immigration

January 2, 2020

Book 214: Exit West

“His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.”

Dates read: March 9-11, 2018

Rating: 10/10

I don’t have to go too far back on either side of my family to find immigrants. On my mom’s side, my grandmother left her native Austria as a young woman, and on my dad’s side, my great-grandfather came over from Poland as a teenager. Neither were what would be considered particularly desirable immigrants: great-grandpa was illiterate in his native Polish and spoke no English at the time of arrival, and grandma was a Jewish woman without higher education at a time when America was not especially welcoming of Jewish immigrants. But arrive here they both did, and carved out lives for themselves, and started families, and here I am a couple generations later, an American writing this blog.

As long as there are parts of the world that experience war, famine, and oppression, there will be immigrants and refugees. Mohsin Hamid’s short, delicate Exit West tells a story about two of them, Saeed and Nadia, with a small magical realism twist: people move between countries through doors that appear, seemingly at random. People go through them, but they don’t come back, so you don’t know exactly where you’re going until you get there. You just know that it’s not where you are, and for many people, that’s enough. Including our central couple, young people in a never-named, seemingly majority-Muslim city. Nadia covers herself from collarbone to toe in a long robe although such attire is not mandatory…but she’s an atheist who smokes pot and is sexually active. Saeed is more traditional, but still far from devout. They meet in a class and sparks start to fly…but then so do bullets as insurgents begin to battle the government in their city, too.

Soon, they’re left with little choice but to flee if they want any hope for the future. As they enter first Mykonos, and then London, thousands of others are doing the same. Hamid tosses little side vignettes of other refugees into his story, showing how people react to the new reality: some respond with fear and violence, but others build unexpected connections. As more and more people come streaming across borders, tension between the native populations of the countries experiencing an inflow and the desperate masses who’ve arrived begin to build. But cracks begin to form between Saeed and Nadia, as they find themselves taking different approaches to life in their new reality.

There’s something fairy-tale-esque about this story, and it’s not just because of Hamid’s absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous writing. Maybe it’s in how Saeed and Nadia are given personalities, but still feel symbolic. Maybe it’s the way Hamid “zooms out”, as it were, every so often to give us a fuller view outside of their story. Maybe it’s the familiar beats of love, and loss, and a journey. Maybe it’s the undeniable sense of optimism. Maybe it’s the elegance of the narrative. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above.

I’ll admit that I was wary when I heard that this book has a magical realism element, as that doesn’t usually appeal to me. But I found myself grabbed by Saeed and Nadia, and their growing bond, and their reluctant flight from home, and their struggles to make new lives for themselves. And the device of the doors makes for a certain efficiency that works with the overall flow of the novel…like I said above, there’s a real elegance to it, every word and plot detail seems like the product of a deliberate choice to include it. So using doors allows us to skip all the tedium of the mechanical aspects of getting from point A to point B. I was both charmed and deeply moved by this book and now I need to read everything else Hamid’s ever written because this was amazing. I’d recommend this book to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Cuckoo’s Calling (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Fourth of July Creek

Three years ago, I was reading: The King Must Die

Four years ago, I was reading: Thirst

January 24, 2019

Book 165: Butterfly Boy

“I want to tell him the truth. Yes, I know this story. He’s told it to me at least three times, and each time he tells it he remembers more details. That’s how my father lies, convincing himself more and more that what he’s telling is fact, because fiction isn’t this exact and memorable.”

Dates read: August 2-5, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Since I’ve started tracking my reading for this blog, I’ve tracked particular categories. Fiction vs. nonfiction. Hard copy books vs. Kindle editions. And male vs. female authors. Like a lot of white people educated in predominantly white schools, I’ve been exposed constantly to white writers, usually male (my AP English teacher did make it a point to have us read works by black authors as well). I took it for granted until I started reading book blogs before I launched my own, and I started to really think about how many books I was reading that were written by dudes. I decided that I wanted to keep an eye on that metric…women are half the world, shouldn’t we be telling half the stories?

Turns out, I often really like books written by women! And I’ve become more and more sensitive to the number of white and heterosexual (and cisgender and able, etc) narratives I read as well. Books force us to really think about people that don’t look like us as people worth investing our time and energy in. And so I was intrigued when my book club chose Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy. I’ll admit that I was initially concerned about finding something to relate to in this memoir of a gay Latino man’s coming-of-age, but I realized how ridiculous that was very quickly. What there is to relate to is the experience of being a human growing up. Although the details of Gonzalez’s childhood and adolescence are very different than mine, the broad themes are very similar: trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be, struggling with your relationships with your parents, finding yourself in unhealthy relationships. There’s a reason the coming-of-age genre is so popular: everyone’s gone through it, so everyone can relate.

Gonzalez centers his narrative around a bus trip he takes with his father to his maternal grandparents’ village in Mexico. Gonzalez, at this time a college student, has just had another ugly, violent fight with his lover and reflects on this relationship as well as his life growing up, particularly his conflicted relationship with the man he’s traveling with. It’s a harsh life he’s led: the family’s poverty keeps them rootless, chasing unskilled labor jobs, constantly living with relatives to keep a roof over their heads. Their time living with his paternal grandparents is especially bad: his grandfather is physically abusive and rules the home through fear. Gonzalez knows fairly early on that he’s gay, and while his sexuality is mostly a topic avoided by his family, his mother encourages him to hide it from his father, so he lives in a constant state of shame and suppression.

Gonzalez’s writing is really beautiful, even as he describes brutal violence and searing embarrassment. He mostly avoids telling the reader who people are (himself, his father, his mother) in favor of showing who they are through their own words and actions. When, early in the book, Gonzalez gives his father money for two first-class bus tickets and the older man returns with two coach tickets, overriding his son’s decision about how to spend his own money, we can tell what kind of person he is. By the time Gonzalez gets to the end of his story, we understand how the ways he’s been taught to hate himself leave him vulnerable to a relationship in which he’s treated with contempt. This would probably be a very difficult book to read for people with a history of domestic violence, but I’d recommend it for other readers. Regardless of your background, there’s a story here that’s very worth reading.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think about who writes the books you read?

One year ago, I was reading: Mansfield Park

Two years ago, I was reading: Helter Skelter

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

November 29, 2018

Book 157: My Antonia

“Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Dates read: July 1-4, 2017

Rating: 5/10

There’s something very powerful about childhood friendships. My best friends are still two girls that I’ve been friends with since elementary school, even though I live on the other side of the country from them…there’s a special-ness to having history that’s shared from the time you were really young, the way you got to know each other’s parents at sleepovers, the field trips and dances and first relationships you were there for each other for. I feel like I know them, and they know me, in a way that would be almost impossible to replicate for people we’ve met later in our lives. We’ve been there with each other as we became adult people, through the fits and starts and steps backward and forward and sideways. It’s a strong bond.

In Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia, Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Schimerda, the dearest friend of his youth. They arrive in rural Nebraska on the same train: orphaned ten year-old Jim going to live with his grandparents, fourteen year-old Antonia as part of her immigrant Bohemian (Czech) family. They tread similar but not identical tracks…while Jim’s family is prosperous and steady, the Schimerdas quickly find themselves mired in poverty and struggle to make ends meet. But they live close to each other (by pioneer standards, anyways) and the two become close. Even when the Burdens move into town, Antonia’s there before long, as a “hired girl” to do housekeeping. When Jim goes off to college, Antonia stays, and even so they easily pick up where they left off when they reconnect almost a decade later.

There’s not much of a traditional story structure here. It’s presented as an adult Jim’s recollections of his friend, so it takes a loose and kind of winding way of presenting its narrative. I didn’t take much issue with that, since the book is pretty short, honestly, and not super textually rich so it’s not like it gets bogged down for the lack of standard-issue “rising action”. Where I found myself losing interest was in the last third or so of the book, in which the lively Antonia largely vanishes and we’re left mostly with Jim, who is pretty boring and whose straightforward path doesn’t have any real tension. We see the world of the novel through Jim’s eyes, but it’s Antonia who gives it its animating force. I’d argue that Cather’s strength isn’t so much her prose, which didn’t do much for me, but her characterizations. She imbues even relatively minor characters, like Otto the hired farmhand, or Antonia’s mother, or fellow young immigrant woman Lena with a verve that makes them memorable. Too bad she couldn’t do the same for her ostensible main character.

I will say that I’m glad this book was something I read as an adult instead of in high school. Teenage me would have HATED it because it’s kind of boring, and while adult me would agree on the boring part, I was able to bring more life experience to bear that improved the reading of it, for me. I’m able to appreciate the way a significant friendship can loom large in your nostalgic reflections of childhood, and the hesitancy you can feel about reaching out even when you really want to reconnect. And one thing I did really enjoy and think still is criminally underrepresented in literature is the depiction of a genuine mixed gender friendship. As someone who’s had strong, completely nonromantic friendships with men that I’ve really cherished, I feel like so often you only see those depicted as part of a family relationship or one of the two parties is gay, like there has to be some obstacle to “explain” why a man and a woman who enjoy spending time with each other would not want to sleep together. To see an actual friendship between a boy and a girl depicted as just that, in a novel published literally a century ago, is refreshing.

Tell me, blog friends…do you believe that men and women can be just friends?

One year ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Two years ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Three years ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men

October 11, 2018

Book 150: In The Skin Of A Lion

“How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art now lie like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern Avenue deciding which bunch to buy? Does this make her more magical? As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder if its meticulous construction. How did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly?”

Dates read: June 4-9, 2017

Rating: 6/10

What does it mean for a piece of media, like a book or a movie, to be “good”? Does it mean it’s artistically accomplished? Excellent on a technical level? And what point does the degree to which you as the audience enjoyed it enter into it? Should it? As someone who loves books and movies, this is a question I find myself struggling with regularly. For example, in what will likely be an unpopular opinion, I did not at all like watching Goodfellas. Objectively, it’s a very well-constructed movie and I can understand why it’s so admired. But I hated it. I wouldn’t watch it again if you paid me. Well, it depends on how much, but it wouldn’t be cheap.

I read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient a few years ago, and I felt much the same way about it as I did reading his earlier work, In The Skin of a Lion. It’s beautifully written, poetic and lush. It has powerful themes, love and belonging and the building of a major city. But I never connected to either book. In The Skin of a Lion is told in a not-quite-linear format and has a dreamlike quality. When you remember that the story is framed as though it’s being told by one person to another during a journey, this makes more sense. Its primary focus is Patrick Lewis, a man who grew up in rural Canada doing ranching and demolition work alongside his father (his mother was long since gone). The father was a solitary, taciturn man, and Patrick grows up to be much the same.

Patrick’s adult life is presented to us as the story of his relationships with two women, both actresses: Clara, who he meets when he takes a job looking for her vanished boyfriend, and Alice, a friend of Clara’s who he reconnects with after Clara has herself disappeared and after Alice has had a daughter, Hana. There are stories between and around those relationships, and stories about other characters who are more tangential to the plot, all loosely connected through Patrick.

I’ve said before that I’m a reader who tends to be drawn to character-driven stories, which means this book was sometimes a struggle for me. The sheer beauty of the writing helped me get at least something out of it, but the characters were profoundly underdeveloped. Patrick is the central character, and although he’s written as being pretty emotionally closed-off, it’s frustrating how opaque he is. The other characters are barely people at all…the women especially seem much more like plot devices than actual humans, but the men aren’t much better off. For plot devotees, there’s not much here either…what I was left with by the end of the book was less the sense of a story than a series of beautiful, haunting images. Like a Malick film.

I usually try to write my reviews of book club selections before the actual discussion so that my ideas are my ideas, but I didn’t quite make it with this one and I think talking about it with other people gave me a new frame of reference for it. There are two epigraphs introducing the book, and the one that I’ll focus on is from The Epic of Gilgamesh. When you think about this novel as consciously echoing the style of an epic, some of its shortcomings make more sense: the clunky dialogue, the characters that feel more like archetypes than people, the sense of mystery that hangs over the entire thing. It still wasn’t a book for me, but looking at it through that lens made me feel like its flaws were less egregious. If beautiful, almost poetic prose is something you’re drawn to, this will be an amazing read for you. If you like a bit more traditional story structure with strongly drawn characters…it won’t.

Tell me, blog friends…what’s your favorite classical epic? I’ve got to go with The Odyssey, myself.

One year ago, I was reading: The Blind Assassin

Two years ago, I was reading: The Life of the World to Come

Three years ago, I was reading: Unbelievable

August 9, 2018

Book 141: The Leavers

“What a relief it had been to find him, to have someone to come home to, letting the everyday concerns take over: lesson planning at World Top English and where to go to dinner, filling myself up with tasks and conversation and possessions until there was no longer space to think about you. This is what could happen in a city like this. A woman could come from nowhere and become a new person. A woman could be arranged like a bouquet of fake flowers, bent this way and that, scrutinized from a distance, rearranged.”

Dates read: April 21-24, 2017

Rating: 5/10

A few years ago, I did 23 And Me. America is, by and large, a nation of people who came from somewhere else, and I was curious where my family came from. My dad’s side of the family, especially my grandmother’s line, has been in the country for a long time and they’ve kept good records tracing our family back to the old country. But my grandfather on that same side was the son of a Polish immigrant who had no records of his family, and my mom’s side is a big question mark since she was adopted as an infant.

In Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, Deming Guo doesn’t need any help to know where he came from. Born in the United States to Polly Guo, who had herself smuggled to America to escape a dead-end life in China, Deming was actually sent back to his mother’s home village for a few years to live with his grandfather while Polly worked endlessly to try to make some headway on her debts to the loan sharks that got her to New York City in the first place. When we meet Deming, he’s in elementary school, living with his mother, her boyfriend, the boyfriend’s sister, and her son, Michael, who’s about the same age as Deming himself. Then, suddenly, after Polly starts talking about maybe moving to Florida for a job in a restaurant instead of the crushing grind of the nail salon she’s been working in for years, she disappears. Already economically strapped, Polly’s boyfriend and his sister can’t afford to keep Deming with them for long, and he’s soon adopted by a pair of white upstate professors, where his new parents dub him “Daniel”, ostensibly to help him get along easier in the overwhelmingly white town he finds himself in.

We next catch up with Daniel in his early 20s, back in NYC and doing musician gigs after he dropped out of college because of an online poker problem. He’s crashing with his bandmate, Roland, the only other person of color that he went to school with, and trying to figure out how to avoid going back to school like his parents want him to. He’s never found out what happened to his mother, but after a chance reconnection with Michael, his curiosity is reawakened. As he starts to pursue the issue, the perspective changes and we get Polly’s story…how and why she came to have Deming, how and why she came to America, and what actually did happen when she disappeared.

I never DNF (do not finish) books, but if I did, I would have dropped this one after about the first 50 or so pages. While the way his childhood played out would give anyone emotional scars, Daniel himself is not an enjoyable character to spend time with. He’s whiny, he steals money from his friends, he’s a coward. I really did not enjoy reading about him. But when the story switched to his mother, the book took off. Polly is a dynamic, interesting character who practically springs off the page, and her story is easy to get emotionally invested in. I wish Ko had either started with more of Polly or just made her the primary focus of the book overall…starting with Daniel seems like asking to lose a decent chunk of your audience straight out the gate.

And to miss this book entirely would be a shame. Although it’s uneven, there’s really solid stuff here. Like I said, Polly’s story is a great one: she’s a fantastic character and her struggles to make it are compelling. Ko also had me cringing in recognition at the way she painted Daniel’s adoptive parents and their friends, who adopted a baby girl from China…the self-satisfied pats on their own backs for helping their children “connect with their culture” through food and dance classes, the way Deming is renamed like he’s a puppy they picked up at the pound instead of a person. By the end, Ko has developed Daniel into a more understandable character and I came around to appreciating the book, but it really makes you slog through some bad (not even just like challenging, but bad) content to get there.

Tell me, blog friends…does a bad beginning turn you off a book entirely?

One year ago, I was reading: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Two years ago, I was reading: The Lords of Discipline

June 21, 2018

Book 134: Chemistry

“Ninety percent of all experiments fail. This is fact. Every scientist has proven it. But you eventually start to wonder if this high rate of failure is also you. It can’t be the chemicals’ fault, you think. They have no souls.”

Dates read: March 18-21, 2017

Rating: 7/10

When I was in middle school, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I had always been the kind of kid for whom “bad behavior” most directly translated into “mouthing off”, and I loved to play devil’s advocate, and I was stubborn like an ox. I was captain of the mock trial team in high school, and I really thought being a lawyer was exactly what I wanted. Until I got to law school, which I hated. And then started practicing, which I hated even more. Figuring out that I needed to go another way is a decision I’m constantly thankful I made.

Coming from an adult perspective, I think it’s silly that we expect 16 year olds to have any idea what they might want to do for the rest of their lives. I think of myself as being pretty smart, but it turned out what I was sure I wanted to do at 16 was incredibly wrong for me. And the protagonist (never named) of Weike Wang’s Chemistry is in kind of a similar boat. Pursuing a Ph.D. in, of course, chemistry at a prestigious New England university, she has a bit of a meltdown as her experiment fails to produce results. Although she does love the field, she begins to question her choices about everything in life as she takes time off of her program.

There’s not a lot of “plot” in this book, really. The protagonist is trying to decide what to do about her long-term relationship with a fellow chemist who has proposed to her but she’s not sure she wants to marry, trying to figure out how to support herself without her graduate student stipend, being there for her best friend through pregnancy and early motherhood and marriage crises, and figuring out when and how and if to tell her Chinese immigrant parents that she’s not in school anymore. It is this last matter that most preoccupies her, and much of the book is made up of her recollections of her childhood, of her parents’ relationships with each other and with her, of the pressure she feels to succeed in the ways that they value in order to validate their sacrifices.

Stories like these illustrate the power of “own voices”: an Asian-American woman telling the story of an Asian-American woman. A lot of non-Asians look to them as a so-called “model minority”, hard workers somehow naturally gifted at math and science. Of course the reality behind that is more complicated (it’s as much a result of the kinds of immigrants that tend to leave Asia behind to travel to America as much as anything else), and Wang pulls back the curtain on what might seem like a neat little family of a scientist, a housewife, and their scientist daughter to show the internal workings that are just as messy as anyone’s home life.

That being said, evaluating Chemistry on its novelistic merits reveals a book that is good but not great, and quite obviously a debut, though a promising one. Our nameless narrator is at times rather formless, and mostly reacts to the events around her rather than being proactive. She’s very unsure of herself after breaking out a track that she found herself in more than chose, and while that’s understandable, it makes her hard to really get enough of a feel for to connect with much. But Wang’s writing is sure and emotionally true, and I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially to 20somethings that are wondering if they’re on the right track.

Tell me, blog friends…did you end up doing what you thought you would at 16?

One year ago, I was reading: The Year of Living Biblically

Two years ago, I was reading: Song of Achilles

March 8, 2018

Book 119: Snow

“It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come- in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

Dates read: January 18-22, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When someone asks me if I like the movie Goodfellas, I never know what to say. It’s a well-directed, well-acted, well-told story, so I think it’s a laudatory work of film and I admire its accomplishments. But I didn’t actually enjoy watching it and I have no desire to do so again. It’s one of those weird things that happens sometimes for media in all forms, for me. I’ll find something to be a significant piece and worthy of praise, but that doesn’t mean I always actually like it.

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow falls into that weird, middle-ground territory for me. It’s a well-crafted tale, rich with context and layers of meaning. But I didn’t actually enjoy reading it all that much. From a third-person narrator point of view (we’ll get to that later), Snow tells the story of Ka, a Turkish poet who has spent much of his adult life in political exile in Germany, newly returned to his home country for his mother’s funeral. When he hears from an acquaintance that a beautiful former college classmate, Ipek, is freshly divorced, living in a border town called Kars, he finds himself a pretext to visit there to see her. The pretext is that there’s been a recent wave of suicides among devout Muslim young women, who have been forbidden by government policy to wear their headscarves, and he’s there to investigate.

The snow is already falling thickly when Ka arrives in Kars, and it ends up closing off the community over one long, turbulent weekend in which there are assassinations, coups, and police brutality. There are several storylines, all interwoven tightly: the community debate over headscarves, Ka’s courtship of Ipek, Ka’s suddenly rediscovered inspiration to write poetry, Ipek’s relationship with her sister Kadife, both of their ties to a wanted terrorist, the poverty and desperation of the men in Kars, the hope and idealism of the boys at the Muslim high school. The theme of the tension between the West/secularism and the East/religion is pervasive, coloring all of the events of the novel.

Which turns out to be a story within a story, as we find out that the tale of Ka’s time in Kars is being told by his friend “Orhan”, based on Ka’s own written recollections. It’s a little bothersome that although the conceit is that the story is being told by a third party, the narrator seems omniscient more often than not, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What is more bothersome is that there is none of the characters is particularly well-developed, or to me, identifiable. Ipek is the embodiment of the virgin/whore dichitomy, either idealized or compared to a porn star. The terrorist, Blue, is constantly described as compelling without much in the story to make the reader understand why. Even Ka, though he is the center of the narrative, remains at a frustrating remove. Like Turkey itself, he’s neither completely Eastern nor completely Western and vacillates between the two. He doesn’t know his own mind, and it makes him hard to get a hold of as a character.

But the writing and structure is lovely. It’s a little snowglobe of a story, and effectively creates the air of emotional claustrophobia that anyone who’s been stranded (by snow or flooding or ice) for a few days can understand. I’m not sure that the third-party narrator is as effective a device as it could be, but I got a wry, frustrated smile out of plot machinations that mean that we never actually get to read one of Ka’s inspired poems…it lets us just imagine how great the poems must have been without putting Pamuk under pressure to write something magnificent. This was a book club selection, and proved divisive for the most part: there were several people who loved it and just as many who completely hated it, with only very few (like me) falling in between. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it based on my own experience of it, but maybe you’ll completely love it like some of my book club friends?

Tell me, blog friends…do you read literature in translation often?

One year ago, I was reading: Housekeeping

Two years ago, I was reading: American Gods

February 22, 2018

Book 117: Americanah

“Ifemulu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.”

Dates read: January 10-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Every so often, a thread pops up on Reddit asking people who’ve come to the United States from elsewhere what surprised them most about this country when they got here. The answers are usually fairly similar: our obsession with germs and our “personal space”, our loudness, how big the country really actually is, tipping. I always enjoy reading these kinds of things because I’m always curious about how what seems very natural to us can seem bizarre to people who grew up elsewhere and I try to keep it in mind when I myself travel elsewhere: what seems odd to me probably seems perfectly normal to them. Just because I think of something as “the way things are” doesn’t mean it’s the way things are everywhere.

Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born-and-raised protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, experiences this kind of cultural whiplash twice: once, when she transfers from her university in Nigeria to a small college in Pennsylvania and then the second time, fifteen years later when she decides to return to Lagos. That Ifemelu is black and only really experiences what it’s like to be black in a predominantly white world once she gets to the United States, as well as the gap between African-Americans and Africans in America inspires her to start a blog about race, which becomes a major source of income for her and helps earn her a fellowship at Princeton. Once the fellowship is over, she shuts down her blog, leaves her longtime boyfriend, and prepares to go back to Nigeria.

She’s nervous about going back, not so much because she doesn’t have anything lined up there but because it means she’ll be back in the same place as Obinze, the man she loved in high school and college but is no longer in touch with. Adichie uses one of my favorite framing devices to structure her novel: she begins with Ifemelu just before she leaves the US, shows us how she got there through flashbacks, and then proceeds forward. I love getting some information but not all of it right up front: it makes me intensely curious to find out how the situation we first encountered came to be. I hate mystery-style books where all the “answers” are backloaded…it makes the rest of the book feel like it’s treading water before the payoff at the end. Those just leave me annoyed by the time I get to the end, but unwrapping the narrative layers one by one keeps me hooked. And Americanah had me like a fish on a hook.

Not only is her story structure one that I personally respond well to, but Adichie’s writing is absolutely magnificent. I marked what feels like half of the book because she has a such a knack for taking feelings that you have or you recognize and phrasing it in a way that hits you right in the gut because it’s so dead on and perfect and you never thought about it like that before. And I loved the way she wrote Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship, from their charmed young love to the reason for their separation and that Adichie isn’t afraid to give them new partners, partners they experience happiness with even. There’s context and nuance, not just to their relationship, but to their lives. The whole book explores shades of gray, no one is either a saint or a villain. They’re people, trying hard and messing up and trying again. I think one of the most important things about reading is its potential to increase empathy, to see people outside of the ones like you as having the same kinds of hopes and dreams and fears as you even if their experiences don’t look exactly the same. This book is a beautifully written examplar of that exact principle. It’s completely fantastic and I totally loved every second of reading it and I recommend it highly.

One year ago, I was reading: The Bear and the Nightingale

Two years ago, I was reading: The Twentieth Wife

October 12, 2017

Book 98: Border Child

“But this third pregnancy felt similar to her first, with daily morning vomiting, and the constant taste of bile lingering in her throat. Perhaps this baby, like Lilia’s first, would be a girl child. Little Alejandra would be almost four now. Is almost four now. She is almost four, Lilia told herself. Is, not would be.”

Dates read: October 12-15, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Like pretty much everyone else in America, I’m descended from immigrants. On my mom’s side of the family, the most recent immigrant was my grandmother, from Austria. On my dad’s, it’s my great-grandfather, from Poland. I have my whole family tree mapped out on Ancestry, I like digging into it and finding passenger lists and marriage certificates and thinking about how many people through history making certain moves at certain times that it took to end up with me, here and now. It’s kind of miraculous, when you think about it.

But the historic, boats coming into Ellis Island type of immigration that white people tend to think about isn’t the reality of immigration as it exists today. There’s a whole complicated series of visas, or, for some people from south of the border, there’s a fraught experience of smuggling oneself across the Rio Grande in the desperate hope for a better life. It’s the same reason our grandparents and great grandparents came, but it’s a different way of trying to make it happen. And it’s a tragedy during such a border crossing which underlies Michel Stone’s Border Child.

Hector and Lilia are a young couple in a small village in Mexico, the parents of a toddler son and an as-yet unborn baby. But they’d once had another: their firstborn, a daughter named Alejandra. Both Hector and Lilia had wanted more than what their rural town had to offer, and so Hector had himself smuggled to the US. Lonely and impatient, Lilia took Alejandra and attempted to cross herself. She was separated from the girl, and while Lilia made it, Alejandra vanished. They lived in the US a while anyways, ultimately being deported after a few years. They have their son and Lilia becomes pregnant again, and they try to move on, but a chance encounter with the one person who might be able to help them find out what happened to Alejandra leads Hector on a dangerous journey across the country to find out.

One of the reasons I read is to explore worlds outside of the one I experience as a married middle-class white lady in the US in this day and age. I picked up this book hoping for insight into the situation that drives people to try to cross the border, why they risk so much just to get into the country and try to stay. What I got was…not that. While it does get a little bit into what drove Hector and Lilia north in the first place, the book as a whole is just not very good, honestly. Neither of the main characters is given much depth, and the prose is flat. I’ve always understood one of the fundamental principals behind good storytelling to be to show rather than tell. Stone does exactly the opposite…he never lets a moment breathe, always has to put what should be subtext directly into text. There’s no subtlety or artistry to it, and it’s never more than a workmanlike reading experience. I was disappointed in this book, and wouldn’t recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…which of your ancestors was the most recent to come into the country where you live?

One year ago, I was reading: The Life of the World To Come

Two years ago, I was reading: Unbelievable

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