Book Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

This book is marvelous.  It’s likely to be the best book I’ll read all year, or in years to come. Mostly I just want to sit here and heap it with accolades, but that probably isn’t as helpful to potential readers as an actual book review would be.

The short version: I am truly floored by the talent of this new young writer. Gyasi (pronounced like “Jessie”) follows the parallel lineages of two half-sisters through several generations, beginning in 18th century Ghana at the height of the slave trade. Effia marries a European slave trader while Esi is abducted from her village and sold, and each generation of their descendants carries the family narrative forward in separate chapters, each of which can almost be read as a discrete short story in its own right. The ending brings the novel full circle and is satisfying in the extreme. This book is hauntingly beautiful and it made my heart ache again and again.

The longer version: Homegoing is a book of meticulous, dare I say superlative, craft. The narrative is relentlessly propulsive, and yet Gyasi has pared down a story that is truly epic in scope to a mere 300 pages. It is a book that explores the terrible and ongoing repercussions of enslaving a race, but which does so with an open heart and an eye toward a future where persons, and a people, might yet be made whole. It is the work of a writer at the top of her game, so the fact that Gyasi is a debut novelist not yet turned 30 is all the more astonishing. It is a story of always seeking the missing part, of looking for home in the next place each character ventures, whether it’s of their own volition or not.

If I had dogeared every page where Gyasi’s words resonated with me, I’d have every other page turned down, but here is a passage that were deeply meaningful, and which, I think, give an excellent idea of the urgency behind much of the book and what the writer is capable of:

Originally he [Marcus, six generations removed from Esi] wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his Great-Grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his Grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction  -- the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the 60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the 80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d be inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University, and then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was (289-290).

Do you see what she just did there? Do you?

Effia’s descendants, still in Ghana, are as lost as Esi’s are in America, and though never saying it outright, Gyasi implies that the effects of slavery -- the abduction, selling, and general obliteration of personhood of a race over generations -- still vibrate in the mitochondrial level of our DNA. Borne back ceaselessly into the past, indeed.

This book is going to be an important book -- important in the way that Toni Morrison’s Beloved has become important -- and it is certainly the hallmark of an uncommon literary talent. I almost always scoff when I hear that Unknown Author X has been paid bazillions of dollars for Debut Book Y, but in this case, Homegoing is worth every penny that Knopf has paid for it. And possibly then some.

If you’re going to read one work of literary fiction this year, it should be this one. I’m not sure that I can say anything else.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided at my request from the publisher. Its US publication date is tomorrow, June 7, and I’m tickled that I’ll get a chance to meet the author next week when she signs at my store on June 15. 

Book Review: Thirty Girls by Susan Minot

I've been a fan of Susan Minot's ever since I first read Evening back in the 1990s. Thus I was already predisposed to like her new book called Thirty Girls before I even picked it up, but by the time I came to the end of it, I thought Minot had accomplished something both subversive and marvelous.

Esther is a young Ugandan girl who has been kidnaped by the brutal nutjobs in the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness, participate in, and submit to various atrocities associated with children's conscription armies in sub-Saharan Africa. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Kenya with the hopes of writing a piece about children like Esther. Minot uses these dual narratives to great effect, alternating Jane's third person story with Esther's more urgent first person every other chapter. When Jane's and Esther's paths eventually cross, Minot starts playing her sly hand.

We follow Esther from the time she is abducted from her boarding school through her frightful experience with the LRA, all the way through to her escape and recovery in a refugee/rehabilitation camp created for such children. Jane, in turn, we follow from her arrival in Nairobi as she meets various wealthy, white ex-pats who are bored enough to accompany Jane on her trek to Uganda to find out more. There's a very Out of Africa-feel to Jane's narrative, and Minot's descriptions are lush and her style is breezily literary in these sections. Jane is undergoing some existential angst and she falls in romantically with a young man more than 15 years her junior on this group excursion that almost feels like a holiday.

Jane's chapters contrast starkly with Esther's halting and awkward first person narration, which she is ostensibly relating as part of her recovery therapy. These escaped children have endured not only the horrors inflicted on them, but the horrors they were required to inflict on other children in order to survive. Most of the girls are no longer wanted by their families, because as rape victims they are not  considered marriageable, and when the boys play in the field their games quickly escalate into violence.  This is the first way that Minot lures her readers into a false sense of security: though the content of Esther's chapters is clearly weightier than Jane's content, Jane's chapters are so much better written that it was actually difficult to make myself not skim Esther's chapters.

Now consider this: according to the Human Rights Watch, "an estimated 20,000 children have been abducted during the 16-year conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government." Twenty frickin' thousand children.  Now consider this: in 1997, Minot traveled to Uganda to report on these missing children. It seems to me that whatever she saw there has been percolating in her mind for well over a decade, and I'd say that Thirty Girls is her shining tribute to those stolen children, children whom most of the world has forgotten.

You know how Westerners and/or white people and/or people of privilege are all, like, "Oh, what a tragedy that 20,000 children have been stolen from their homes in Uganda," or "How terrible that those Hutus are systematically slaughtering the Tutsis," or "Oh, [insert your own African tragedy of choice here]," but then they put down their newspapers or turn off their televisions without really being touched by the horror? I feel that Minot is doing a bait & switch with Jane's and Esther's narratives, because though we begin and end with Jane, and even though something bad does happen in Jane's narrative, I think the whole point of the book is to make Esther's tale more memorable and important; that basically despite the bad stuff that happens indirectly to Jane, she's still the privileged and lucky one, and the small existential crises she feels are clearly *nothing* in the eyes of the reader compared to what Esther and the rest of the titular thirty girls must undergo.

It's clear to me that Minot holds up her novel like a mirror -- the reader knows which story is more important in this book and society should watch and learn: it is not acceptable to dismiss news like this in order to be consumed by our First World Problems.

NB: Knopf published Thirty Girls earlier this month.  I read an advance reading copy that was provide to me by the publisher at my request. I confess that I read this book back in December and then gave me ARC away to somebody else to read, and that's why I have no excerpts included in my review. Sorry!

Vacation Reading and Some Book Reviews

My physical book pile.

So today is our second full day in Anguilla and I'm already a little panicky: I have finished reading my third book.  What if I run out of things to read? As always, my husband and I check a suitcase full of books and gifts when we travel here, and this year I even loaded up my Kobo with e-galleys to be on the safe side.  But this afternoon I just finished my third book, so I'm starting to get a little antsy. I have 15 physical books and 13 e-books and 13 days left of my vacation, so I'm sure I won't actually run out of books to read, but I still fret.

Please be aware that some spoilers lie ahead.

Choosing one's airplane read is even more important than choosing one's vacation reads, which is why I test-drove every physical book that earned a place in my suitcase/backpack. This year I struck gold by taking Holly Black's forthcoming The Coldest Girl in Coldtown for my plane read.  It's immediately engaging and well-written, and clearly this is not your daughter's vampire novel.  True, it's a young adult book, but Holly wrote this book in homage to the great vampire works she read growing up.  If you think vampire books begin and end with Twilight and thus haven't given them a fair shake, give this one a go.

Tana lives in a slightly futuristic world where a rogue vampire decided to break all of the ritualist rules of Vampire Secrecy by infecting hundreds and hundreds of people with the Cold, and they, in turn, infected thousands and thousands and so on. This created worldwide havoc, but at least in the US there are a handful of Coldtowns, where vampires and humans live side by side in an uneasy alliance: humans allow vamps to feed on them just a little via IV tubes rather than by biting (which spreads the Coldness), and therefore the vamps' food source doesn't dry up (literally) and the humans can keep on being human and not Cold.

One day, Tana wakes up from an all night party to discover she is the only partygoer left alive from a mass vampire attack. When she discovers Aidan, an exboyfriend infected with the Cold, and Gavriel, a mysterious but insane vampire, chained up in a bedroom, her split decision to try to rescue them both by driving to the nearest Coldtown changes all of their lives. You'll find no romanticized notion of vampires, no helpless heroine, and no love triangles here.  Instead, you'll get a moral-but-complicated-heroine who often doesn't know what the right thing to do is, plus a vampire who is unhinged, secretive, and seductive. In other words, this book is thoroughly fun and refreshing.

NoViolet Bulawayo's debut novel, We Need New Names is decidedly not fun and refreshing.  Unless by "fun and refreshing" you mean "dark and disturbing, with a side of bleak." It's the story of a girl named Darling who grows up in Zimbabwe but later moves to America to live with her aunt. No matter where she lives, she is longing for the other country and unable to confront that longing head-on.

She and her best friends, Chipo, Bastard, Godknows, and Sbho, are only around 10-11 when the book opens, but already they inhabit dual worlds of innocence and worldliness that juxtapose sinisterly.  A scene in which the kids are sneaking off to Budapest (a wealthy neighborhood far from their shantytown) to steal guavas to assuage their hunger pangs but joking about breaking into the houses to steal other things, is echoed later in the book when an angry mob on a rampage destroys a house, drop-kicks a dog to its death, and drives away the wealthy white occupants--the kids watch in terror and then  pour into the emptied house to make their own brand of mischief.

Or when Darling, Sbho, and a new neighbor want to re-enact a scene from ER because they want to emulate the beautiful and successful doctors on TV, only to come dangerously close to inflicting real harm to pregnant Chipo with their wire hanger and herbs mixed with urine as abortants. Not to mention the scene when Chipo breaks her voluntary muteness to finally tell Darling how she got pregnant (raped by a family member), and Darling's response: "I watch her and she has this look I have never seen before, this look of pain. I want to laugh that her voice is back, but her face confuses me and I can also see she wants me to say something, something maybe important, so I say, Do you want to go and steal guavas?"

In other words, Bulawayo breaks your heart with these characters while she makes you want yell and scream at them, and then you remember that they're only children and your heart breaks all over again.  This is a strong debut but not a comfortable read. I definitely recommend it.

NB:  I read advance reading copies of each of these books, which were provided upon my request by my sales reps.  We Need New Names was published by Little, Brown in May 2013 and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown will be published in September 2013. 

Book Review: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One of the best books I've read in the last decade was Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published in 2006 and recreating a period of history about which I knew nothing, much to my shame: the Biafran war for independence in Nigeria. When I heard that Adichie had a new novel coming out this spring, I was very excited by the news.

It's difficult to compare Adichie's seminal novel with Americanah, her latest effort. This is a contemporary novel, splitting its time between Nigeria and America, with a brief and depressing detour into England for good measure. The writing is always good and frequently transcendent, and that's not an adjective I use lightly. It is a third person narration that mostly follows Ifemelu, a bright young Nigerian woman who jumps at the chance to study in America; after finding much struggle she finds both personal and professional success, but something still eludes her, so she returns to Nigeria.  We also get a portrait of Obinze, the boy from university who loves Ifemelu but loses her through no fault of his own, and his subsequent sojourn to London as an illegal immigrant.

The third person narrative feels so intimate on occasion, though, that I had to double check and assure myself that it was not first person--that, as much as anything, is the true measure of how fine a writer Adichie truly is. She does everything right, as far as I'm concerned, and writers who are (lazily, in my opinion) compelled to write in first person, or use multiple narrators to tell their story, or worse, do either of those things while writing in present tense, could learn much from studying her prose and structure.

The first half of this novel is truly substantive, whether it's dealing with power and corruption in Nigeria, or the vagaries of racism in modern America. Adichie made me think of race in new ways while I was reading this, and of course her discourses on American Blacks vs Non-American Blacks (told via Ifemelu's blogposts) were fascinating and illuminating in equal measure. Whether it's Ifemelu's complicated relationships with her auntie, cousin, and boyfriends in the US, or with her family or Obinze back home in Nigeria, or whether she's casually expositing about race in America compared to a lack of race awareness in Nigeria, I found the first half of this book satisfyingly meaty--something I could really sink my teeth into.  Whether I was reading the book over breakfast, on the airplane,  or in a cafe in the French Quarter, I was immersed and loving it.

The second half of the book, however, is a bit of a disappointment, I'm sorry to confess, but that may have more to do with my expectations than it does with any real failure of the book. Once Ifemelu repatriates to Nigeria, and once her path crosses with Obinze's again, the book becomes much more about relationships than anything else. While I was expecting Great Things, hoping that Ifemelu would use her Life Experience to strike out on her own, raging against the machine for the rights of the downtrodden, she was mostly concerned with reuniting with Obinze, who in her absence, had married and had children.

The book ends with (Spoiler alert: please highlight the following text to read it) Obinze leaving his wife to be with Ifemelu, which gives the novel a tawdrier ending than I would have liked.  I had no objections to their being together--in fact, I tend to root for happy relationships in fiction--but what I really wanted was for the novel to continue beyond that point, to tell me what extraordinary things they had done with their lives. I wanted to know that they used the strength of their combined love as a fulcrum to move the world and be a force for good, as they had been on their own in their separate lives. 

Still, I want to make it clear that I was drawn into this novel emotionally in a way that I haven't been with the past few pieces of literary fiction I've reviewed. Adichie's writing is terrific, and a book like hers, even one whose ending disappoints, is still about a thousand times better than most of the drivel that gets published.

NB: This book has already been published in the UK and will be published by Knopf in the US on May 17, 2013.  I read an advance reading copy provided to me at my request from my sales rep.

Book Review: Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

For whatever reason, I never read Alexandra Fuller's first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (perhaps because I thought the title was inexplicable, perhaps because I didn't know it was set in Africa), but as soon as I heard about this one, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, I knew I wanted to read it.  Not only does it have one of the most evocative titles ever, it is also largely set in Africa. And since African lit is second only to Caribbean lit in terms of my regional reading preferences, I devoured this book the same day that my kindly sales rep, Karl, gave it to me.

So apparently in her first memoir, Fuller reveals some things about her mother that came across as less than flattering and perhaps even of the call-social-services-pronto variety.  In Cocktail Hour, her mother is hesitant to talk about her own childhood because she doesn't want to end up in another Awful Book, but apparently she relents enough for Fuller to fashion this 200+ page second memoir of her mother's life.

Nicola Fuller, nee Huntington, is clearly a force of nature.  Hailing from Scotland but living most of her life in central and east Africa, she is of seriously hardy stock.  The kind that is so admirable and interesting to read about but perhaps less comfortable to actually live with.  Unconventional, larger-than-life, fearless, fierce, daunting and undaunted are among her many epithets.

She is also unapologetically pro-Colonial and the reader must entertain the possibility of her being virulently racist, too. Problematic, that.  And yet she loves Africa, with every last fibre of her being, and it's hard to imagine loving a place so much that you don't also love its people.  So suffice it to say that Alexandra is a product of both her generation and her social class, and that she is one of the most complicated and fascinating and charismatic characters I've ever encountered.  If she had lived in ancient Greece, her life would be sung by the likes of Sophocles and Aristophanes--in other words, equal parts tragedy and comedy.

I never knew much about Rhodesia, other than it became Zimbabwe and that the gorgeous Ridgeback dog breed hails from there, until I read this book. What I know now isn't particularly pleasant, either.  If this book is to be read at face value, Rhodesia was basically an entire country for for all of sub-Saharan Africa's white-flight.  Great.  I also learned more about the Boer War, which somehow has always remained hazy in my mind, no matter how many novels I read that reference it (same thing with the Crimean War, come to think of it; maybe it's my American upbringing rearing its ugly head).

But enough with my ramblings.  Here are some passages that I think attest to the kind of person Nicola Fuller was, and the life she led.  Alexandra Fuller clearly had a great subject to work with here, but it was her writing as much as the store that kept me turning the pages breathlessly.  The Narrative "I" in many of the below passages is Alexandra, Nicola's daughter:

p. 73 "I reassured Mr. Faraji that Mum is an extreme omnivore.  She has eaten snails peeled off the farm's driveway and wild frogs' legs from the bush surrounding the Tree of Forgetfulness. Once she even ate a prawn cocktail in hyperlandlocked, socialist-era Zambia, and if that didn't kill her, I argued, a little dysentery-laced street food on Mombasa wasn't going to do the trick.

p. 118. "People often ask why my parents haven't left Africa.  Simply put, they have been possessed by this land.  Land is Mum's love affair and it is Dad's religion."

p. 39 '' 'I used to run away from our bungalow...and play in her garden with my first best friend, Stephen Foster.' Mum smiles at the memory. 'Stephen and I used to take turns pushing each other on his tricycle. We wore matching romper suits. We had tea parties. We went everywhere together, hand in hand.'
     'Stephen was one of Zoe's sons' I guess.
     Mum frowns, 'No, no, no,' she says. 'Stephen wasn't her son. Stephen was a chimpanzee.'
     There is a small, appalled pause while I try--and fail--to imagine sending one of my toddlers off to play with a chimpanzee... 'Weren't your parents worried he would bite you?' I ask.
    Mum gives me a look as if I have just called Winnie-the-Pooh a pedophile, 'Stephen? Bite me? Not at all, we were best friends.' " (NB: The jacket photo for this book is a picture of Nicola and Stephen Foster, colorized of course.)

p. 142, after the death of one of her children, "The doctors tranquilized Mum until her grief receded to a place so deep that she was the only person who could hear it. In this way, everything about Adrian's death became a devastatingly slow injury, shards of hurt surfacing sometimes unexpectedly decades later the way pieces of shrapnel emerge from soldiers' wounds years after they have been hit."

p. 170, during the civil war in Rhodesia, "On the way home, Vanessa and I fought over who would have Olivia on her lap.... Until Mum (sitting in the front with her Uzi pointed out the window) swiveled around and threatened to swat both of us unless we settled down, shut up and looked after the baby. After that we got serious and put Olivia on the seat between us, below the level of a window so that if we were ambushed, a bullet would have to go through the Land Rover door and one of us before it could ever reach our baby. There was an unspoken rule. If we were all going to die, it would be in this order: Dad, Mum, Vanessa, me, and then unthinkingly last but only over all of our dead bodies, Olivia."