Like her character Amma, whose voice is the opening chapter for this novel, Evaristo started out as a playwright and political/cultural acti4.5 stars
Like her character Amma, whose voice is the opening chapter for this novel, Evaristo started out as a playwright and political/cultural activist. I sense that this background - of experience, creative approach and concerns - informs and shapes this novel on every level. The author’s choice to write the novel in free verse, with no punctuation, is only occasionally ‘poetic’; instead, it is direct, vivid, conversational and accessible. I wasn’t even aware of ‘reading’ - the experience was more like being exposed to auditory performance.
The really outstanding quality of this book is its ‘voice’ - or more accurately, chorus of voices. I was hugely impressed by Evaristo’s ability to make each separate voice so unique, strong and believable.
Although each ‘voice’ or chapter could be read as a stand-alone, a large part of the charm and interest of the novel is in the way the voices are blended together. Evaristo creates a symphony from each difference voice (instrument); the separate stories blend and harmonise, and at times one voice alters our perception of the voice before. This book is a master class in perspective, particularly in the case of the mother/daughter characters: Amma and Yazz, Carole and Bummi, and Shirley and Winsome.
The author is also quite unflinching (and humorous) about the messy, complicated, nuanced truth of women’s lives. Most of the characters are what (as a convenience) might be described as ‘black’ - although the majority of the characters are mixed-race, and their backgrounds vary a lot in terms of ethnicity, culture and age. Without ever blatantly stating this as being the case, the entire novel seems to serve the idea that not all ‘black’ women are the same, and yet there is something specific to black women’s experience.
Evaristo definitely has her finger on the pulse of contemporary culture in London, but her understanding of the past is equally strong. Many of the strongest characters in this book are the older ones - first-generation immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa, and also a fascinating mixed-race character whose family history in England stretches back to the 19th century. She’s certainly not the first author to put black women at the front and centre of the story, but this is a very entertaining and worthy addition to the canonical pantheon of writers including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou and other strong contemporary voices like Diana Evans and Oyinkan Braithwate. ...more
In the 2016 Afterword to this book - this epic, this almost unbelievable true story - author Thomas Keneally describes his attraction to the story of In the 2016 Afterword to this book - this epic, this almost unbelievable true story - author Thomas Keneally describes his attraction to the story of Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden (the 1200 Jewish people he saved during the Holocaust). There is the ‘Holocaust itself’: a fantastical reductio ad adsurdum of a culture of race-hate, (that) seems as much akin to sci-fi as to actual history.. There is the the ‘Holocaust as moral template’: in other words, how would ‘I’ react in similar circumstances? Would I be brave, or cowardly? Brutal, or kind and generous? Then, there is the character of Schindler himself. As Keneally states, and shows throughout the narrative, Schindler was a ‘joyous, hectic pragmatist’ who operated at the very heart of the SS regime. Despite this, he subverted Nazi doctrine in every way possible, at enormous risk to himself, and managed to employ, take care of and even rescue more than a 1000 Jews. Although his kindness may have started out as casual, and even self-interested, it developed into a consuming passion. Through a combination of guile, charm, luck, and a fortune in bribes, Schindler managed to pull off the unlikeliest of rescues - including reclaiming 300 women who had already become trapped in the death vortex of Auschwitz. This rescue alone has no other equal or equivalent.
When I was visiting Krakow in December of 2019, I toured the former Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik (German Enamelware Factory) which Schindler owned and operated from 1939 to 1944 with his ‘highly skilled’ Jewish work force. These days the factory is a museum describing Krakow during the days of the Second World War, but with the greatest emphasis on Oskar Schindler and the Jewish experience. When I was there, I overheard a teacher telling her teenage students that they mustn’t be quick to judge the inhabitants of WWII Krakow: whether Polish, German SS or Jew, there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and plenty of people somewhere in between. I thought of her words so many times as I was reading this book, because in addition to the flawed hero at the centre of the story, there are so many examples of people of every ethical gradation. There were systems, and systems within systems. There was a great deal of black marketeering. There was, above all, a desperate desire to survive. The highlight of my visit to the former Enamel Factory was watching a film in which several of the war’s survivors, Schindler’s former employees, described what it was like to be taken in to the relatively safe harbour of Schindler’s employment and care. Making it onto Schindler’s List was your best chance of survival in a country which collaborated with the destruction of 90% of its Jewish population.
It’s a fascinating, compelling book - it is a story, as Keneally says, more ‘morally complex and affecting’ than anything he could have invented. It is not without its difficulties, though, and I don’t refer only to the horrific subject matter. The enormous cast of characters, the German terminology, and the very complexity of reality (as opposed to the neater structure possible in fiction) make it a difficult story to follow at times. It’s very easy to lose the thread, and I couldn’t always keep track of all of the characters, no matter how hard I tried. Keneally’s narrative voice is not that of straightforward biographer, either. At times, the story unfolds in the present tense, almost in the form of a fly-on-the-wall ‘you are there’ perspective. Dialogue is inserted whenever Keneally could reasonably do so, and he makes clear in both the Foreword and Afterword that he has built up the story from the detailed testimony of many people who were still living in 1980, when he first began researching Schindler’s amazing and unlikely story. It’s a complicated, intricately detailed, crazy quilt of a book - unique, and unforgettable.
I purchased this book in the bookshop of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland on December 17, 2019. ...more
This book took me an inordinate amount of time to read considering it is only 348 pages, and it required at least 5 minutes of staring glassy-eyed at This book took me an inordinate amount of time to read considering it is only 348 pages, and it required at least 5 minutes of staring glassy-eyed at my computer screen before I decided to give it this mediocre and wholly inadequate 3 star rating. I’ve read a lot of books, but this one was truly unique - and that is both a good and bad thing. It has an excessively stylised narrative technique, and although that technique manages to capture the paranoid, under-siege mentality of Northern Ireland in the 1970s (during the height of ‘the Troubles’), it also manages to be extremely difficult and often tiresome to read. There is almost no storyline, the characters are given a sort of ‘code’ name instead of a real name - for instance, the protagonist is referred to as either ‘middle sister’ or ‘maybe-girlfriend’ - and the first-person POV is just weirdly indescribable. Although the plot trajectory did have a logic and consistency to it, it was also highly tangential and full of fanciful free-association and stream-of-consciousness moments. It somehow managed to be both fresh and repetitious, humorous and morose, startling descriptive and often just discombobulated. I had to make myself finish it, and there were moments when I just longed for it be over, and yet I cannot help but think it was an interesting reading experience. ...more
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
At the beginning of this sli“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
At the beginning of this slim, incredibly compact novel, there is a discussion that takes place in an A-level History class. Tony Webster and three of his friends - one of them who will commit suicide not many years later - debate what 'history' actually is as a concept, and whether it can ever be described as an accurate or realistic record of what actually happened. Subjectivity, the lapses of memory, the unreliability of evidence, the unknowability of crucial and lost testimony - all of these will come into play during this story. I suspect that most people who have been given a good education, or who are philosophically inclined, will have already given these ideas some thought; but Barnes does an admirable job of weaving these questions into the plot of his novel. When an odd legacy - a small sum of money and a diary - are left to Tony by an former girlfriend's mother, he has to reconfigure events which took place some forty years before. Elegantly written, I thought - and engrossing....more
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