Blue Sky Green Grass

Description

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me. This devastating and merciless sentence is the beating heart of the conflict within Blue Sky Green Grass. This dynamic fictional novel captures the totality of the Portuguese Diaspora by exploring the traumatic and anguished dispersion of a single Azorean family throughout the world. The reader is quickly introduced to the protagonist Pedro De Conceicao, a young man who appears desperate, somewhat obsessed, with wanting to know the origins of his paternal family’s scattering. He aches to know why so many of his immediate family seem so unable, or incapable, of disentangling themselves from the past tragedy, some committed sin, that refuses to relinquish its persistent hold on his strewn tribe. Pedro suspects that this generational curse has something to do with his paternal grandmother, Sofia, who, for reasons that he hopes to discover, was banished from her island home of Pico by a community and, more painfully, by a husband who suspected her of witchcraft and unfaithfulness. Sofia, like her namesake the female divinity of Gnostic belief who experiences the archetypal fall, suffers unbearably because of a calamitous transgression. Her single act of infidelity proves catastrophic and her omnipotent husband reacts like an affronted god. Consequently, she must endure a merciless fate, a pitiless moira. She is cast far and away from her home, her husband and most of her children. Her suffering is unrelenting and made grievously worse by the tribulations that seem to be her children’s inheritance—the legacy that rabidly waits to claim Pedro until his epiphany, until he recognizes that his father Manuel has paid his family’s penance with his life. This epiphany takes place during the final chapter. Pedro awakens to a new day while vacationing in his family’s house on Faial. His father is finally, after an exile of twenty years, returning to his paradise island of Pico. Happiness reigns supreme despite the previous night’s meeting between Pedro and Ildabao, the hateful product of Sofia’s ancient affair with Demiurgio. During the encounter, Pedro angrily refuses to believe Ildabao’s accusations and thwarts the aging man’s malicious plans. With the new day and with his new understanding, Pedro watches the resurrected Manuel reclaim his island garden. Finally, after visiting the dilapidated shack that used to be his father’s home, Pedro recognizes once and for all the omnipotence of his father and his own salvation. He is free. The generational curse is finally broken. All is well. Since there exists a painfully unspoken disconnect between Pedro’s present and his paternal family’s past, Blue Sky Green Grass does not follow a linear pattern. Instead, it is written as a series of twelve stories, each from the perspective of a De Conceicao family member. A short, punctuating vignette dealing specifically with an event from Pedro’s life precedes each story. The stories, of course, are all interconnected in that they deal with and refer to the same family members and their shared past and present misfortunate. Rather than being chronological, the stories ebb backwards and forwards in the current of time, encompassing the Azores of the 1930’s, Toronto in the 1990’s and all years in between. Each one unfolds within the greater context of the family’s history, reflecting the muddled manner in which Pedro contemplates his family’s past while trying to make sense of it in his present. Read more

Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more

Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 20, 2022

Edition ‏ : ‎ 1st

Language ‏ : ‎ English

File size ‏ : ‎ 1.6 MB

Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported

Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled

X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled