8 minute read
THINGS THEY LOST by Okwiri Oduor
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
when he’s finally supposed to accompany Jane to a social event in his role as pretend boyfriend, he flakes, sending not so much as a text to explain his absence. As the story unfolds, O’Leary provides backstory about the connections between Joseph and each woman as well as revealing what happens to each relationship following the catastrophic Valentine’s dates. Readers will try to connect the dots to determine how the three women are related, if at all, and whether any of them really belongs with Joseph. While the story starts off as though it’s a romantic comedy, the content gradually shifts, and a clever twist toward the end may leave readers feeling they’ve read a thriller more than any sort of romance. With thoroughly likable characters—even Joseph becomes appealing—this plot-driven novel is fast-paced and engaging throughout. Full of both humorous and heartwrenching moments, the novel is packed with the perfect mix of contradictions to keep it engaging.
An expertly plotted romantic surprise about self-forgiveness and second chances.
AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS
Ono, Masatsugu Trans. by Juliet Winters Carpenter Two Lines Press (184 pp.) $16.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-949641-28-8
A dreamlike story about an unnamed family beside an unnamed forest. The narrator of Ono’s latest novel to appear in English refers to his young son, who wants to watch TV, and his wife, pregnant with their second child, but none of these characters receive names. Nor does the country where they live—not their native country—or the language they’ve learned or the refugees the narrator eventually sees tramping through the forest. And yet the lack of names is the least of this mysterious novel’s many puzzles. More obscure are the time frame and the plot. What has happened when? At one point, the narrator and his pregnant wife visit a cake shop—but is she pregnant with their first child or their second? Or is the narrator alone, his wife having gone to her family home to wait out the pregnancy? “I can’t remember what we bought that day or whether we left without buying anything,” he says. “[Those] memories, too, have become doubtful. It’s possible that it was a single event, mixed and rolled out over and over.” Ono’s prose, elegantly translated by Carpenter, is deceptively simple. His references range from Darwin to Mozart. But while the marketing copy helpfully explains that this is a novel about “climate catastrophe,” it’s difficult to know what, in the end, to make of it. The narrator’s son brings home an old woman who quickly disappears. The forest is rumored to be full of imps who steal children—and also mail. The mailman seems to have fangs. How all these details connect to one another—and whether they do—is anyone’s guess.
Beautifully written but puzzling to the point of opacity.
MIRROR MADE OF RAIN
Patel, Naheed Phiroze Unnamed Press (255 pp.) $26.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-951213-60-2
Addiction dominates a comfortable Indian family and pushes its daughter to the edge. Patel’s debut is a dark, unhappy story of alcoholism and a broken motherdaughter relationship. On good days, Noomi Wadia’s mother, Asha, “could be amazing,” but such days are rare since Asha lost her second child and, subsequently, her mental health. Now she’s an alcoholic, dominating the lives of Noomi and her father, Jeh: “My parents’ marriage is destroying them, slowly, like termites eating a house.” Noomi, 23, has grown up lonely and rebellious, blaming her parents, struggling in her own relationships, and tempted by alcohol, too. Eventually she will break free of her home in Kamalpur and move to Bombay, where she works as a journalist and meets Veer, the man she will marry. When we next encounter Noomi, she’s arriving in New Delhi with the ever tolerant Veer, to meet her future-in-laws. But, as in the preceding sections, Patel undermines her story with overemphasis, juxtaposing Noomi against casts of twodimensional secondary figures—corrupt businessmen; mean, spoiled, and critical female elders; and contentedly privileged male peers. This heavy delineation coarsens the storytelling, sapping sympathy for its beleaguered central character, who will struggle with her own alcoholism, depression, and hard choices. At times Patel demonstrates a graceful descriptive style, but it’s her tendency to accentuate that predominates, even during a redemptive—and not quite convincing—conclusion.
A shortage of nuance drains impact from a painful tale.
TAKE MY HAND
Perkins-Valdez, Dolen Berkley (368 pp.) $24.30 | April 12, 2022 978-0-593-33769-1
It’s 1973 in Montgomery, Alabama, and when a Black nurse realizes her young patients are being shockingly mistreated, a lawsuit reveals the systemic horror taking place. After graduating as a nurse, Civil Townsend starts work at a family planning clinic in pursuit of her dream of empowering poor Black women. Civil is assigned two young sisters, 13-year-old Erica and 11-year-old India Williams, as off-site patients—she’ll visit them at home periodically to give them injections of Depo-Provera. Civil becomes deeply invested in the Williams family, helping them move out of their squalid sharecropper cabin into an apartment and helping the girls’ widowed father find a new job that doesn’t require him to be literate. But soon Civil’s ex-boyfriend Tyrell Ralsey tells her
