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The Hired Man
Apr. 24th, 2021 07:17 amAn English woman buys a run-down house in Croatia and a man who lives nearby spends the summer helping them restore it. Sounds like the setup for a classic romance story. But The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna is a very different beast, exploring the effects of a horrific shared history on a small rural community.
Laura is oblivious to the history and culture of Gost, and unconcerned by the impact the arrival of her family has on the town. Duro is trapped by that same history, reliving it through his first person narration, and unable to move on from the atrocities he has both seen and perpetrated.
It's a complex book, building up pieces of the backstory gradually via muddled timelines. The use of the present tense for the sections in the past denotes how they are still so fresh in Duro's mind that he is forced to live them over again every day.
There are moments of sweetness and domesticity in his interactions with Laura and her teenage children, but the sense of the heaviness and dread of what is to be revealed is never far away.
I was enthralled throughout - masterful storytelling.
Laura is oblivious to the history and culture of Gost, and unconcerned by the impact the arrival of her family has on the town. Duro is trapped by that same history, reliving it through his first person narration, and unable to move on from the atrocities he has both seen and perpetrated.
It's a complex book, building up pieces of the backstory gradually via muddled timelines. The use of the present tense for the sections in the past denotes how they are still so fresh in Duro's mind that he is forced to live them over again every day.
There are moments of sweetness and domesticity in his interactions with Laura and her teenage children, but the sense of the heaviness and dread of what is to be revealed is never far away.
I was enthralled throughout - masterful storytelling.
