a feather on the breath of god

This book...it's just wow. Weike recommended this book to me in January. I think the first chapter was the hardest to get through. I thought it was basically another version of The Woman Warrior, which, to be honest, I hated. I finished the rest of this book on subway rides home - and I'm glad that it captivated me, but also did not make me miss a single station (*cough Yuval Noah Harari *cough).

Feather is divided into four sections: Chang, Christa, A Feather on the Breath of God, and Immigrant Love. I think my favorites were parts three and four. The first two parts are about Nunez's father and mother, respectively. Her father is ethnically Chinese but bears a Portuguese surname, having been born in Colon, Panama. Her mother is a proud German raised under Nazi Germany. Feather is about Nunez's foray into ballet. Immigrant Love is about her torrid affair with an Odessan named Vamid. 

Nunez's writing is simple and unpretentious. It's not like the poetic, elaborate stuff that Ocean Vuong writes, which can get sickening pretty quickly. Her words are sharp. I am fascinated by immigrant writers who are painfully self-aware that every sentence they write puts them further away from their families. Love, for immigrants, messy and fraught with tension, because in some way, every family is broken. The way that Nunez manages to wrap that "thick" love into beautiful narratives amazes me. 

“How in God’s name did I get here?” she would ask, her head in her hands, truly bewildered; as if she had blown here like a feather...At her lowest she would say, “I feel like a bug crushed under someone’s heel.” I can't wait to read Kundera. :)