“This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but at a certain point, science fail. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrust ful of science, who thought at it as a cunning trick to nod them of their faith, and 1 have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must neccessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became,, for me valuable ways of seeing but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfied in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.”
p.183
Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is a great, intense novel about family, loss, addiction, religion and bioscience. It’s the kind of novel that is so dense and intense that it took me some time to finish it – it’s not something I could easily fly through. A slim novel with a great impact – just like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, but also quite different, which is incredibly impressive.
CLARITY AND CHAOS 