The Radiance
By Ayad Akhtar ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10 "" On some level, somewhere less conscious, I suppose we're probably always just experiencing ourselves. Our anchoring biases, as you put it. The color of our own seeing. We think we're seeing the..."
By Ayad Akhtar
★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10
286 pages
What’s it about?
This work of autofiction imagines an author moving to a remote college town to teach, only to be hit by a car almost immediately. The driver flees the scene, and speculation suggests it was intentional. While the author struggles with the physical and emotional effects of the accident, he is also trying to find his footing as a teacher.
What did it make me think about?
How do all the disparate threads in this story tie together?
Should I read it?
Well.... This is a tough one to review. Ayad Akhtar is an author I admire- and there is much to admire in this book. But for me, the book was all over the place. Some of the storylines were so philosophical and esoteric that I lost the thread of the overall story at times. Although I did really enjoy the Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen idea that is dropped in out of nowhere. This is a cerebral book for sure- even the basketball reference is thought-provoking. I had to go to the dictionary twice just to learn words. Who sees the word "encomia" often? So many of the ideas and references were thought-provoking and distracting at the same time.
That said, some of the storylines really held my interest, and I had no trouble finishing the book once I started it. His experience teaching at a college was beyond belief: "Things had changed, he said, more radically in the past decade than in any other of his forty-year career. The students were unrecognizable to him: rigid, embattled, astonishingly frail." The world of college campuses sounds exceedingly like a minefield. How sad the portrayal of this generation often is. If you are looking for a book to make you think, look no further.
A passage I marked
" On some level, somewhere less conscious, I suppose we're probably always just experiencing ourselves. Our anchoring biases, as you put it. The color of our own seeing. We think we're seeing the world, and we are, to an extent- but what we're really always seeing, more than anything else, is the particular color we put on it."
