Georges Le Mercenaire Le Mercenaire من عند Tejpura, Rajasthan, الهند من عند Tejpura, Rajasthan, الهند

** spoiler alert ** This book confused me for a long while: in the first place, it was a book about a black woman coming of age in the South. However, I discovered that this book was about a lot more than a black girl. It was about a woman coming of age... and I wasn't prepared for the universality of that wonderful fact. The quote below will illustrate the beauty by which this is done. She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was marriage! The protagonist, Janie, begins her tale in a flashback. From the start, although this is a black saga, I kept looking for the defensiveness, the anger, the differences, but none of them were there. Instead Zora Hurston reminds us that we are all pretty much the same. She says: Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. If you are female and you don't think that's a bald embarrassing truth, think about it some more. Hurston lets you have the truth on the first page... and after that you just want to know more about the secrets she understands, not only about women, but about people. It’s not an easy book to read, much of it written in black vernacular, but you become accustomed to it as if you were sitting in a rocker watching it happen, laughing with the others or shaking your head. Hurston constantly enthralls and she rarely disappoints. More than just a story about a woman looking for fulfillment in life, this is a wonderful story about the category 5 1928 hurricane which destroyed a great deal of Florida, including Henry Flagler’s railroad, and caused the great Lake Okeechobee to flood surrounding southern central Florida, breaking its dikes. It’s amazing to have an eyewitness account not from safety but from the ground level. After all the damage it did and then a year later the stock market collapse, the Florida boom was kaput. Still people kept on and so does Janie. You just see the history a little differently from the dirt. Janie begins the story as a 16 year old with dreams about love and, just like any 16 year old, sometimes you want to grab her and tell her that life is a bit more serious than she thinks. After a few years, she tends to grow out of her doldrums, but still she knows that life ought to be more meaningful than it is. Because if this, even though the reader winces at the time, she takes a leap in order to find happiness. You just know it’s going to turn out badly…and it arguably doesn’t. This is not a story about living happily ever after as much as it is about the need and the willingness to do what is necessary in order to find the dream of universal humanity. The wonder is that it does so without bitterness or rancor or any common fable about the white man keeping the black man down. Instead it’s all about living as best one can and taking the chances necessary. This is an extremely powerful and unique book. Rarely am I this impressed by a piece of moderately modern fiction, but this deserves my accolades and more. Moreover it is an interesting and arguably correct alternative view of black culture in the early twentieth century. Most of all, it is just a remarkable tale about the cost of living one’s heart. This book is nothing short of amazing.