Customer Reviews

Gravity of Sunlight

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is simply a beautiful book with well developed characters, scene setting that makes you want to hop a jet to Africa, real emotion, and a wonderful story of love and longing, betrayal, adventure and everyday life. I love this book! With apologies to Barbara Kingsolver, it's similar in that it's set in Africa, it's about a minster, his wife and their children and their time in that strangely intoxicating country, but it's so much more readable than Kingsolver whom I never finished. One of the most interesting aspects of Rosa Shand's novel is the beginning paragraph of each chapter in which she sets a scene or merely ponders on something unrelated to the action. These pieces are so very poetic in themselves. And then there's the story -- Agnes, who many women will relate to, who cannot "will herself" to love her unconnected husband, fantasizes about a man who she becomes inevitably bound with. But enough of that, read it yourself, you won't regret it. (And who in their right mind would call this book racist? The "reviewer" clearly missed the point if he/she even read beyond the first chapter...) Rosa Shand, please write more!

For those who like fine, poetic writing this novel fills the bill. In some ways I would compare it to The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - as it is set against a political upheaval in Africa and deals with Americans trying to cope in a foreign land. Another parallel is the religious connection - Shand tells the story of Agnes who is married (sadly) to a Lutheran deacon and teacher who is harsh and unromantic. Agnes lives in a separate world and becomes involved in an affair with a Polish professor and seems rather oblivious to the political upheaval going on all around her. A fine, involving read.

The Gravity of Sunlight by Rosa Shand is an extraordinary and sensuous novel equally brilliant in its creation of place (Uganda in the 1970's during Amin's rise to power) and its exploration of human desire. Shand's depth of image in the externals of Africa -- the smells of wood smoke and gardenias; the musical sounds in the "buzz and whir" of insects or antiphonal native song floating through the "rustling of mango leaves;" and the sights of "thick green," "dusty glitter," and flopping banana leaves -- become inseparable from the internal soul. Equally, Shand's portrayal of characters through Agnes's sensitive and urgent consciousness, as when she sees Wulf during the early stages of her attraction to him,"a figure in a gleaming pure-white jacket, a man in the dark at the bottom of her drive" deeply penetrate not only Agnes's soul but our own interior selves.

Agnes is a woman who craves love and attachment to all living things. Uganda, teeming with aliveness, paradoxically both nourishes her and fosters her restlessness and need for fulfillment. So real is the experience of this book that I felt a tightening in my own chest, becoming connected to Agnes's joy, pain, and ultimately her confusion and disorder over the mystery of love and how it perches in one's own heart.

This novel is so pretty, so elegant, so poetic. The beauty of the language and the depth of the love story set against the hideous ugliness of Idi Amin's reign is a marvel. The story is sensual and erotic, the prose so lovely that you feel Africa. The heat, the mosquitoes, the sultry evenings. A lyrical novel that's a delight to read.

Beautiful and flowing. Rare. Shand is a masterful writer. She captures the universalities of tensions in marriage, yet draws vivid pictures of the disappearing mixtures of subcultures in a Uganda in turmoil a generation ago. The lessons are subtle and still relevant.

Like her character, Prudence, Rosa Shand paints portraits. Not only of the African landscape, but also the landscape of the mind. By staying "locked" in the eyes and ears of Agnes, Shand conveys a true, subjective experience of a woman living her life in Amin's Uganda. But The Gravity of Sunlight is not about politics or Africa. It is about Agnes. About her unfulfilling marriage. And the sublimation of her extramarital, interracial desire.

A reader above calls this book racist. Baloney. This book is about Agnes, not the apotheosis of Africans, and the Africans whom Agnes does meet are in no way "demonized." Sadly, this critic's predilection to see racism will distort anything he reads. Furthermore, false accusations like his damage good people and impair our ability to detect real racism when it does occur.

Rosa Shand's first book is filled with simple but beautiful language, description of the physical and the emotional experience of living in Uganda during the time right before and during Idi Amin's political coup. As the story unfolds, Shand manages to very gently capture the very complicated relationships between husband and wife, wife and lover, amidst the rhythms of life in a foreign land, all which help make this a very successful debut novel.

Agnes is our narrator, and she, her husband John and their young children have moved to Uganda. John is a professor teaching at the college; Agnes teaches part-time at the lower school. Each of them is lost in their respective idealisms, and their relationship is suffering for it, as they don't seem to have an intimate connection on any real level. Agnes, who is always searching to fulfill what she feels is a lack of meaningful attachment to her husband, meets Wulf, who is also teaching at the university, and is a friend of her husband's, they embark on a tentative relationship.

What works about this novel, is that this affair, in all its various stages and with all its various consequences, is written in a way that echoes the lifestyle and the political uncertainties of the country. Shand weaves Agnes' story with an intimate look at a society very different from Agnes'and our own, and these dual storylines are revealed piece by piece to the reader as the circumstances of Agnes' daily life allows. She uses deceptively simple language to tell a story of many layers, each one as lush and as precarious as the next. A fine book to curl up with on a wintry weekend, which is about how long it will take to read.

In The Gravity of Sunlight, Rosa Shand explores one woman's desires for a fulfilled life beyond her marriage and motherhood. Set in Africa in the 1970s, The Gravity of Sunlight provides a look into the heart of an American woman who comes to terms with her own desires. Agnes remains true to her self while feeling torn between her wanting to do what is right and what will allow her to best express her needs. She chooses the latter. She does this at some expense to her family. However, the reader will want to cheer this character on. One cannot help but feel connected to her. Rosa Shand does a beautiful job with this novel. I especially enjoyed the exerpts at the beginning of each chapter. They helped create set the mood and provided me with an insight into the true heart of the novel. On the down side, I did not find the love scenes between Agnes and Wulf to have much substance. They should have maybe been more vivid, not graphic. But more descriptive. They seemed a bit abrupt in the novel and I know there was more to them than that. Overall, I do recommed this book. Both men and women would enjoy it.

I loved this book and recommend it highly--Shand is a beautiful and talented writer whose short stories I've followed in journal and literary magazines for many years.

This book was bursting with amateurish problems that should have been removed by any good editor or omitted by any good writer. The story was tasteless and banal, like eating cream of wheat every day of your life. You could say it was rather without substance. The language, not poetic as some claim, is simply gimicky and distracting. The language pulls away from any forward movement in the novel and makes some passages painful. And I'm not somebody who dislikes language heavy work (as an example, I enjoyed Ulysses' use of language for the most part).

Praises about the love story are in total disregard of the stylistic errors and cheesy genre orientation of this fiction. This is Danielle Steel in a cheap, gimicky disguise. The characters and setting took a back seat to the heavily plot and language. There is not a reason to read this book (which I say of few books), and this is the only book I have thought of jamming into the paper shredder at work.

While reading, I threw the book across the room and refused to read past the half way mark of the book. If you buy this, consider yourself warned.