Musings on Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

"Are we going to be okay?"

"What's the point of it all?"

This novel is a quiet yet deeply moving narrative that explores the limits of faith and science, in a fight for survival, a quest to find hope through tragedy. There's a lurking shadow of despair that lingers throughout this novel, and to me this resembled the shadow of fear and uncertainty so many of us felt every single day this year.

What i found most striking about this novel was its unassuming memoir writing style. This isn't a sensational page turner. There were no grandiose displays of grief, loud calls to injustice, or dramatic stories of poverty and violence - yet it's hard to walk away from this book without feeling shook, without feeling like you just experienced the intimate corners of the character's life - the emotions you'd feel as if Gifty's pain, her mother's depression, or her brother's addiction, were your own.

I also felt challenged on my own unconscious perceptions about depression, faith, and addiction, insecurities in a world of science as woman of color, and a woman of faith. Gifty's journey to make sense of it all - felt like my journey. It's hard to walk away unchanged after reading this book. Gyasi finds a way to share a young character's contemplations on extraordinary circumstances, in a way that feels ordinary yet showing literary flair.

See reviews by other readers here. Here are my favorite quotes from the book:

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

"What's the point of all this? Is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion". When the answer to this question is 'Because God deemed it so ' we might feel comforted, but what if the answer to this question is 'I don't know' or worse still 'Nothing'"

"I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but brazing brilliance would be enough to prove it"

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”

“I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.”

“I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can't account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for 'us' to feel and think, then what is 'us'? Do you believe in souls? I was breathless.”

“But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?”