Scarica Gun Island - riassunto e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! AMITAV GOSH “ GUN ISLAND” 1. PLOT Deen, a New York-based antiquarian book dealer, who in one of his trips to Calcutta (Kolkata) had the privilege to meet and talk to one of his relatives, about the Bengali folk and the myth of Gun Merchant and the goddess of snakes, Manama Devi. After a talk with Piya, an old lady who studies and monitors dolphins, Deen started a trip to the Sundarbans, the (disappearing) wetlands situated between India and Bangladesh, in search of a shrine and the truth behind the myth. This journey sets off a chain of other characters in the novel and brings in Piya, but also Tipu, a slippery young man who teaches Deen about the main facts of the legend; but also the earnest Rafi who goes from the Sundarbans to Venice via a convoluted, dangerous route taken by migrants today, and Cinta, the glamorous Italian academic, whose faith and insight glimmer through the book. 2. FOCUS ON CLIMATE CHANGE In the background of this novel, there are the most notable themes that the author usually refers to, starting from the theme of memory, to the one of the inexplicable, and last but not at least the ecology. Climate change, present and past, is the glue in this novel, sticking together different geographies and histories around the world, but in particular the Sundarbans and Venice. Both locations are threatened by the rising seas as a result of global heating, leading to premonitions of catastrophes that were also written by modernist literature whose frame was people's life in the 20th Century, except when the wars started. “Gun Island” is not a traditional novel, in fact as we could notice the plot, seen as a continuum of chronological events, is even more important than characters and their actions. The catastrophic phenomena that during the past were exceptional, are now the new normality for Earth and the inhabitants. As we know, history is repeating itself, with all its changes caused by the ice-age of the seventeenth century, recognised today as an outcome of climate change too, that are recalled, in the form of the coded legend of Bonduki Saudagar aka the Gun Merchant, and then echoed in the form of migration. The author Ghosh ties in the global movement of refugees in search of new lifestyle and livelihoods as the survival in their original lands becomes impossible, with climate change, and he underlines also these two, now daily, phenomena being effect and cause. The author in his novel, uses also fiction as his vehicle, and he conveys this world-view through events in the lives of the four main characters. As Suspriya Chauduri wrote in her article [1], Deen, Rafi and Tipu's destinies intersect themselves in the grid of cross national migrations, one of the most notable problems of nowadays: this situation of change have created a new human living being. This number of immigrants, in this case ecological immigrants, is going to increase in the future, if we don't do something concrete. Then, Piya is at the hand to rescue some beloved of her beached Orcaella, and in the meantime some trafficked immigrants from Bangladesh are arriving in the same place in Italy. In my opinion this passage is a sort of reminder: the beached Orcaella is a living being which had lost its life due to natural changes, caused by the human footprint. There's a story of a 2-years-old baby, Alan Kurdî who lost his life and was found “beached “ on the Turkish beach : he was one of the ecological immigrants who died after a long trip in search of a new life, because of his unlivable conditions of his country.
