Leaves of the Banyan Tree
by Albert Wendt
Three generations of Samoa. Progress destroys what it promises to build.
For you if
you want to understand how Western modernity arrived in the Pacific and what it cost the families it found there
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Three generations of a Samoan family across the 20th century — the patriarch Tauilopepe who builds wealth by abandoning everything traditional, his son who falls apart under the weight of his father's ambitions, his grandson who tries to find a way through. Wendt is the father of Pacific literature in English and this is his most ambitious novel — a dispatch from inside the specific Pacific experience of colonialism, Christianity, and modernity arriving simultaneously and the generations it takes for a family to process that collision. The most important Samoan novel in English.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Pacific
- Voice
- Written by a Pacific author
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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