Transcendent Kingdom
When’s the last time you started a book in one place and finished it in another? I don’t mean like the couch and then your bed; more like two totally different geographic locations. Or maybe I should just say “settings” because perhaps the act of reading a book can be like its own story in and of itself.
Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is about a young woman trying to reconcile the religious faith she was raised in with her life as a scientist. Religion, science, and all that. Adding to protagonist Gifty’s angst and sorrow is the specter of her older brother, who dies of a heroin overdose when he is in high school.
The book shifts between Gifty’s childhood in Alabama, her time as a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, and a tiny bit in Ghana, where both of her parents are from (and to where her father eventually returns permanently). As someone who has moved a fair amount, including internationally, I kept coming back to something I think about frequently: Are we “the same” no matter where we are? How do our settings influence our personalities, our values, our relationships?
Here’s an old blog post about The Plains by Gerald Murnane. In it, I explored the idea of how landscapes can affect *populations* but I do wonder what it means *individually* to float from one locale to another and to keep yourself fully “intact.” Or are humans just completely malleable, no matter how hard we try not to be?
{Transcendent Kingdom: Started in Sudbury, MA and finished in Charlotte, NC.}
originally published on instagram