Chris Abani writes of a brother, a father, a mother, all dead; of a homeland, long since left; of memories, thick and pungent, like the smoke from herChris Abani writes of a brother, a father, a mother, all dead; of a homeland, long since left; of memories, thick and pungent, like the smoke from herbs wrapped in pages torn from the Bible and smoked, as young boys will do, emulating the men around them.
You tear Psalm 23 from Father's leather-bound Bible, roll it. Silently I recite, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not— You consider the scroll and with the match and flame already licking the edge of the paper, you ask if I think God remembers my name.
Abani, originally from Nigeria and now an English professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, writes with a cadence that is both soothing and reverent, like a hymn. He is a natural storyteller and his images have a solidity and specificity that is both deeply intimate and generously universal.
Everywhere the snow and by a roadside, a blue phone next to a tilting stop sign In the Bible there are 500 verses on prayer, 500 verses on faith, 2,000 verses on money and possessions, 1,214 violent or cruel verses, a liturgical math, Quran means that which is read.
This collection is a gracious meditation on grief and forgiveness, on faith and memory, and change. Novelist, poet, essayist Chris Abani is one of our greatest contemporary writers.
Love is a figure of speech, but also a thing real as a stone baking in the relentless sun....more
After her sweeping multi-generational debut, Homecoming, Yaa Gyasi turns to the immediate and intimate with Transcendent Kingdom (it suddenly strikes After her sweeping multi-generational debut, Homecoming, Yaa Gyasi turns to the immediate and intimate with Transcendent Kingdom (it suddenly strikes me how juxtaposed in theme these two titles are-they could easily be swapped one for the other and fit). Transcendent Kingdom explores multiple layers of cultural and societal isolation: of being Black and an immigrant in America, of being a woman in STEM/academe, the stigmas of mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, hailing from the South, even evangelical Christianity. The novel's central character, Gifty, walls herself off from a world that defines her and her family in bullet points, categorizing them with derision and skepticism.
Gifty, in the final year of her doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford University, is studying the neural receptors of mice in order to understand reckless reward-seeking behaviors that often result in pain and punishment. The brilliant young woman, daughter of Ghanian immigrants, raised in Huntsville, Alabama with her brother, Nana, is seeking more than data for her dissertation. Nana, a promising high school athlete, died of a heroin overdose after a sprained ankle brought OxyContin crashing into his life. And her mother, who arrived from Ghana with an infant son and reluctant husband some two decades earlier, suffers crippling episodes of severe depression. Gifty, a pious child desperate to please and appease, escapes her family's misery through her academic prowess but doesn't escape being miserable.
The novel moves in non-linear fashion from Gifty's present, where her mother lies nearly immobile with depression in Gifty's small Palo Alto student apartment, to her childhood in Alabama where she exists awkwardly as one of the few Black children in her school and the only Black child in the evangelical church her mother chooses to attend. Her father flees for Ghana when Gifty is just a little girl; she sees him only once more the summer she turns eleven. She is sent to Ghana to spend time with her aunt after her mother tries to commit suicide in the aftermath of Nana's overdose. Gifty's world is one of Limbo, an arm's length from both places that might claim her: Africa and America. Neither accepts her, so Gifty retreats into her journal until she escapes into the ivory towers of an elite education.
Despite the heavy turns of this family's life, of Gifty's isolation and introversion, the stuttering attempts at love and friendship, there is a lightness and hope to the narrative and in Gyasi's beautiful, clear, generous prose that is simply irrepressible. Good people find Gifty and mentor her through her stages of self-acceptance. Few stay around- falling away naturally as college friends, early colleagues, short-term lovers do- but they have their effect all the same and Gifty learns to navigate her wounds. She understands that the world has little room for Black men except to feed off their athletic success, and she realizes early that she "would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”
Quietly poignant and deeply moving, this lovely novel offers redemption even as it splits the heart open. Highly recommended....more
Achingly beautiful and bewildering, Travel Light, Move Fast is the fourth of Alexandra Fuller's memoirs of her fascinating, roughly-hewn and tragic faAchingly beautiful and bewildering, Travel Light, Move Fast is the fourth of Alexandra Fuller's memoirs of her fascinating, roughly-hewn and tragic family. This most recent volume is a portrait of her father, Tim, who at the story's opening lies dying in a Budapest hospital. Fuller leaves her Wyoming homestead to join her mother in this ancient, sweltering city on the Danube that is suddenly teeming with Syrian refugees. From this jolting perspective, the author returns us to the landlocked south central African nation of Zambia, where her parents farm fish and bananas.
Anyone familiar with Alexandra Fuller's previous memoirs will need little introduction to and realignment with her peripatetic, dipsomaniac parents and their post-colonial tragic-comic adventures in southeastern Africa. Yet there is more story to mine in their rich lives. Travel Light, Move Fast delves deeply into Tim Fuller's past and his psyche, a heretofore scrappy silhouette beside the force of nature that is Alexandra's mother, Nicola.
This is a narrative deeply riven by grief and mended together with sustaining, unconditional love. Fuller examines her parents' marriage with empathy and wonder, and the reader marvels at the couples' ability to remain whole despite the loss of three children, a country, multiple homes, and family fortunes. Their senses of humor, place, and their utter adoration of each other — Nicola and Tim Fuller created their own country and language that even their two remaining daughters could not penetrate — allowed them to survive a civil war that left them without citizenship and personal tragedies that would have shredded the wellbeing of most mortals.
As to be expected, Fuller juxtaposes vignettes of the past with her current personal struggles, but in this memoir the gut-punch of her present comes near the end. I ache for this writer, this woman, and admire her enormously. She is exactly my age and has achieved success as a writer that I still fantasize about; she has worked tirelessly, through years of professional rejection and personal heartbreak, to see her work published. Her writing intoxicates, her family fascinates, and Travel Light, Move Fast does not disappoint. But it is her graceful, resigned and poignant embrace of grief that will stay with me. Highly recommended....more
This is as harrowing and haunting a book I have read since 2009 and Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them, set throughout sub-SahThis is as harrowing and haunting a book I have read since 2009 and Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them, set throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Edna O'Brien's Girl is the nominally fictional horror story of young girls enslaved by Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group that still holds sway in northeastern Nigeria.
In language spare and forthright, O'Brien writes of Maryam, a schoolgirl taken hostage, repeatedly raped and tortured, and forced into marriage by a gang of young soldiers, most of whom were terribly, ironically, forced to pick up weapons and join the fight of zealots and madmen. Maryam shares her experiences in a tone so matter-of-fact the reader senses her profound shock at the devastation of her body and soul, the deep shame of her captivity and abuse. Maryam, still nearly a child herself, gives birth to a girl and soon after she escapes, eventually finding her way back to her family. But she is ostracized as a traitor, and subjected to further humiliation from her own community.
Girl is an agonizing read. I flinched in horror page after page, knowing that even though this is a novel, every scene is taken from the very real lives of Boko Haram's victims. This is a work of fiction happening in real life, real time. There is peace to be found, eventually, for Maryam, but O'Brien ends it as she should, as if it were yesterday, for of course we don't yet know the legacy of these young women and how many may or may not be restored through therapy and new lives.
Another reviewer asserted that as important a story as this is, Edna O'Brien isn't the one to tell it, suggesting an 88-year-old white Irish lady can't or shouldn't assume the voice of a Nigerian teenager. Bullshit. Bullshit. O'Brien has been writing about trauma, injustice, the plight of abused, forgotten, compromised women and girls for sixty years. She writes despair, rage and redemption with greater vision, compassion, and universality that any living writer I have read. Her Author's Notes reveal the great lengths O'Brien went to in her quest to make this story adhere as closely to the truth as possible. This is not cultural appropriation, this is a writer who has devoted her career to telling the stories of the most disadvantaged and silenced so that they will be heard, over and over again.
Multiple trigger warnings, but I encourage you to remember this is happening to young women, right now. To look away is to pretend otherwise....more
After fending off an attempted assassination, former FBI agent Marie Mitchell flees with her young twin sons to the Caribbean island of Martinique, whAfter fending off an attempted assassination, former FBI agent Marie Mitchell flees with her young twin sons to the Caribbean island of Martinique, where her mother lives. She begins a letter to her boys, "I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you."
The letter takes the reader back through time to chronicle Marie's childhood in Harlem, her career as a Fed at the tail end of the Cold War in the 1980s, to present day 1992, where she finds herself a target after her involvement in a coup to overthrow the president of Burkina Faso.
American Spy is a spy novel in the old school tradition of Graham Greene and John Le Carré -cool, mannered, character-driven. The opening sequence is the novel's only real action scene. Debut novelist Lauren Wilkinson is far more interested in emotional intrigue and intellectual investigation. Marie Mitchell is not only the rare woman to make her way into an old boy's club, she's black. American Spy is as much a political thriller of American race and gender as it is a Cold War exposé.
Marie is bumping up against a ceiling of racism and sexism in her New York field office, pushing papers, an ignored bureaucrat, when she is recruited by the CIA. The mission is to undermine the Marxist leader of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Marie and Thomas meet cute at the U.N and begin an affair. But it's not a typical honey trap mission for Marie- she has fallen in love with the charismatic leader. Eventually she travels to Burkina Faso and we witness history: Thomas Sankara was a real man and the story of the overthrow of his government is based on actual events.
Wilkinson packs a massive amount of story into this poised, restrained novel. Much of Marie's reminiscence centers around her sister, Helene, who was also in the intelligence community, and the mystery of her death. American nationalism and moral ambiguity also play central roles, as Marie questions the undercover operation that finally pulls her from the wings to center stage.
Despite its complexities and nuances, despite Wilkinson's confident, graceful writing, I was left largely unmoved by the story itself. There was a distance that never really allowed me to know or understand Marie, and I found whatever romance may have existed between her and Sankara rote and passionless. The thread of her sister's mysterious death was left hanging, and the ending came so quickly, I kept turning back pages to see what I'd missed. Even Marie told the story of the coup from a distance- she wasn't there for its final acts.
Still, this is a remarkable, thought-provoking, original novel and an astonishing debut. Highly recommended. 3.5 stars rounded to 4....more
Tangerine is rather a hot mess, chockfull of clichés and tropes, burdened with foreshadowing and paint-by-numbers narrative, but dang if I didn't readTangerine is rather a hot mess, chockfull of clichés and tropes, burdened with foreshadowing and paint-by-numbers narrative, but dang if I didn't read it in two gloriously indulgent chunks.
Christine Mangan's debut is a highly-stylized homage to the sexually-charged thrillers of Highsmith, the gothic contrivances of Brontë, and the North African dreamlogues of Bowles, set in the Moroccan city of Tangier in the late 1950s. Throw in a little Hitchcockian intrigue and a cast of secondary characters straight off the set of Casablanca and you have a book that seems to ripe for the big screen. Not surprisingly, George Clooney's production company has optioned it, with Scarlett Johansson playing the lead. Which lead I'm not certain, for two women headline this show: the pale, fragile, wisp of an expat, Alice Shipley, who hides in the cool shadows of her Tangier apartment, frightened and depressed; and her former college roommate, dark and sultry Lucy Mason, who inexplicably arrives on Alice's doorstep one day and makes herself right at home. The narrative flits back and forth between the present and the women's recent past together at Vermont's Bennington College, where a friendship went bizarrely astray, with tragic consequences.
If you don't concern yourself overmuch with logic and can stomach a little melodrama, this is a fun, delicious read. I set it aside only to Google travel articles about Morocco. I'm ready to go....more
Having so recently read Jennifer Haupt's novel In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, I went in search of real-life survivor accounts of the 1994 Rwandan genoHaving so recently read Jennifer Haupt's novel In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills, I went in search of real-life survivor accounts of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and immediately landed on Clemantine Wamariya's extraordinary story.
This is not a recounting of the killing fields — the 100 days of horror when neighbor turned against neighbor in wholesale slaughter. Wamariya's experiences are of a child who escaped just as civil war began. But surviving the massacres launched Clemantine and her older sister, Claire, into a different kind of horror. They spent seven years traversing eastern Africa, seeking shelter in refugee camps, most of which were little more than fenced-in sloughs of despair. There were days when Clemantine repeated her name over and over, to make certain she wouldn't forget who she was, to hold onto one last shred of her pre-flight humanity. Everything else has been taken from her.
The sisters' experiences fleeing from camp to camp, with brief respites of stability in Zaire and South Africa, alternate with Clemantine's post-rescue life in the United States and the alienation she experiences as a exotic creature with a disturbing story. In an unexpected twist, she becomes a celebrity, winning a high school essay contest that puts her on the Oprah show, sharing the stage with her hero, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. She and Claire are reintroduced to a family they have not seen in twelve years, since the girls fled Kigali, leaving their parents behind. Yet there is no fairy-tale ending here. Reunion with her family and a welcome into the open arms of strangers in the U.S. cannot erase the years of suffering endured as a wandering, homeless, trapped girl.
This is a memoir of visceral emotions, of a young woman tortured by anger and fear and trying to make sense of all the she endured and how she survived. It moves from the fable-like impressions of a little girl leaving behind the idyll of a life in Kigali before the terror to an endless march through a forest, not understanding the bodies she sees floating in the river are not sleeping, to the more concrete details of a young woman carrying for Claire's babies in city slums, while her sister seeks the means to provide for her family and escape the hand of an abusive husband. Only when she is out of crisis, safe and cared for, does Clemantine have the time and space to look at the woman she is becoming. It is so hard, and so important, to read her withdrawal and anger, the way she turns herself inside out, revealing the thorns covering her soul to the rest of the world, a world which can't possibly understand what she has endured. In an undergraduate ethics seminar at Yale, the professor poses the perennial dilemma: who should be saved or sacrificed in a sinking ship, the old and infirm or the baby? Clemantine explodes in class, shouting that she has lived this dilemma, on in lake in Zaire, fleeing for her life in a too-crowded boat, wondering who would be deemed the sacrificial lamb. Her anger spills over at last, as she realizes how profound the chasm between herself and her fellow students.
The chasm is narrowed as Clemantine continues to tell her story on stage and in her writing. Healing continues, and this hardworking, articulate, brilliant woman uses her art to reveal the possibility of our greatest humanity.
As we bear witness to the horror happening on our southern borders — children being torn from their families, families degraded by the inhumanity of the wealthiest, most privileged nation on earth — we must remember that every one of these children is a Clemantine. Each has her story, each deserves the opportunity to live a life free from fear and conflict, each deserves to share their experiences, so that we all become the better for having listened and learned....more
"How do we become human except in the face of adversity?"
This elegantly written and richly cast novel speaks of adversity, both personal and political"How do we become human except in the face of adversity?"
This elegantly written and richly cast novel speaks of adversity, both personal and political, that tests our willingness to greet the world with compassion, to believe in the possibility of happiness.
Attila Asare, a Ghanian psychiatrist and expert on PTSD, and Jean Turane, an American wildlife biologist, meet by chance, and then chance again, in central London. Jean is living in London, conducting a study on the urban fox phenomenon; Attila is passing through to present at a conference, yet his connections to the city run much deeper. His ex-lover is fading away at a care facility in the suburbs, Alzheimer's corroding her brain. And as he arrives in London, he receives word that his niece has been detained by immigration and her young son has run off, disappearing into the February cold and dark.
It is the search for the boy, Tano, that unites this unlikely pair and brings to the foreground a cast of supporting characters. These characters — hotel employees, garbage collectors, street buskers, the homeless — are themselves immigrants, all making their way in a shadow economy far from the glittering highrises and bespoke suits of the storied British city.
The narrative moves from present to recent to mythical past, tracing the lines of a wolf hunter in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, the demise of Jean's marriage and her quest to save coyotes in New England in the mid-oughts, and Attila's work as a hostage negotiator and trauma specialist in war zones from Bosnia to Sierra Leone to Iraq. Despite the breadth of its landscapes, Happiness is the story of what happens deep inside the heart after grief and loss, after love has come and gone. And possibly come again. It is also deeply political, delving into human migration, animal conservation, and war. There are so many layers of theme and character and much of the narrative relies on coincidence to move it forward, yet Forna keeps this all spinning in delicate orbit with sublime writing and wonderful characters.
It was paradoxical, but nevertheless true that in this life and in his career Attila had often observed joy amongst those who had suffered most: it was what life gave in exchange for the pain.
The beauty and power of fiction lie in its ability to open doors to truths we may be too frightened, weary, or ignorant of to seek out in news sourcesThe beauty and power of fiction lie in its ability to open doors to truths we may be too frightened, weary, or ignorant of to seek out in news sources or historical accounts. Many read to escape, not to be brought into the middle of the fray. But I venture that all of us read to feel, and feel deeply.
I recall vividly the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, when nearly a million Rwandans — mostly Tutsi minority —were slaughtered by the ethnic majority Hutus. The killing spree was of such speed and ferocity that it seemed something out of a horror novel. And it occurred as the world was watching the rending apart of Yugoslavia. Distracted and fearful, political powers were slow to react. The world abandoned Rwanda.
Jennifer Haupt traveled to Rwanda in 2006 to interview survivors and observe the long process of reconciliation and accountability. She left with stories of atrocities beyond imagining, as well as stories of hope, forgiveness, and redemption. Ten years later she completed the novel that was seeded in her heart during that trip, a novel that brings readers into the heart of a place and time few in the Western world understand or even seek to revisit.
In The Shadow of 10,000 Hills weaves together stories of three women searching for truth and purpose in tragedy. Their common bonds are the shadow of a man, a father to one, lover to another, and rescuer to a third, and the shadows found in the Rift Valley hills where Rwanda lies lush and green and shattered by violence.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lillian Carlson, a young black civil rights activist, moves to Africa to find a way to carry out MLK's dream of compassion and peaceful justice. She works first in Kenya, then opens an orphanage in Rwanda, restoring a pitiful farm into an abundant plantation. Lillian is also retreating from a country that forbid her to be with the man she loves, white photojournalist Henry Shepherd. Their taboo relationship can't withstand American societal pressure. Lillian leaves the country and Henry marries a high school sweetheart to whom he feels a sense of duty, but little love. Their daughter becomes his bright spot, but even she isn't enough to hold him to home and family. Henry abandons his wife and child and meets up again with Lillian in Rwanda. But he doesn't stay.
At the novel's opening that abandoned daughter, Rachel, has recently lost both her mother and her baby. Grief unmoors her and sets her on a quest to find her father. The emotional journey becomes a literal one. Rachel travels to Rwanda, where Lillian reluctantly opens her home, but withholds much of her truth.
Bridging the gulf between Henry's daughter and the woman he truly loved is Nadine, a young Tutsi woman who barely survived the genocide. Nadine is now a college student in Kenya, home for a holiday break when Rachel arrives. Although the character most in need of healing and answers, Nadine becomes the thread that binds the wounds of the past and brings these isolated characters together.
Haupt writes with warmth and grace, allowing the reader to breathe into the horrific recent past of Rwanda. We who sit in the safety of our prosperity would do well to seek out the stories of those broken apart by political, ethnic, and cultural injustice caused by fear and hate. These are cautionary events that we must heed, given how close we are to our own destruction. Novels such as In The Shadow of 10,000 Hills allow us to imagine the possibilities that we harbor in our own hearts for hate, and for hope.
On June 16, 1976, schoolchildren from Soweto, South Africa, set out to demonstrate peacefully in response to the government decree that Afrikaans — thOn June 16, 1976, schoolchildren from Soweto, South Africa, set out to demonstrate peacefully in response to the government decree that Afrikaans — the language of apartheid repression — be introduced as the language of instruction. More than 10,000 Sowetans gathered to join the march. The police responded first with tear gas, then with bullets, killing two children. Scores more children and adults would be dead by the end of the day; how many will never be known. Soweto was on fire and would burn for days. From Soweto, the uprising spread across the country and from there, the world became aware of the brutality of apartheid.
I knew none of this when I began Bianca Marais's heartfelt Hum If You Don't Know the Words. I was in elementary school in 1976, singing "We Are Marching to Pretoria" in music class, aware only of famines in Africa, not of the fight for liberation. It would be another eight or nine years, my freshman year in high school, that the anti-apartheid movement would claim space in popular culture and my heroes — musicians — made it their cause celebre ("I, I, I, I, I ain’t gonna play Sun City!" anyone?).
Hum If You Don't Know the Words weave two voices, a white girl, a black woman, into the fabric of Johannesburg at the time of the uprisings.
Robin is the nine-year-old daughter of a mining official, living far from the townships but in full complicity with apartheid mores. Despite her troubled home life and the mental twisting of racism that swells around her, she's a good kid, full of moxie and quirk, trying to make sense of the world. Then her parents are murdered and her beloved black nanny and housekeeper is torn from her side. She's sent to live with her aunt in Johannesburg, a single working woman who needs a little girl in her life like a fish needs a bicycle.
Beauty, a widowed mother of three, lives in the Transkei, hundreds of miles from Johannesburg. Her eldest, Nomsa, attends school in Johannesburg and lives with Beauty's brother. The young woman has gotten caught up in the political movement to free black South Africa from white repression. Beauty's brother writes to warn his sister of the danger Nomsa is courting and Beauty travels by foot and bus to reach her girl. She arrives the day of the Soweto uprising, the same day her daughter disappears.
Circumstances bring Robin and Beauty together and the plot becomes a search for the missing Nomsa, while the story explores the growing bond between white child and black woman at a time when lines are being drawn violently across a society in full explosive change.
This book held me because of its vivid sense of time and place, the depth of the characters, particularly Beauty, and Marais's delicate but true representation of grief, racism, and a little girl's awakening to the world around her. The final third strains credibility to the point of farce, as Robin capers throughout the city, chasing down leads that point to Nomsa's whereabouts and her philosophizing is at once too sophisticated and exasperating. The climax forces a suspension of disbelief that is unfortunate, given the strength of the story that precedes. Yet, I don't hesitate to recommend this powerful, lovely read. ...more
We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So, when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose st
We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So, when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?
This question, posed by a 20th century character near the end of Homegoing encompasses the novel's central theme: telling the stories history forgets, misses, or ignores entirely. In the case of Yaa Gyasi's stunning debut, the lost story is the active complicity of West Africa in the slave trade.
Homegoing travels through three centuries and two continents by way of the bloodlines of two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. As the story opens in what is now Ghana, Effia is sold as a bride by her father to a British slavetrader. Her half-sister, Esi, whom she's never met, is being held captive not far away, awaiting transport to the New World as a slave.
And so these two branches split from the same tree become an episodic novel in which each chapter moves between West Africa and America, following seven generations of these two young women and the brutal legacy of slavery both continents allowed to flourish.
The marvel of this novel is how we become so quickly and solidly attached to the protagonist of each chapter, even though we don't remain in his or her life for long. And how agile Gyasi is in portraying each generation and location, despite dramatic shifts of culture and geography. The chapters set in West Africa are the most revelatory. I've read extensively of the evil and agony of pre-and post-antebellum racism and violence in the United States, as well as the disease of Jim Crow that followed emancipation. But to see the entangled roots of slave history in West Africa, revealed with such vivid storytelling, is astonishing.
Relationships, not history lessons, are at the heart of Yaa Gyasi's tale. Each generation is propelled forward by the love of those left behind, the entangled hearts and bodies that make up the passionate soul of this novel. I will admit to becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and the rapid changes of place and time, all of which diluted some of the novel's power. But in the end, I was moved and troubled, heartened and breathless. This is an extraordinary debut....more
Mnemosyne, known as Memory, writes to an unseen, unmet Western journalist from her cell in Zimbabwe's notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. SheMnemosyne, known as Memory, writes to an unseen, unmet Western journalist from her cell in Zimbabwe's notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. She has been sentenced to death for the murder of her childhood guardian, Lloyd–a white man to whom her parents handed her off in a diner when Memory was a young girl. Memory is an albino African, a condition that, even after she is treated for its physical pain, leaves deep scars in her psyche. Memory's attempts to define her identity and reason through a family and community that abandoned her lead her beyond Africa and into a redemptive life in Europe. But when she returns to Zimbabwe, disaster in the guise of a horrifying coincidence befalls her and she lands, unwittingly, on death row.
The premise is breathtaking, the execution less so. The epistolary narrative means relying on the memory (a compelling and well-rendered theme) of an unreliable narrator. Much of the first half is devoted to describing daily life in this women's prison, which is worthy of its own novel, but it does crowd out Memory's memories of her childhood and it become difficult to know quite where to focus one's attention. The second half of the novel, where Memory brings the reader into her life after she is sold to Lloyd, is rushed and so many of the events inexplicable and tangential.
Gappah's writing is gorgeous–strong and clear with full-color descriptions and a vivid sensuality that brings every setting, every character to life. The narrative is well-paced and the foreshadowing of deeper, darker secrets—the essential mystery of Memory's relationship with Lloyd and her arrest and conviction—propel the reader forward. The plot is distracted and unsatisfying, but this is still a worthy read for its insights into current Zimbabwe and its wonderfully rendered female characters....more
I've watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TedXEuston talk, from which this publication was taken, several times because, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I admI've watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TedXEuston talk, from which this publication was taken, several times because, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I admire and adore her with every cell of my being.
I read this transcript with my morning coffee today. And I am again renewed, enlightened, hopeful, enchanted, and inspired. We should all read this. We should all be feminists.
The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty because the diver has had her backpack stolen, with her laptop, wallet, passport while checking into her hotel in CasablThe Diver's Clothes Lie Empty because the diver has had her backpack stolen, with her laptop, wallet, passport while checking into her hotel in Casablanca, the city her guidebook suggests "The first thing to do upon arriving in Casablanca is to get out of Casablanca."
Come to think of it, the only thing the diver has left is her clothing. The thief, caught on security camera, walked serenely out of the hotel, her backpack slung over his shoulder. He wisely left her suitcase, which contained nothing of value: only the diver's clothes.
The "diver" (the title is taken from a poem by Rumi) is our nameless protagonist, a 33-year-old American from Florida who has flung herself around the world to escape the fallout from a painful divorce. The reasons for the divorce are revealed in bits and pieces and when the puzzle is fully formed, it is more bizarre and tragic than we could have imagined.
Part madcap comedy of errors, part Kafka-esque nightmare, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is a cool and clever psychological thriller that displays Vida's signature lonely, emotionally disjointed woman traveling abroad.
The second-person narration may irritate or confound some readers; it is not a POV construct we see much outside of the short story form, for it's difficult to enter and remain engaged in an extended narrative with all those "yous" being thrown at us. But Vida's novel is slim and this reader found the 2nd person narration pretty brilliant. It conveys a sense of "everywoman", like something written as travelogue or self-help article. It feels as though our hapless heroine is talking to herself, talking herself through this disaster-adventure. The "you" allows the author, her character, and the reader a certain sense of freedom—unburdened by the inner thought of first person, the puppet-mastery of third person, all choices are possible. And the woman, who becomes Sabine Alyse, who becomes Reeves Conway, consistently makes the bad choice. But it's hers, and hers alone to make. And after her identity is stolen, choices are really all she has left.
You wouldn't expect to find the woman on a movie set as a stand-in for a famous actress a mere two days after the theft, or hanging backstage with Patti Smith , but that's where this novel leads. It leads into deeper territory: all the ways we construct and lose and rebuild our identity. It's heady stuff, this. Vida takes us into foreign lands and strands us, dizzy and disoriented and without a friend. And what a perfect metaphor for the effects of grief and loss.
The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is powerful and elegiac, absurd and compelling. Highly recommended
This book and the impression it left on me have not been far from my mind since I finished it several days ago. I had a feeling of deja vu in the earlThis book and the impression it left on me have not been far from my mind since I finished it several days ago. I had a feeling of deja vu in the early pages, and realized I had picked up Thirty Girls and set it aside last year after only two or three chapters. I can't recall why it didn't speak to me then, but I'm so glad I returned to complete it.
The 'I've read this before' feeling also rose because I so recently read Francesca Marciano's striking Rules of the Wild, written several years before Thirty Girls. But the settings--Nairobi, East Africa--and the central character, a white, Western woman at unease in her expat surroundings, running from one past, yet colliding with her bohemian, privileged present amidst suffering and war, are one and the same. Yet the books diverge at least as much as they run parallel. They complement, rather than compete.
Whereas Marciano brought us deeply into Esme's psyche as she seeks to weave herself into the fabric of an African life and to find her calling, Minot's Jane knows she is just a visitor, and one with a specific mission: to tell the story of thirty teenaged girls kidnapped by Ugandan rebels.
Telling this story is also Minot's mission, and she does so with aching, devastating beauty. She gives voice to one girl in particular: Esther Akello. It is through Esther's eyes and ears, to the sound of her voice, that we see, hear and feel the trauma of those stolen children of Uganda. Could we not hear, too, the voices of their sisters to the north, those women and girls of Nigeria who are also casualties of fractured borders and ceaseless conflict?
Cognitive dissonance splinters the framework of the narrative, as it shifts from Jane's story to Esther's. It caused this reader considerable frustration. Jane is accompanied by a ragtag crew of bohemian whites: Lana and Don, Pierre and Harry. Harry was born and raised in Kenya. He's worked to save wild dogs, worked for this NGO and that, yet he doesn't seem to have a passion for much beyond hang-gliding. His detachment is echoed in nearly every Western-born and/or white character: they take pride in their adaptation to and knowledge of Africa, but their existence is pointless. Take them away and no one would notice--their footprints are material, their contributions immaterial. Jane slips in the mud and into Harry's arms early in the book; fifteen years her junior, Harry becomes the prism through which Jane considers her aging self, both her physical degradation and her moral lassitude. Although I was curious and followed Jane's story, I felt as detached from her and her new friends as they seemed to be from the terror unfolding in Uganda.
Where this story pulses and breathes is in the bearing witness of the horrors experienced by the Thirty Girls. Minot's language changes as she so beautifully captures Esther's voice; it becomes plaintive and poetic, yet strong and clear as a bell. The girls' survival becomes a thing we keen for.
The narrative weaves Esther and Jane's story in tighter and tighter braids until at last they meet. What this meeting brings, who changes, who goes on and why is something for a reader to discover. But Susan Minot does loving, compassionate justice to the girls who are taken, were taken, are still being stolen today. Whatever weaknesses this novel may have, it tells a strong, necessary story in precise, yet lovely language.
Early in Leaving Before The Rains Come, Alexandra Fuller recalls a Q&A session that followed a reading she gave in Dallas in 2010. An audience member Early in Leaving Before The Rains Come, Alexandra Fuller recalls a Q&A session that followed a reading she gave in Dallas in 2010. An audience member asked her, “Do you consider yourself African?”
Fuller notes that the writer with whom she shared the stage, a woman she does not identify by name but describes her so that we know it is Nigerian author and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, would never have been asked this question. That is because Alexandra Fuller, of English and Scottish descent, is white.
Did I consider myself African? The truth is, I longed to say, “Yes,” as I had years ago. Even, defensively, “Of course, yes.” I longed to have an identity so solid, so obvious, and so unassailable that I, or anyone else, could dig all the way back into it for generations and generations and find nothing but more and further proof of the bedrock of my Africanness.
I said, “Not anymore. Not especially.”
In a memoir of heartbreak and endings, of confusion and lost dreams, this may be the saddest moment for me. It seems to encapsulate all that Alexandra Fuller has lost in her bold and astonishing life: her country, her family, her way.
Alexandra Fuller’s 2002 memoir of her childhood in southern Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is one of the most evocative I’ve read. The follow-up, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, delves into Fuller’s mother’s life—and her father’s, after this irrepressible couple meet and marry and take on southern Africa—a story less touching perhaps, but no less fascinating. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight ends on Fuller’s wedding day. She is twenty-two, feverish with malaria, and helplessly in love with American Charlie Ross, an adventure guide ten years her senior.
The moment I learned that Alexandra Fuller had written a new installment in her exploration of self and family, I got in line. I’d fallen hard for her fearless, beautiful writing. Her family’s stoic humor in the face of disaster amazed me, their flaws and eccentricities charmed.
The initial chapters of Leaving Before The Rains Come make for awkward reading if you are not familiar with the Fullers and their life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Zambia; the references to past events are delivered with a kind of insider’s shorthand. It isn’t until Fuller reaches to the point of denying her Africanness at the reading in Texas that she approaches the book’s central theme: her failing marriage.
Although Fuller recounts stories from her family’s unique past to color in the lines of her present, this memoir is really about a woman, alone and disconnected.
Fuller gently probes at the reasons why her marriage became intractable. She is careful not to assign blame and she is protectively oblique about her children, now young adults. Charlie seems to offer the best of both hemispheres that pull at Alexandra: he understands her smoldering love for Africa, yet his very Americanness represents the stability she craves. He is older, sober, a man with a plan: “Charlie didn’t burn through the present, or drown it out, or wash up against it, because his past had left him intact. He had a future to look forward to.” After the difficult birth of their first child and a near-fatal bout of malaria for Fuller a year into their marriage, Alexandra and Charlie leave Africa for the American West. There they buy land, build a house—first in Idaho, then in Wyoming. Charlie starts a whitewater river guide business and Fuller begins to write.
But as we learn later, the marriage began to disintegrate early. As in that first year, early. Yet, two more children and nineteen more years of marriage follow. In their first decade together, Fuller writes nine novels that are rejected before she finds her way with Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Charlie Ross sets aside his adventure guiding to sell real estate, a move that fits his description of “someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous” yet disappoints Fuller all the same. She married whitewater river rapids, not a Century 21 gold jacket.
This change of career isn’t what makes the marriage fail. There is a ranch, a house, animals, and three children to provide for. (Fuller’s writing career takes off, but if ever there was evidence that a successful book, even two, do not equal financial freedom, Fuller’s cautionary tale is it). There is financial stress and a natural lessening of passion as the demands of family take over, but Fuller reaches for a deeper reason. She identifies a profound incompatibility that harkens back to how being raised in Africa, in her very particular family, has shaped her psyche.
In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.” But in America “there seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights … Of course, I changed and sped up.
Even in Wyoming—which reminds her of the natural, savage beauty she left behind—away from the city, at peace with animals and adored children, Fuller can’t escape the sense that she is losing herself.
Just as she is poised to make the break, disaster strikes. Charlie is crushed beneath a horse and comes within a hair’s breadth of death. Alexandra Fuller stays with her husband through his recovery, but in the end, they end.
Fuller reflects painfully on all the reasons why she and Charlie grew apart or never should have been together in the first place, but none struck me as insurmountable. Except—and this is at the heart of all Alexandra Fuller’s eloquent, spirited and raw writing—her sense of being misplaced. Her cultural displacement is a rift of the soul that she is ever in search of healing.
I am Alexandra Fuller’s age. We married at the same time, to men who made our knees weak, who were both solid rocks of self-possession and stability. But how and why my marriage has withstood all the earthquakes large and small while another’s failed is impossible to say and unfair to speculate. As the author poignantly states,
It’s not anyone’s job to make another person happy, but the truth is, people can either be very happy or very unhappy together. Happiness or unhappiness isn’t a measure of their love. You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.
A chance conversation with someone in a coffee shop a few weeks ago brought this book to my attention. As I read, I wondered both how this story and tA chance conversation with someone in a coffee shop a few weeks ago brought this book to my attention. As I read, I wondered both how this story and the publication of memoir passed me by. Did I perhaps read a snippet in The New York Timesin the fall of 2008, shake my head in momentary worry and sadness, and move on to Presidential election campaign squabbles, forgetting all about the plight of Amanda Lindhout?
I certainly won't forget her story now. A young woman, blithely tripping about the globe, in search of direction, meaning, identity and adventure, becomes a prisoner by means of her own ignorance, arrogance, and good intentions.
Growing up in Alberta, Canada with a single mom whose much-younger boyfriend terrorized the family with bouts of drunken violence, Amanda found an escape route in old copies of National Geographic. In those pages filled with images of the Hindu Kush mountains, the tropical forests of Indonesia, and the vast plains of the Serengeti, Amanda dreamed of a life less-ordinary, of finding the freedom that is unique to the traveler. At the age of twenty, she begins a series of extreme adventures, funded by episodes of waitressing at high-end restaurants in Calgary. Traveling as cheaply as she can, she set off for months at a time—traipsing through South America, South Asia, Africa—full of spirit, but without direction.
It's only after she takes hold of a camera that Amanda Lindhout finds a calling as a free-lance photojournalist. She cuts her teeth as a stringer in Afghanistan, and then takes a job as a correspondent for an Iranian-run news channel in Baghdad, a job which earns her the scorn and contempt of nearly every other Western journalist she encounters. Shamed by her own naïveté, she decamps to Kenya with the intention of inserting herself into the war in Somalia.
Days after she and a former boyfriend, photographer Nigel Brennan, arrive in Mogadishu in August 2008, they are kidnapped by a group of heavily-armed young men. Amanda and Nigel spend the next 460 days in brutal, soul-crushing captivity.
This book is a narrative of two parts, two very differently constructed narratives—what I call Before Captivity and After Captivity. Before Captivity is a series of events, a "First this happened, then that happened", with largely shallow self-reflection. Truly, it is an honest mirror of Amanda at this time: an earnest, brave, determined young woman without direction. Her only goal is to move away from where she is and what she might become if she remains standing still.
After Captivity is a shattering coming-of-age story of a woman in physical, emotional and spiritual crisis. How Amanda survives her ordeal is not only her story, but a larger story of war, poverty, and faith.
This is an anguishing read. The abuse Amanda sustains at the hands of young men for whom she comes to feel tremendous empathy is graphic and wrenching. But the story she and co-author Sara Corbett tell is a vital one: to understand how the soul transcends while the body suffers.
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