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So Far Back
Pam Durban. Picador USA: 2001 (paperback). ISBN: 0312283474. 259 pages.
Guide not available
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Durban’s provocative novel gives us an amazing perspective on how family members from the past can influence our everyday lives today. Through the 1837 diary of Eliza Hilliard, we learn about the Hilliards—a venerable Charleston clan whose family tree stretches back 250 years. Past and present and black and white clash and dance back and forth as Louisa (the last of the family and the discoverer of Eliza’s journal) struggles to understand how her own family could have justified slavery and how its slaves could have survived. In the way this haunting story examines America’s deepest collective wound, it bears some resemblance to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (and, like Beloved, it’s beautiful and wrenching at the same time). While there’s lots to think about and lots to talk about, Durban tells the story without hitting us over the head with a political agenda, so what shines through are the all-too-human moments in some of the biggest and darkest events that shaped our nation.
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