Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Mais um livro que lemos no Clube do Livro da Mamilândia.
Zente, que delícia de livro. Que história fantástica, a começar pela ambientação toda diferente. A história se passa na Nigéria e tem várias palavras em línguas locais, um monte de frutas e comidas que desconhecemos (querendo, cê perde horas na Wikipedia pesquisando a culinária local), a descrição dela torna tudo muito palpável e você quase sente o cheiro daquele pedaço da África através das páginas. A história é uma delícia, é um coming of age com o toque de uma autora fantástica que vem de um país sobre o qual sabemos muito pouco.
Quem adivinhar quem é minha personagem preferida do livro ganha um beijo no próximo Pistolando ;)
“She walked fast, like one who knew just where she was going and what she was going to do there. And she spoke the way she walked, as if to get as many words out of her mouth as she could in the shortest time.
‘Welcome, Aunty, nno,’ I said, rising to hug her.
She did not give me the usual brief side hug. She clasped me in her arms and held me tightly against the softness of her body. The wide lapels of her blue, A-line dress smelled of lavender.
‘Kambili, kedu?’ A wide smile stretched her dark-complected face, revealing a gap between her front teeth.
‘I’m fine, Aunty.’
‘You have grown so much. Look at you, look at you.’ She reached out and pulled my left breast. ‘Look how fast these are growing!’
I looked away and inhaled deeply so that I would not start to stutter. I did not know how to handle that kind of playfulness.
‘Where is Jaja?’ she asked.
‘He’s asleep. He has a headache.’
‘A headache three days to Christmas? No way. I will wake him up and cure that headache.'”
Runaway World (Anthony Giddens)
Esse eu li pra pós, mas confesso que não gostei muuuito não. Sublinhei alguns bons insights, mas achei a leitura meio chatinha no geral.
At first sight, the concept of risk might seem to have no spcific relevance to our times, as compared to previous ages. After all, haven’t people always had to face their fair share of risks? Life for the majority in the European Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and short – as it is for many in poorer areas of the world now.
But here we come across something really interesting. Apart from some marginal contexts, in the Middle Ages there was no concept of risk. Nor, so far as I have been able to find out, was there in most other traditional cultures. The idea of risk appears to have taken hold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was first coined by Western explorers as they set off on their voyages across the world. The word ‘risk’ seems to hav come into English through Spanish or Portuguese, where it was used to refer to sailing into unchartered waters. Originally, in other words, it had an orientation to space. Later, it became transferred to time, as used in banking and investment, to mean calculation of the probable consequences of investment decisions for borrowrs and lenders. It subsequently came to refer to a wide range of other situations of uncertainty.
The notion of risk, I should point out, is inseparable from the ideas of probability and uncertainty. A person can’t be said to be running a risk where an outcome is 100 per cent certain.
There is an old joke that makes this point rather neatly. A man jumps from the top of a hundred-storey skyscraper. As he passes each floor, on his way down, the people inside hear him saying: ‘so far so good’, ‘so far so good’, ‘so far so good’… He acts as though he is making a risk calculation, but the outcome is in fact determined.
Traditional cultures didn’t have a concept of risk because they didn’t need one. Risk isn’t the same as hazard or danger. Risk refers to hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities. It comes into wide usage only in a society that is future oriented – which sees the future precisely as a territory to be conquered or colonised. Risk presumes a society that actively tries to break away from its past – the prime characteristic, indeed, of modern industrial civilisation.