The Great Believers in Prime Reads

Apr 01, 2021 Darius Irani rated it it was amazing

Shelves: on-libby

The Great Believers is a story of love and companionship, and, of processing grief and the far-reaching effects of loss. It is a celebration of the lives cut too short by AIDS and an acknowledgment of those who survived, lives forever changed, who are now the caretakers of these memories.

I think the following quote from the book captures this beautifully,

Everyone knows how short life is... But no one ever talks about how long it is... Every life is too short, even the long ones, but some people

The Great Believers is a story of love and companionship, and, of processing grief and the far-reaching effects of loss. It is a celebration of the lives cut too short by AIDS and an acknowledgment of those who survived, lives forever changed, who are now the caretakers of these memories.

I think the following quote from the book captures this beautifully,

Everyone knows how short life is... But no one ever talks about how long it is... Every life is too short, even the long ones, but some people's lives are too long as well.

The writing was excellent and the intertwining plot lines were well executed. There were two specific parts of this novel that really made me think. They're not even that significant to the intertwining plot lines, but they challenged my own perspectives:

First, the novel did an excellent job depicting imperfect humans living through the devastating early years of the AIDS crisis. All humans are imperfect. We make mistakes, have emotions, and think irrationally sometimes. We see the world through the eyes of Yale and Fiona, in their respective timelines, yet Makkai challenges us to empathize with the characters in conflict with them.
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Second, the exploration of the parallels between the Lost Generation of the 1910s and the queer lives lost during the 1980s was really interesting. Nora tells Yale of Paris after the war,

Because you’ll understand: It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends. I’d studied next to them for two years. I’d run around with them, doing all the ridiculous things you do when you’re young, I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told Picasso died in the war, you'd understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss. It—you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before.

Nora was a survivor of that generation, when so many of her friends were lost to World War 1 or the Spanish Flu. She became the caretaker of these memories, and no one sees the ghosts all around that she does. I found this particular way of expressing and understanding loss to be quite compassionate.
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