Day #6 of the 30 Day Book Challenge

[shadowkat]

The prompt is A book published by someone under 30 . [It was either that or a book published this year (note not read this year - published this year.)]

You can do either one I don't care.

Mine?

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu. The novel was published in 2012, when the author was 25 years of age.

The Author:
Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and grew up in the Galilee. She served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years. She graduated from Harvard in 2011. Her debut novel has been published or will soon be published in 23 countries. It has been longlisted for the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and selected as one of the ten best fiction titles of 2012 by the Wall Street Journal. She is the youngest recipient ever of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 award. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, Dazed and Confused, the Guardian and NPR.Com. She lives in Israel.

Synopsis of the book:

Yael, Avishag, and Lea grow up together in a tiny, dusty Israeli village, attending a high school made up of caravan classrooms, passing notes to each other to alleviate the universal boredom of teenage life. When they are conscripted into the army, their lives change in unpredictable ways, influencing the women they become and the friendship that they struggle to sustain. Yael trains marksmen and flirts with boys. Avishag stands guard, watching refugees throw themselves at barbed-wire fences. Lea, posted at a checkpoint, imagines the stories behind the familiar faces that pass by her day after day. They gossip about boys and whisper of an ever more violent world just beyond view. They drill, constantly, for a moment that may never come. They live inside that single, intense second just before danger erupts.
In a relentlessly energetic and arresting voice marked by humor and fierce intelligence, Shani Boianjiu creates an unforgettably intense world, capturing that unique time in a young woman's life when a single moment can change everything.

The book gives an inside account of what it is to be constantly at war, to be in constant conflict. The boredom and the devastation of it. It haunted me long after I read it in 2013.

Comments

[cactuswatcher]

A Hero of Our Times by Mikhail Lermontov (Герой нашего времени 1839, 1840)

Lermontov is my favorite poet. A Hero of Our Times was his only novel and something a critique of the Romanticism (the source of brooding heroes and anti-heroes like Angel) that was popular in his day. Unfortunately he fell victim to the same Romantic ideals, being killed in a pointless duel before he was 27. The clip is his vision from the book of such a duel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Raf8_VJX0&t

[shadowkat]

I'm not sure I agree that anti-heroes fit with Romanticism - I think you may be confusing them with classical heroes - who also brood. But aren't really anti-heroes.
Whedon saw Angel as a classical hero, but he was written by Tim Minear, David Fury, and David Greenwalt as a noir hero. Whedon doesn't seem to understand the noir genre that well - which I've always find highly amusing.

Noir came after the Romantic period - it's kind of post-modern or a reaction against romanticism, along with existentialism.

But otherwise interesting selection.

[wendelah1]

The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath, published in 1960. She was 28.

I put your selection on my "want to read" list. It sounds good.

[shadowkat]

Oh, I adore Sylvia Plath. I devoured her poems and read The Bell Jar in college.

[wendelah1]

Me, too. I read The Bell Jar when I was around 20, I think, and her poems, as well. I've reread her poetry but not the novel.

[shadowkat]

Not sure I could re-read the novel - it was painful. Or so, I remember.