INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national bestseller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama . Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, ...
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national bestseller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama . Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.
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Add this copy of Transcendent Kingdom to cart. $12.99, very good condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2021 by Anchor Canada.
The very title of Yaa Gysai's novel promises an exploration of religious themes. Early in the book, the narrator, Gifty, explains how she first became interested in science and in religion through her fourth grade science teacher. Her biology teacher who was a believing Christian had observed: "I think we're made out of stardust, and God made the stars." Her teacher also said: "The truth is we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears." Gifty expands upon her early teacher's difficult sayings throughout her life, particularly when she is a sixth year PhD candidate at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying the brains of mice and the role of their neural circuits in reward-seeking behavior.
Gifty is indeed intellectually gifted, having been raised in Huntsville, Alabama by a poor, uneducated mother from Ghana and gone on to graduate from Harvard, earn her PhD from Stanford, and become the head of a prestigious laboratory in Princeton. She thinks often of the mystery of spirit and brain and of the unique ability of humans to transcend various mechanistic limitations:
"Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who make up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I never would fully know."
Gifty's reflections on science, religion, and God are at the heart of Gyasi's novel. The book insightfully presents many questions which trouble philosophically-oriented people about the relationship between the brain and the mind, and human intentionality. It also shows the continued influence on Gifty of the Evangelical Christian religion of her childhood, and her attempt to retain what was valuable in it while moving on to her own life.
The questions Gifty raises are embedded in her own experiences. Her telling of her story moves back and forth in short chapters from her life in the laboratory in Stanford, to her apartment which she shares with her aged mother, back to her early childhood in Alabama, and to her undergraduate years at Harvard. In some ways, it is a cluttered story. Gifty's focus is on her depressed mother who is largely bedridden and on her brother, Nana, seven years her senior, who was an athlete of promise before becoming an addict and dying of a heroin overdose. Nana's story is told in detail in the book, and his death leaves Gifty shattered. It deprives her of the belief in the Evangelical God and is at least a factor in Gifty's demanding career choice.
Gifty shares her experiences on many things, including prejudice against her and her family in Alabama, the difficulties of poor, immigrant life, experiences of sexual discrimination, coming to terms with her own sexuality, and experiences of religious discrimination at Harvard based upon her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Some of this material weakens the thread of her story. With all of her own particularized experiences, I thought the strength of the book was on its examination of the pervasive character of both spirituality and science and of the efforts of Gifty to understand and come to terms with them and with herself.
The book moves slowly at times. Gyasi has done her research and describes in detail the life of a graduate student in the demanding field of neuroscience. With its various subthemes, "Transcendent Kingdom" is eloquent in its discussion of religious themes and will probably be of most interest to those readers with a passion for religious questions.
Robin Friedman
Andrea
Jan 24, 2021
I was blown away
"What problems do we solve by identifying problems circling them?"
Anyone who has had addiction touch their lives has had that question in some form be a part of the answer they live. Gifty, her brother Nana, her mother and father all deal, or not deal, with life in "the West". After her brother's overdose, her mother retreats and Gifty hides, searching for answers: G-d? Science? Relationships, or lack thereof?
I kept hoping that all the hype that had put it on my "wish list" would be true, and it was. I love the Gifty character. She really is a gift. And coming from an addicted family, it was easy to follow the story even with the skewed timeline. The old story about Pandora's Box has been wandering through my brain as I have read this; because, at the bottom of this story truly hope still survives. Highly Recommended 5/5
[disclaimer: I received this book from an outside source and voluntarily chose to read and review it]
