Reviews tagging 'Blood'

L'Africain du Groenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

6 reviews

jaan's review against another edition

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emotional informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

3.75

VERY interesting. For me, Kpomassie’s wit and storytelling capability really shine when he is documenting his experience learning and acclimating to Inuit diet and hunting practices; and when he is describing Greenland’s natural landscape, including the arctic days and nights, the sea, the ice, and the aurora borealis.

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morebedsidebooks's review against another edition

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slow-paced

2.0

 
Every time G. had been drinking too much, his wife shunned him and the sickening smell of drink and tobacco he gave off. She would go and sleep with her children at the other end of the platform. G. lay on his back with bleary eyes and kept calling out, “N., come here — I’m waiting!” “Leave me alone!” she retorted in a sharp, shrill voice. The next hour witnessed an endless series of appeals followed invariably by refusals. Finally, in his absolute determination for sexual relief, G. would step across his sleepless children to get at his wife. She had her own strange method of putting up greater resistance, which involved hugging one of her sons — always the same eight-year-old boy — tight against herself. Protecting his mother by holding her close in his arms, the howling, weeping child would fight off his drunken father with tremendous kicks in the face which sometimes made his father’s nose bleed. Soon the man would fall back out of breath, but he quickly returned to the attack amid shrieks and tears from all the children. This unbelievable scene would drag on sometimes till morning, with momentary pauses and savage resumptions. The little boy in question had once announced that some day he would kill his father, because he was making life a torture for his mother.

 
Yet Kpomassie, a grown man present, gives no indication, unless being a witness is all of it, of his own course of action faced with such a situation. 

See my blog for an in-depth review.

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jasschumacher's review against another edition

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adventurous informative medium-paced

3.0

What made me read a book about a Togolese man travelling to Greenland? Perhaps I also have Fernweh. I'm glad I do and just as glad to have read this book. This is an interesting and impactful personal account of two cultures meeting for the first time.

"I was now convinced that I was living among people no different from any other men on this earth [...]." (pg. 208)

"[...] I had never missed my native Africa, for the poetry of movement of the ice froze up the muggy heat of my native tropics. I had adapted so well to Greenland that I believed nothing could stop me spending the rest of my days there." (pg. 297)

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seanamcphie's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0


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katiewhocanread's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging slow-paced

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literaryrevisited's review against another edition

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adventurous inspiring medium-paced

4.75


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