I enjoyed her book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, so I thought I’d try more. This one is historical fiction and written with a voice that’s “of the time.” That’s a voice that does not hold my attention right now, so I’m passing on this one!
Did anyone else find themselves thinking, this book was obviously written by a woman? The insight, compassion, awareness of and caring about others’ mental states; the continental-scale sense of tragic loss... presented as first-person narrative by a sixteenth-century former merchant? I couldn’t buy it, and the incongruity kept jarring me out of my reading experience, and I’m 100% OK with that because damn, what a story and what a writer.
What struck me most is Lalami’s gift for negative space: expressing a complex swirl of feeling without a single term of emotion or often without even a direct reference. Much of the writing is declarative—it would be easy to dismiss as a simpleminded journal—but the depth is in the context, in what she doesn’t say but the reader’s heart nonetheless aches in knowing the rest of the story:
[The Zuni elder] fell silent. He leaned back against the wall, thinking …
Did anyone else find themselves thinking, this book was obviously written by a woman? The insight, compassion, awareness of and caring about others’ mental states; the continental-scale sense of tragic loss... presented as first-person narrative by a sixteenth-century former merchant? I couldn’t buy it, and the incongruity kept jarring me out of my reading experience, and I’m 100% OK with that because damn, what a story and what a writer.
What struck me most is Lalami’s gift for negative space: expressing a complex swirl of feeling without a single term of emotion or often without even a direct reference. Much of the writing is declarative—it would be easy to dismiss as a simpleminded journal—but the depth is in the context, in what she doesn’t say but the reader’s heart nonetheless aches in knowing the rest of the story:
[The Zuni elder] fell silent. He leaned back against the wall, thinking about everything I had said, but his face darkened as he reached his conclusions. Let the white men come if they wish, he said. We have fought intruders before, we can do it again. At these words, his deputies nodded in agreement. The town of Hawikuh was not a settlement that could be taken without a fight, and they were prepared for it.
The tale of a European voyage of exploration to the new world as told by someone who cannot participate in the European myth of discovering the new world.
Very good imaginative treatment of the story of an enslaved North African member of a 16th c. Spanish expedition.
