. Samuel’s great uncles had been twins, and the advent of their birth had brought a maelstrom of controversy to the family. Primogeniture had been jeopardized – without knowing for certain who’d been born first, how could they name an heir? And twins, a freak occurrence, scared people. Only some awful wrongdoing could produce the same person twice. The mother’s fidelity came into question; for no man on earth was so virile that he could do two at once. Only the prestige of the Tyne name saved their matriarch from suspicion. Samuel’s ancestral experience was enough to put both him and Maud off.
you heard it here – twins are the result of some awful wrongdoing.
