Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo

They say if you have nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all. I usually abide by this adage, but not today.

Certainly you’ve heard about the scandal surrounding 2019’s Booker Prize, which was split for the second time between two winners: Margaret Atwood for her Handmaid’s Tale sequel, The Testatments, and to Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. (The first time was in 1992 for Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.) Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the prize, and there were many (myself among them) who felt this monumental (albeit embarrassing) moment was somewhat shrouded by the twinning of the award. To me, the split felt unnecessary. Does Atwood need another accolade of this sort (and the privileges that accompany it) for her duly praised dystopian tale, now entering its 35th year? The answer is no. Evaristo, on the other hand, has written eight books and had yet to receive international acclaim, yet has been touted as an exceptional writer and a longstanding advocate for writers of colour in the UK.

So, it is armed with this empathy that I began to read Girl, Woman, Other. I was immediately confounded by the scarcity of punctuation and found myself tripping over the abrupt line breaks (an awkward attempt at poetic meter). I would have put it down immediately if it weren’t for the promising structure: twelve stories of Black British women organized in trios. If I found one story stereotypical and hollow, perhaps the next would inch that much closer to authenticity, is what I told myself. Reader, it did not happen. There are many problems with this text, mainly that Evaristo is attempting to encapsulate certain types of Black personhood with which she appears to have no familiarity. The stories take very strange turns, most notably (spoiler alert) an affair between a mother and son-in-law. With about 100 pages to go, I saw no path forward and gave up. All the same, I can appreciate Evaristo’s ambition, even though it falls short of its potential. There are very few moments that I believe the characters, mostly when they are older and Nigerian, and if that’s not an exhortation to write from your own experience, then I don’t know what is.

Lot - Bryan Washington

Bryan Washington’s Lot, is a stunning debut collection of ten short stories. A love letter, of sorts, to Houston, each story speaks to the quiet, mundane moments of his characters’ lives.

Everyone around me could not seem to stop speaking about this book. Its size (very small) discouraged me. I thought, I’ll read it at some point, I have larger books to get through right now. But, I devoured Pachinko in less than a week, and found myself needing something short to cleanse my palate. Enter Lot. As much as the stories are about Houston (each one named for a neighbourhood or street in the city), Washington does not force his characters to become tour guides. I have no sense of what to expect should I ever find myself in Houston, but instead walked away from this book with fragments of an ordinary Houstonian’s memories.

The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O'Connor

In an effort to keep myself accountable, I thought I’d share quick thoughts on the books I read over the next year.

The first book I read was Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. I picked this up from my favourite bookstore for several reasons, including its endorsement as a staff pick, but especially because the protagonist is a Classics professor. Unfortunately, I found the translation (from German to English) poor and distracting. I made it through the first chapter before deciding to put it down.

The next book I read and actually completed was The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor. Wow, do I love FOC’s writing. I haven’t read any of her work since my undergraduate days, but I was convinced to pick this novel up after reading Hilton Als’ essay This Lonesome Place, featured in his Pulitzer Prize winning collection White Girls, which contextualized this particular FOC novel in the unreconstructed South, and shared new (to me) insights on her engagement with race.

Photograph by Joe McTyre / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / AP

Every single sentence is in its perfect place. The story is curious: a mad preacher dies of old age, and his great-nephew, who he kidnapped as a child, is left alone in the outskirts of the city. The nephew is infected by a need to baptize a relative of his – a parting gift from his late great-uncle. The rest is about Christianity, mental illness, familial violence and relationships, disability, and race relations in the American South. There are no women, and when they are mentioned by male characters it is done with contempt. Still, the characters and their inner monologues are haunting.

Illustration of Flannery O’Connor by Charlotte Strick & June Glasson.