{"id":33766,"date":"2018-12-26T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-26T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=33766"},"modified":"2018-12-20T15:38:50","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T21:38:50","slug":"the-great-believers-by-rebecca-makkai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/the-great-believers-by-rebecca-makkai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0is one the New York Time’s<\/em>\u00a010 Best Books of 2018.\u00a0Recently, I heard speak Makkai when she\u00a0gave a reading\u00a0at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City.<\/p>\n

Her novel explores a\u00a0time in Chicago’s history\u00a0that is little documented, according to the author. \u00a0A native of Chicago, she spoke of the difficulty of finding primary and secondary sources about the AIDS crisis in her hometown. New York and San Francisco were much more likely to be\u00a0 the subjects and settings of the print and film record of the time. So, of necessity,\u00a0\u00a0she ended up interviewing survivors, healthcare workers,\u00a0caregivers, residents of Boystown,\u00a0as well as doing other research for several years. She attributes the emotional resonance of the book to the fact that she was forced to seek out and talk to people, getting the telling detail and anecdote, rather than just reading about the crisis.<\/p>\n

The book’s thread is Fiona, the sister of an early victim of AIDS – before\u00a0it even had a name.\u00a0As a young girl, she\u00a0appears in both the\u00a0eighties portion of the book as well as\u00a0the sections\u00a0dealing with the\u00a0more immediate past. These chapters are set in 2015\u00a0when\u00a0Fiona goes to Paris to try to connect with an estranged\u00a0daughter, now involved in a cult. Makkai weaves Fiona through the lives of the principal characters of the book; for example, when she’s in Paris, Fiona stays with\u00a0a now-famous photographer who chronicled the early days of the AIDS epidemic.<\/p>\n

I found the chapters set in the eighties by far the most compelling. The main character here is Yale Tishman, who is a development director for an art gallery. His personal story\u00a0is\u00a0shadowed by\u00a0 the fear he feels about every cough or\u00a0fever\u00a0– every\u00a0possible sign of illness.\u00a0 He and his friends try to deal with the mysterious and little understood disease in different ways. Told from Yale’s point of view, you get a small inkling of the paranoia and confusion of the time.<\/p>\n

Because Yale is involved in obtaining an art collection owned by an expat living in \u00a0Paris of the\u00a0twenties, the novel finds parallels with\u00a0that time and place. The book’s title refers to a line by F. Scott Fitzgerald about the generation that was decimated by World War I and the flu epidemic that followed. After this time period, artists and others who didn’t necessarily fit into mainstream society gravitated to Paris of the twenties:\u00a0 \u201cWe were the great believers. <\/em>I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved\u2014and who now walk the long stormy summer.\u201d –\u00a0<\/em>F. Scott Fitzgerald, \u201cMy Generation\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers\u00a0\u00a0is one the New York Time’s\u00a010 Best Books of 2018.\u00a0Recently, I heard speak Makkai when she\u00a0gave a reading\u00a0at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City. Her novel explores a\u00a0time in Chicago’s history\u00a0that is little documented, according to the author. \u00a0A native of Chicago, she spoke[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[265,399,1140],"class_list":["post-33766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference","tag-aids","tag-chicago","tag-paris"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-8MC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33766"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33866,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33766\/revisions\/33866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}