“A young African girl with seerlike awareness of the past comes of age....A joy to read.” things they lost
A TRAIL OF CRAB TRACKS
Nganang, Patrice Trans. by Amy B. Reid Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $30.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-374-60298-7
A complex, sometimes didactic story of war and remembrance by Cameroonborn novelist Nganang, who calls himself “Caretaker of the Republic” in this book’s acknowledgments. “What is a world with no utopia worth?” So asks a man named Ouandié, the leader—in life as well as in Nganang’s latest novel—of a guerrilla army fighting first the French colonists of Cameroon and later rival ethnic groups. The question is one that arises, in various forms, throughout the narrative. Nganang’s story opens in snowy New Jersey, where an academic named Tanou lives with his family. His father—who, Tanou comes to understand, bears a different last name from his—has come from Cameroon to live with them, leaving his own family behind, and now, it appears, he is suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. There’s more to his forgetfulness and “secretive nature” than that: Nithap, renowned as a doctor in his homeland, has much that he’d like to forget as a veteran of a vicious civil war in which horrible atrocities were committed by both sides—and which Nganang portrays in graphic detail to drive home the terror of the time. When Tanou travels to Cameroon, he begins to follow the “trail of crab tracks” of Nganang’s title, which refers both to an arcane script developed to represent the language of the Bamileke peoples of western Cameroon and to the symbol adapted by Ouandié’s rebel army: “The UPC’s mistake,” observes one woman, “is that they chose the crab as their party emblem! The ant, that’s what I would have said, or termites, even. But the crab! The most egotistical of all animals!” As Tanou teases out his father’s difficult past, he learns that conditions in his native country have scarcely improved since independence, still riven by corruption and tyranny, and that the young people he meets are eager to resume the struggles of old. An effective continuation of Nganang’s project to capture his country’s history.
THINGS THEY LOST
Oduor, Okwiri Scribner (352 pp.) $26.99 | April 12, 2022 978-1-982102-57-9
A young African girl with seerlike awareness of the past comes of age. Before Ayosa Ataraxis Brown was born, no more than “a wriggling thing, unbound, light as a Sunday morning thought,” she was granted access to the traumatic, layered memories of her mother’s past. Fittingly, a
kind of strife has always marked Ayosa’s relationship with her mother, Nabumbo Promise, a mercurial photographer who shares her daughter’s willful spirit and is disturbed by the girl’s preternatural knowledge. Now almost 13, Ayosa lives alone in the small village of Mapeli Town in a manor that belonged to her great-grandmother—an Englishwoman named Mabel Brown whose wealth spurred the town’s founding—while Nabumbo Promise disappears on work assignments for months on end. As Ayosa awaits her mother’s return with a mix of love and anger, ever wary of body-snatching wraiths that might impersonate Nabumbo Promise, she whiles away time with the enigmatic neighbors—Sindano, the owner of a visitorless cafe, and Jentrix, the town’s apothecary—who provide clues into the Brown family’s deep links with the town’s traumas; she also forms a powerful bond to free-spirited Mbiu, a motherless girl who observes Ayosa through the manor’s windows. Nabumbo Promise returns at last, but her relationship with Ayosa grows thornier as the two clash over the painful rifts in their relationship and Nabumbo Promise begins to detach from reality. Debut author Oduor renders this fantastical world so tangibly it almost leaps off the page—a feat aided by her stunning language: A hornet’s nest is an “enormous papery capsule writhing above them, full of murder and full of nectar”; Ayosa experiences “nights where her body unravel[s] from itself like yarn from a spool.” There’s a complex emotional current animating Ayosa’s relationship with her mother as the two vacillate between disdain and desperate, intense love, lending the narrative a sense of momentum and depth. Though sometimes strained by an abundance of colorful characters, this novel is lively and original; it is a captivating journey from start to finish. A joy to read.
THE NO-SHOW
O’Leary, Beth Berkley (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | April 12, 2022 978-0-593-43844-2 After three young women are stood up by the same man on Valentine’s Day, they each embark on elucidating journeys of self-discovery. The novel opens on Valentine’s Day in London as Siobhan, an attractive and successful life coach, waits at a restaurant for Joseph Carter. Though previously she would have said he was just a fling, a breakfast date on Valentine’s Day suggests they might be moving to a new place in their relationship. At least, that’s what she thinks until he fails to show up. Next we’re introduced to Miranda, an adventurous arborist who climbs trees for a living. She’s supposed to meet Joseph for lunch, but again, he fails to appear. Finally, there’s Jane, a quiet young bookworm who volunteers at a charity shop and clearly has a secret in her past. Jane has lied and told her co-workers that Joseph is her boyfriend simply to put an end to their constant attempts at matchmaking. Joseph had been game to play along, except that |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 april 2022
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