Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief. Frank Kafka
I was lead to the above quote from an interview between the author of this book and her translator Sophie Hughes – the author saying “That’s why I wanted to make an experience of Hurricane Season. It seemed to me that the only possible way to communicate this particular story, even if that meant grabbing the reader by the throat and roughing her up a little. But then that’s exactly the kind of books I like, the ones that are like a natural disasters, the ones Kafka said were like axes for the frozen sea within us”.
Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.
The reading of this book was particularly appropriate as I read it in the second half of May:
- Two weeks after the time of the year when the main events of the book are set (in early May);
- Two weeks before the start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season (which gives the book its name – see below – and whose fallout – like many natural and man-made disasters - occupies a large chunk of my working life)
- And in a week which I should, except for the Coronavirus, have spent working in Mexico – visiting Mexico City and Monterrey.
This book is set in a very different Mexico to that which I visit – both socially/economically and geographically. This book is set in the vicinity of a lightly fictionalised Gulf Coast Veracruz, in a town wracked by poverty, corruption and crime and misogynistic/homophobic language and violence. The book is not so much set in that society but infused with it – particularly with the language and violence and that makes the book an extremely uncomfortable read – a book that (picking up on Kafka’s quote) wounds and stabs the reader’s sensibilities.
And it is a book which has its origins (appropriately) in a natural disaster – landslides following a 1978 Hurricane (a fictionalised mash up I think of the timing of Tropical Storm Bess and the impact of Hurricane Earl, which would have impacted the author’s place of birth exactly as she was writing the book). These landslides cause the death of the town’s witch leaving her child orphaned.
And the remainder of the book traces the origins of a man-made disaster – the discovery of the murder of that child (now themselves known as The Witch), tracing it by way of a series of lengthy chapters: the first of which traces the story of The Witch, and the remainder those caught up in her murder starting with Yesenia (who sees her hated, drug-addled cousin Luismi and another local waster carrying the Witch’s body into a truck driven by Munra, a crippled drunkard, married to Luismi’s prostitute birth-mother). The other chapters are narrated by: Munra; Norma an under-age girl who takes refuge with Luismi after prolonged sexual abuse from her own stepfather leads to her falling pregnant (with the narration also hijacked by Luismi’s mother Chabela); the second waster – Brando.
The chapters are written in a breathless style – each a single paragraph, relentless both in their repetition and forwards momentum and in their uncompromising and language and description. With the exception of the Brando chapter, which I felt tipped too much into gratuitousness and rather marred the overall experience of the book, I overall felt that the propulsive way in which the author wrote overcame the repulsive manner of the actual words and subject matter, so that against my better judgement I was drawn into and through the story to emerge as though from a disaster – feeling fortunate mainly to have survived and roughed up by what I had read....more
Now shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Re-read following its deserved (and predicted below) Booker longlisting.
I loved this book aNow shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Re-read following its deserved (and predicted below) Booker longlisting.
I loved this book as much on a second read as a first - its omission from the Booker shortlist was simply to the detriment of the prize.
Once upon a time …. Rami Elhanan, a Jew, a graphic artist … father too of the late Smadar, travelled on his motorbike from the suburbs of Jerusalem to the Cremesian monastry in the mainly Christian town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, to meet with Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Muslim . father too of the late Abir, ten years old, shot dead by an unnamed Israeli border guard in East Jerusalem, almost a decade after Rami’s daughter Smadar, two weeks away from fourteen, was killed in the western part of the city by three Palestinian suicide bombers ..
This brilliant book, surely a serious contender for the 2020 Booker Prize, is a “hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling, which like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination”.
At its heart is the true story of Rami (and Smadar) and Bassam (and Abir)
One Thousand and One Nights is an explicit inspiration not just for the storytelling of the book (and the way in which that storytelling in some ways keeps the girls alive - tragically here only in memory), but for its fascinating structure. It is told in 1001 number paragraphs – firstly counting up to 500 and then back down.
The first half of the novel has as its narrative underpinning, the journey Rami takes on his motorbike to the meeting above, a meeting at which Rami and Bassam do what they do around the world – tell the stories of their daughter’s deaths, of their own mental journeys and of their plea for dialogue, understanding and peace.
Memory. Trauma. The rhyme of history and oppression. The generational shifts, The lives poisoned with narrowness. What it might mean to understand the history of another. It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.
The second half is underpinned by Bassam’s journey home after the meeting.
The middle part is the two lengthy, and powerful accounts, that Rami and Bassam give at the meeting – accounts which we have already largely pieced together from the first part of the book, and which are then further explored on in the second half, but which are set out here in full detail.
From the accounts and the book we get a strong sense of the kinship that Rami and Bassam have reached through their tragedies.
Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together – not including the original number itself – the sums of their divisors equal each other …. As if those different things of which they are compromised can somehow recognize each other.
All of the above would make for a memorable and powerful piece of writing – however what also makes it exceptional literature is the way in which the 500 sections take elements of the stories of Rami and Bassam as a point to weave a web of connections, connections which then in turn give us a deeper understanding of their stories.
These connections draw on modern and ancient history, geography, ornithology, mathematics, language, science, politics and so much more.
Borges said to his listeners that One Thousand and One Nights could be compared to the creation of a cathedral or a beautiful mosque … Their stories had been gathered at different times, in myriad places …and from different sources …[they] existed on their own at first .. and were then joined together, strengthening one another, an endless cathedral, a widening mosque, a random everywhere
It is really hard to do justice to the book and the way in which these connections are both scattered and then gathered together – sometimes via symbolism, sometimes bringing in the terrible reality of violence, and sometimes juxtaposing the two.
But perhaps one example will give an idea.
A terrible section tells of the work of Zaka Orthodox paramedics to gather up body parts after the suicide bombing which kills Smadar – the paramedics have to return to pick up an eyeball (of one of the bombers) spotted by an elderly man – Moti Richter. The eyeball has parts of the optic nerve attached and reminds Richter we are told of a “tiny old fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling”. Via discussions of eye surgery, we go to the hospital where Abir is dying and Bassam is asked if (were the worse to happen) he would consent to an eye transplant. Via rubber bullets (one of which killed Abir) we visit the death of Goliath, the mushroom effect of suicide bombers. The book explores the tightrope walk of the high wire artist Phillipe Petit (the subject of one of the author’s earlier novels) across Jerusalem, following in the path of a cable used by the Jewish forces to sneak supplies over hostile territory in the 1948 War. Moti was a guard for this cable – and at night would patrol under the cable to ensure it was still working on a motorcycle (which in turn reminds us of Rami’s journey) which had its headlight disconnected – and which sat by his bedside “with its wires dangling”.
Are these too many connections - not for this reader, and for me the concept of connection, of the constant search for commonality, of the need for unceasing dialogue - is absolutely crucial to the solution for peace that underlies the message of Rami, Bassam and this novel. The quotes above all show that.
Ultimately no connection - and the resulting increase in empathy and diminishing of enmity - can be too many. Something the book’s title (a countably infinite sided polyhedral) acknowledges.
At one point McCann discusses “The Conference of the Birds” (a story incidentally which is the second crucial inspiration for Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte”) – a story in which a long journey seeking enlightenment ends with the birds finding only their own reflections – an analogy I think for Rami and Bassam’s realisation that only recognising something of your own reflection in “the other” will ever really bring peace, as a bumper sticker on Rami’s motorcycle says “It will not be over until we talk”
And a final example – a lengthy section discusses the journey of an Dublin born Irishman – Christopher Costigin in 1835, tracing the River Jordan from the Sea of Gaillee to the Sea of Salt (Dead Sea), a rather foolhardy and ultimately doomed attempt to explore the region. This novel, by another Dubliner, another attempt to explore and understand the land via journeys is in my view anything but a foolhardy and doomed attempt.
One final comment on the structure of the book. The page numbering (and some comments I have seen from the author) almost imply that the book could be read backwards - which given its travel underpinning of the journey to/from the talk, would mean something of a chronologically backward reading.
Actually I think that would be appropriate. One of the many points that the book makes is that to understand current day conflict you have to return to historical roots - this is as true in Israel (for example a crucial point in Bassam's journey towards peace is when he watches a holocaust film in jail and suddenly realises what drove the Jewish need for a homeland) as for the Irish conflict analogies the author (understandably given his background) frequently draws, as in this passage (imagined as George Mitchell's thoughts).
Eight hundred years of history here. Thirty-five years of oppression there. A treaty here, a massacre there, a siege elsewhere. What happened in ’68. What supermarket was torched in ’74. What happened last week on the Shankill Road. The bombings in Birmingham. The shootings in Gibraltar. The links with Libya. The Battle of the Boyne. The march of Cromwell.
Very highly recommended.
There may be books in 2020 which give an equally brilliant literary treatment to an equally powerful story and with an equally important message. If so then 2020 will be a vintage year for literature.
My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley...more
Update: Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
now winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the second time for this authUpdate: Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
now winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the second time for this author and winner of the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction - perhaps not surprisingly given the tragic way in which the terrible events this book portrays are now (more clearly than ever) not a thing of the past, but reflect present day reality.
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Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book award and was longlisted for the Booker prize – but as well as its literary prize recognition it gained a number of nominations for Science Fiction prizes and won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award.
That book, in simple terms, told a familiar story in an unfamilar way.
The sadly familiar story was of brutality on Southern American slave plantations. The unfamilar way was by turning the “Underground railroad” used to describe the route slaves took to escape, into a physical railway connecting cities and states with different variations on race relations. He used this Gulliver’s Travel style device to trace not just the history of black slavery in America, but to relate it to race relations across American history up to the present day, and to draw on other analogies including the Holocaust and even Slavery in Republican Rome.
The author’s latest novel is perhaps best described as also examining the legacy of slavery and the practice of racism in America, but by doing the opposite - telling an unfamiliar story in a familiar way.
The story is of a Florida based reform school Nickel, whose pupils or inmates, often sent there for minor offences, are subject to forced labour for the state (and via corruption for the staff of the school), savage beatings, rape, punishment cells and in some cases unexplained disappearances (believed to be after fatal beatings followed by burials in unmarked graves). Although white and coloured boys are sent to the school, they are strictly segregated and the coloured boys subject to particularly harsh treatment.
Whereas Whitehead’s previous book relied on fantasy – what is particularly shocking about this book is that it is a very light fictionalisation of a real school – the Arthur G Dozier (or Florida) School for Boys - with a lot of the events and descriptions based on the recent testimony of victims. Perhaps even more shockingly the events portrayed are not from the 19th Century but the late 1960s. On one level I was shocked to not be aware of these practices – but Whitehead himself only became aware in 2014 and I think that the choice to make this at core a relatively conventional (by his standards) novel is simply because the story is one that simply needed to be told and further is deeply impactful without need for embellishment or a new literary perspective.
Where the author does round out the story is in two ways.
Firstly by bringing in the words and teachings of Martin Luther King and examining the challenge of living them in practice. The main protagonist in the story Elwood, starts the book listening repeatedly to a LP of King’s sermons and speeches and follows the Civil Rights movement passionately – plotting how he can get directly involved using his educational prowess. Already though he finds in an incident that doing what seems right and maintaining racial solidarity can lead to a clash. Later, just when he is on the verge of educational involvement, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time (hitching a lift in a car which was stolen) leads to him being sent to Nickel. There he both witnesses and personally experiences racist brutality and stark injustice. He struggles to come to terms with how to forgive those oppressing him and by doing to resist their racist agendas. Even then he retains a belief in justice and is convinced that even if the boys cannot help themselves, others will come to their rescue when their plight is known (he imagines the National Guard taking over the prison). His views are contrasted with the more cynical and world weary Turner – the secondary character in the novel – who gradually befriends Elwood.
The second is in a modern day framing device for the novel – examining, with a twist, the lasting impact of Nickel on the lives of those staying there and the gradual exposure of the practices in the 21st Century. This part of the novel (and the historic denouement that contextualises it) also shows what happens when cynicism is challenged by principle, as well as when idealism is confronted by reality.
Through these two areas I think the author’s secondary purpose is revealed - to challenge the current generation with their reaction to racism: e.g. for the woke generation that the liberal use of hashtag and retweets may not equip them when they themselves are victims of institutional racism.
Recommended. My thanks to Vantage for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given itNow shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given its closing words
this is about being together
A book I have read and loved three times so I was delighted to be present for its win and to get these photos
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When hearing the winner announcement I immediately thought of a passage very early in the book when it says
Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it"
At the Foyles/New Statesman Booker Winner reading on the Thursday of the award I asked the author if she had also reflected on that passage when the announcement was made and how it applied to her own situation.
Her answer was: that she had in fact been reflecting on it for some time (including when she was completing the book), but crucially that when she first started writing the book she did not think it was true for her at all - she did not expect any positive reception from the mainstream as she did not think it had moved far enough or the book would be seen as topical enough. However the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements shifted the ground significantly in her view and meant that the mainstream was ready for a black woman writing about black women.
MAIN REVIEW
The book is written as a series of twelve chapters, each featuring a named character.
These characters are Black (although in one case not aware), British (although in one case no longer thinking of themselves as such) and Female (although in one case no longer identifying as such)
They are however of different age, sexuality and sexual identity, formative experience, family unit structure (both parental unit and their own family unit), ethnic make-up, ancestral origin, shade, region, occupation, cultural background, class, and degree of activism (as well as journey along the activist/conventional spectrum over time).
This is a novel of polyphony, polygenetics, polygenderism.
But crucially it was not one that at any time I felt was a forced attempt to represent diversity but more of a natural attempt to examine the core shared identity of the characters alongside their differences and their journey; and more crucially an attempt to give visibility to black British women in literature.
The author has described the style she chose to adopt here as “fusion fiction” – a fluid form of prose poetry, with a dearth of conventional sentences with capital letter openings and full stop endings
I found this style very effective – form matching content, style matching theme. Evaristo has always been someone who challenges convention in art (as captured in Amma – the most autobiographical of the characters). The fluidity of the prose enables her to range within the characters thoughts and across time, and between stories and characters.
The characters are grouped in four sets of three – with clear and immediate links between the characters in each set, but less obvious and emerging links between the characters in different sets.
The first set has Amma (a provocative theatre director), her daughter Yazz (studying literature at the UEA) and Dominique (now based in the US but at Amma’s original partner in disrupting theatrical culture).
The second Carole (who pulled herself from difficult origins, via a Maths degree at Oxford to a banking job in the City), Bummi (her mother) and La Tisha (her one time schoolfriend now working in a supermarket as a young Mum of three children by three absent fathers).
The third has Shirley (a friend of Amma’s since school, now veteran teacher whose greatest project as a teacher was Carole), Shirley’s mother Winsome (now retired in Barbados) and Penelope (a now retired colleague of Shirley’s who resented the increasing multi-culturalism of their school for many years, while secretly struggling with finding out on her 16th birthday she was a foundling).
The last has non-binary Megan/Morgan (they are a social media influencer and activist), Hattie (their great-grandmother, a 90-something Northumberland farmer) and Grace (Hattie’s mother).
Thee are only the main characters though and Evaristo also brings in the backstories of their parents, their closest friends and even the parents of their closest friends.
She has said in an interview ”At one point I thought maybe I could have one hundred protagonists. Toni Morrison has a quote: ‘Try to think the unthinkable’. That’s unthinkable. One hundred black women characters? How can I do that? I need a more poetic form. Now there are only twelve main characters.” and while adopting the poetic form the novel still retains strong elements of her centurion ambitions.
And the backstories are important I believe in what the author is trying to achieve. From the same interview: ”Even though I don’t have a protagonist who’s a young teenager, a lot of the characters went through that stage. So you have a sense of who they were as children, how they became adults, and then how they are as mothers. I’m deeply interested in how we become the people we are. Coming from a radical feminist alternative community in my 20s, and then seeing these people in their 40s and 50s, I’ve seen people become extremely, almost, conservative, establishment, having lost all the free-spiritedness, oppositionality and rebelliousness of their younger years. To me that’s fascinating. When I meet young people today and they are a certain way, I think: ‘You don’t know who you’re going to be.’ That feeds into the fiction. How do we parent our children? What are our ambitions for our children? How does that link to how we were raised? How does gender play out?”
Amma is perhaps also the most central character - and it is in the after-party on the opening night of her first play at the National Theatre “The Last Amazon of Dahomey”, that the various characters and their stories converge and interact (Carole as her partner is a sponsor of the National, Morgan invited to review the play by tweet for example).
A final epilogue reveals a final link via an examination of hybridity of origins and finishes with the quote with which I open my review.
I found this a strong novel – there is polemic and challenge, but also warmth, humour and self-awareness.
Carol’s idea of bed-time reading includes
“also monitoring the international news that affects market conditions, the weather conditions that affect crops, the terrorism that destabilizes countries, the elections that effect trading agreements, the natural disasters that can wipe out whole industries”
which could simply not be closer to my own work-related reading, but she also comments
“and if it isn’t related to work, it’s not worth reading”
which could simply not be further from my own view of literature – and a book like this is why wider reading is worthwhile.
At the after-party we are told:
a five-star review has already been uploaded online from one usually savage pit-bull of a critic who’s been uncharacteristically gushing: astonishing, moving, controversial, original
Well as my profile picture shows I am more Golden Retriever (incidentally one such Humperdinck features as Penelope’s loyal companion – “always there for her, always eagle for a cuddle, who’ll listen to her for hours without interruption .. greets her as soon as she steps in the door”) than savage pit-bull of a critic (although I have my moments) but five stars from me....more
Finally rewarded for its brilliance as the winner of the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award having already won the 2020 Folio Prize but having bFinally rewarded for its brilliance as the winner of the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award having already won the 2020 Folio Prize but having been previously discarded at the shortlist stage for the Booker and Women's Prize.
Now longlisted for the 2019 Booker, interestingly alongside one of the other Women’s prize books that I reference in my original review.
As i had already read 10 of the longlist (with two unavailable) at the time it was announced I decided to re read them all in turn. I really enjoyed the experience of a re-read of what I think is an excellent longlist, but in almost all cases felt that I was simply repeating my earlier reading experience. In this case though a second read revealed new aspects of the book, or perhaps more accurately opened the possibility to read the book in different ways concentrating on different aspects. I feel that a third read would allow new aspects to be considered. The re-read also highlighted (see my conclusion below) more of the triumphs of the book and diminished some of the flaws (albeit they still remain). I sincerely hope that the judges have a similar experience when considering their choice of shortlist.
I also enjoyed reading the many interviews that the author has given about the book
I felt that by reading and reproducing samples of them I was documenting my own archive around the book.
REVIEW 2 - INTERVIEW QUOTES
One thing I found interesting was that my experience of reading the book, breaking off to read her non-fiction book and then returning to the fiction, seemed to exactly mirror the writing experience.
I started writing Lost Children before I wrote Tell Me, which was an appendix that grew out of writing Lost Children. I stopped writing Lost Children for about six months when I realized I was using the novel as a vehicle for my political frustration and rage, which is not what fiction does best. So I stopped and wrote this essay instead. Once I had been able to do that, I could go back and continue writing something as porous and ambivalent as a novel.
I enjoyed on a second read understanding the importance of documentation and storytelling: the various archives, the family sharing their own story as a family unit, the mother desperate to represent the story of the Laos Children, the Father sharing the story of the Apaches, the Mother keen to emphasise the historical and present day interaction of America and Mexico, the stories the family listen to in the car, the pictures the boy takes and the recording he makes to preserve the story for his sister knowing that their family unit is to break up, the stories the lost children share in the elegy chapters, the different approaches used by the Father (recording all sounds using a boom microphone and gradually allowing a story to emerge, including looking for echoes of the past) and the Mother (using a handheld microphone to record specific sounds in line with a pre-imposed narrative).
I decided on this method because the novel is essentially about ways of documenting, ways of telling, and ways of creating an archive—whether truthful or fictitious—to hand a story down from parents to kids, from kids to kids, and from kids to parents. Everyone in this novel is creating an archive to tell a story they want to tell in their own way
I see Lost Children Archive as a book primarily about storytelling, the way we compose narratives, and how those narratives may or may not become the way we make sense of the world. We use narrative to make the world less horrifying, for example, or more beautiful. Within that, I wanted to explore the way parents hand stories down to their children, and how children unexpectedly hand those stories back to their parents.
To me, the most important part of the novel’s architecture is the fact that the boy tells his story into his mother’s tape recorder, wanting to pass it down to his sister, because she’s too young to remember. But the mother will hear the story first, since it’s her recorder. The novel is her telling the story of their trip, and then receiving it back
It has to do with the form the narration takes… like an ethics or aesthetics of storytelling. It was important for me that the woman had this conflict that arose from observing her husband engage in documentation, that she both criticizes and admires the kind of freedom he has in his way of composing stories.
He has a more atmospheric approach. He walks into a room and holds up a mic and allows things to come. Maybe he is more confident as a storyteller in that sense, as an audio or a sound artist, to record everything and allow that to slowly form a story. She is playing with a much more controlled approach.
And I reflected more on the voice of the children and especially the boy. For all the criticism of this voice, including in my original review, it is clearly one that the author has taken care over. It’s also clear to me that she has drawn heavily on real experience.
In particular I enjoyed the link and contrast with “Tell Me How it Ends” where her first and main engagement with the issues underlying both books was by taking children’s stories and translating them into adult terms to be fit for court. Here she is trying to use a child’s perspective to translate and make sense of adult stories.
The boy was just at the right age in terms of allowing me an entry into a voice and an imagination. He's a very smart boy, and well-read and sophisticated, but he sometimes uses words completely out of context and in many ways is still small. And because the brother is also addressing his younger sister, his voice is directed. It's almost epistolary in its nature. It's got that closeness and that warmth because he's telling his sister a story
I don’t remember when I knew, only that at some point it became very clear. I had known for a while that I wanted a different voice, not only the mother’s. I thought about the husband, but then I decided they had talked enough. Also, it’s important for the novel that you never get his perspective. His silence is a source of the kind of speculation that I’m interested in as a reader. Next I thought about the girl, but it seemed to me that giving voice to a five-year-old was really dangerous. The novel could too easily become cutesy, or chaotic. It’s hard to sustain the voice of a five-year-old for too long .. A ten-year-old boy, on the other hand, still looks at the world with the curiosity and innocence that are very specific to childhood, but is already pretending to be an adult part of the time. Not pretending. Ensayando ser adulto. Ten is an age where I could sustain the narrative while handing the book’s thematic material over to the boy’s gaze and voice.
Also, to be very honest, I had a lot of help from children when writing this particular novel. I would literally interview the children in my family about the way they would react to certain circumstances, like: What would you do if you were lost? What would you be most scared of? What would make you feel some comfort? If you ran away, what's the first thing you would do? I conducted very serious interviews in my family, with nieces, nephews, my children.
Sometimes I would read out loud to kids in my family the parts about the kids only or narrated by the boy. And I would get a lot of backlash sometimes. [Laughter] Like, "No, Mama. That wouldn't happen at all." Or my nephew would give me important instructions on how one might eat a prickly pear in the desert.
Not only that, but then I had also been talking to children in court for a very long time. I had been translating their immigration stories, interviewing them in order to find lawyers that would defend them from deportation. Now, after that, I've been teaching a creative writing workshop in a children's immigration detention space.
So I've been surrounded by children's imaginations and stories for a very long time in a very deep way, but these particular kinds of stories, as well
ORIGINAL REVIEW
What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread, sometimes absentmindedly, other times in a kind of rapture, recording it; and now I am reading parts to the boy. And then there’s also the story of the real lost children, some of whom are about to board a plane. There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.
I originally read this book due to its long listing for the 2019 Women’s Prize.
The Women’s Prize longlist is always marked by its mixture of the entertaining (if lightweight) and the ambitious (if not always successful).
And on a 2019 longlist that includes explicit Mer-otica as well as a light hearted examination of how siblings bonds hold up when one sibling draws post coital inspiration from the Black Widow Spider; this book represents, alongside Milkman, the most formally and thematically ambitious entry.
I approached the book with some trepidation: I was familiar with the ARC reviews of some very respected Goodreads friends who had pronounced it a strong disappointment despite its worthy subject matter; and I ranked my only previous experience with the author’s writing The Story of My Teeth as 1*.
Starting this book though I was immediately taken with: the breadth of ambition exhibited; the literary and meta-fictional conceit involved - including the archives, the embedded literary and lyrical references; and the writing which was at once lyrical (with beautiful descriptions) and harshly self-examining (of the disintegration of the author's marriage).
Albeit conscious of simultaneously feeling that the novel was simultaneously: teetering on the edge of being overly-worthy and politically correct in ambition; pretentious in its conceit; over written (particularly when describing or voicing the narrators children, who seemed to temporarily age five years each time they were actively involved in the narrative).
I was also (and remain) uncomfortable at the constant repetition of blasphemy in the mouth of a five year old, for crude comedy effect.
I would say that a reading of that essay is essential to any full appreciation of the novel. A fundamental part of the novel is the concept of textual embedding and referencing and the essay forms the ur-text for the novel - with background facts, characters, incidents, images and expressions from the essay being repurposed throughout the text of the novel.
The essay I feel also explains one of the key messages behind the novel - the idea of the refugee crisis being the consequences of a shared hemispheric war in which the United States governments of all shades has participated over a half century or more. While the coda to the essay makes the author’s horrors at the election of Trump plain, the essay and novel are set in the Obama administration and that the author’s own decision to get personally involved in the crisis was precipitated by what she sees as a deliberate and callous legal act by that administration.
One of the justifiably controversial aspects of the book, notwithstanding its endorsement by Tommy Orange, is its treatment of Native Americans as a historical people, vanquished by the iniquity of the “white-eyes” (rather than as a modern day community living with the long lasting consequences of that history).
Partly I think this is simply factual - the author’s ex-husband (and by extension the narrators husband at the time of the novel, as their marriage disintegrates) is obsessed with the fate of the last Indians to be conquered and the road trip around which the novel is based is motivated partly (in the novel) but entirely (in fact) by his desire to research the places where the last of the Apaches were captured and taken. But I also felt that it enables the author (a Mexican seeking at the time of the essay a Green Card) to explore again the idea of shared responsibility for a tragic hemispheric war - the novel explores the equal role of the Mexican government in the war on the Native North American’s, and reminders that the area now North of the border in which the novel is set, was then part of Mexico.
The ending of the book – as the story within a story (a story which to add a further layer of meta-ness draws its text from a series of other novels; and which also draws parallels from the child migrant journeys back over many centuries to the Children’s crusades) merges into the real story added a real power to the novel.
Overall I still retain some of my ambiguities about the book - for much of the time as it read it I felt it could be a heroic failure, I think I ended concluding it was a flawed triumph.
And it is to the author's credit, and a sign of her continual self-evaluation that she was aware of many of the potential pitfalls in this novel.
Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really [bad] results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation ............ who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry