Homeland Elegies
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 First edition | |
| Author | Ayad Akhtar |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date | September 15, 2020 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 343 pages |
| ISBN | 978-0316496421 |
Homeland Elegies is a novel by author Ayad Akhtar.
The book is fiction, though written to resemble a memoir.[1] It includes some autobiographical elements; the protagonist shares the name, background, and career of the author.[1] Homeland Elegies has been referred to as autofiction.[2] Akhtar has spoken about wanting the effect of the novel to be like scrolling through social media: "It's essay. It's memoir. It's fiction. It just had to be seamless, in the way that a platform like Instagram is seamless. And one of the pivotal dimensions of that content is the staging and curation of the self."[3] He adds that crafting the book in the first person, and calling the narrator "Ayad Akhtar" allows him "to have a relationship to the reader that felt more immediate than fiction. But I only know how to write fiction ... I wouldn't have known how to write a memoir."[4]
The idea for writing Homeland Elegies came to Akhtar while he was in Rome, reading Giacomo Leopardi's Canti. The first poem "To Italy" inspired him to write a novel about America, that "seemed on the verge of splitting apart".[3] Homeland Elegies begins with "An Overture to America" and then is divided into eight sections, followed by a coda entitled "Free Speech". Akhtar modeled sections off of different Tolstoy novellas: "V. Riaz; or the Merchant of Death" off of Hadji Murad; "VI. Of Love and Death" off of The Kreutzer Sonata; and "VIII. Langford v. Reliant; or, How My Father's American Story Ends" off of The Death of Ivan Ilych.[3]
The book comments on the recent political and financial history of the United States[5] including the election of Donald Trump, the September 11 attacks, and America's debt-fueled economy.[6]