2022 RTT Quarterly: 2nd Quarter: April-June Outcasts and Castaways

2022 RTT Quarterly: 2nd Quarter: April-June Outcasts and Castaways

work in progress , sorry for the inconvenince...

This is one of those themes that can easily take off in all directions, centering on the refugee experience. The definitions I saw for each were rather narrow. Outcast: peopled exiled on account of community norms and Castaways :cast adrift or thrown away often by accident .

I remember our 6th grade teacher read A Man Without A Country* about a man during the civil war who was so angry about his home country,that he cursed it saying I never want to hear anything about the United States ever again. The did oblige him; he was on a ship for 50 years sailing from place to place. He did this all to himself,and was given just what he asked for- placed on a ship for 50 years with no news given. He lost everything. He was an exile, a castaway, with no place to call his own. Theres a moral there, and if I recall no one had much sympathy for him

Right now our world is filled by people through no fault of their own have lost every thing and trying just to survive. Exiles, castaways, Refugees, what ever, This theme is dedicated to them

I'm looking forward to getting recommendations on this theme and thought I would share some of my own. I would highly recommend the first two.

When stars are scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed. Memoir. A graphic novel about two young brothers who flee Somalia and grow up in a refugee camp in Kenya.

I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish. Memoir. A doctor living in Gaza.

Palestine by Joe Sacco. Memoir. A graphic work by a journalist who spent months in Gaza and the West Bank at the end of the first intifada.

Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam. A girl is sent to live with various relatives while her father is at sea.

The hungry tide by Amitav Ghosh. A subplot deals with the Marichhapi Massacre of refugees in the Sundarbans, India in 1979.

Say you're one of them by Uwem Akpan. Some of the short stories deal with refugees, including "Luxurious Hearses" set in Nigeria.

The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari. Memoir. The author escaped Sudan by walking to Chad with other refugees.

A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan by Nelofer Pazira. Memoir. Growing up under Soviet occupation then fleeing the Taliban.

The best we could do : an illustrated memoir by Thi Bui. Memoir. A graphic novel by a woman who fled Vietnam as one of the boat people.

The farming of bones by Edwidge Danticat. About the massacre of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic in 1937 and the aftermath.

Six months in Sudan : a young doctor in a war-torn village by James Maskalyk. Memoir. Doctors Without Borders working with refugees in Sudan.

Strength in what remains by Tracy Kidder. Memoir. A refugee from Burundi who, through the kindness of strangers, goes to medical school in America.

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury. Palestinian refugee in Lebanon.

Kindertransport by Olga Levy Drucker. Children fleeing the Holocaust.

Wandering star by J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Story of Jewish girl living in exile in France and Palestinian girl in refugee camp.

excellent list! I read I shall not hate, which was very powerful and think it should be read by people who probably wont/

Heres a taste of selections you might be interested in

I Am An Island by Tamsin Calidas
The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex.
Life of Pi
The Refugees by Viet Than Nguyen
Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid
The Late Homecomer
The Wrong End of the Telescope

Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration and Exile

I second the recommendations of The Farming of Bones, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey, and Exit West.

I'm currently reading Travelers by Helon Habila, which is narrated by a Nigerian immigrant to the United States who accompanies his American wife to Berlin and meets African refugees while he is there. I'll post a review of it in this thread.

Some additional recommendations off the top of my head:
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
A Good Fall: Stories by Ha Jin
The Illusion of Return by Samir El-Youssef
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Monsieur Linh and His Child by Phillippe Claudel
Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town by Warren St John
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
What Is the What by Dave Eggers

ETA oh my, I apparently used parenthsis for the touchstones; Duh, doen't work. Heres what I meant to say

yes to Devils Highway I found it an eye opening read surprisingly coz I live an hour away; r BTW also consider hummingbirds daughter wonderful novel about a time when 'immigration' was not such an issue

I do recommend On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, as it deals with two generations of Vietnamese refugees, the narrator's mother and grandmother, as well as the effects of this immigrant status on the narrator himself.

Without intending to, I've been reading a book that's perfect for this theme a couple of days before Q2 even starts...

On a similar kind of theme, although in a completely different register, another book that would fit in very well here is Judas by Amos Oz.

This is the second of three loosely-linked books by Goytisolo on the theme of exile:

Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (1970; Cátedra edition 1985; Count Julian) by Juan Goytisolo (Spain, 1931-2017) edited by Linda Gould Levine (USA)

  

Count Julian of Ceuta is supposed to have been a 7th century Christian Visigothic ruler who facilitated the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by forming an alliance with the Muslim invaders, and has thus established himself in Spanish tradition as a notorious betrayer. As Goytisolo wryly notes, recent historians seem to be in broad agreement that, assuming he ever existed, he probably had another name, didn't live in those times, and didn't necessarily betray anyone. But, all the same, Goytisolo, a left-wing, gay, Spanish writer, living in political exile in Tangier and frequently attacked in the Franco press for his "treacherous" and "unpatriotic" ideas, feels an affinity with Julian, and in this novel he develops his fantasy of a reconquest of Spain by the Moors, which will sweep away the hypocritical ideas of Spanishness cultivated by Franco and the Catholic hierarchy.

Goytisolo's point, of course, is that it's absurd to speak of any kind of set of ideas, genes, or physical or moral characteristics that make up the "Spanish character". Even the famous "Olé" of the bullfight is an Arabic borrowing ("wa-l-lah"). You can be Spanish without being a stoical, Catholic Francoist, but you can't be Spanish without owing a great deal to the Moorish part of Spanish history.

It's a complicated book, full of — amongst many other things — linguistic games; multi-level parodies of texts from the Golden Age, the Generación del 98, and the Franco era; grotesque or sordid sex-scenes; an idiosyncratic rebellion against the tyranny of "full-stop-capital-letter"; snakes that are never just snakes; the uncensored version of Red Riding Hood; a James Bond film; a certain part of Isabella the Catholic that has become a giant tourist attraction; and, as a recurrent theme, the topography of Tangier, with a special focus on its public toilets and bath-houses. There are lots of pages that you need to read and re-read to make sense of them (I was grateful for Prof. Levine's notes in the edition I was using), but you can't say that it ever gets boring! Wonderfully caustic and original.

Hi, I often "lurk" to get good ideas for reading! I can suggest the following with this theme:
Shakespeare's The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Robinson Crusoe, Freedom in Exile by the Dalai Lama, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and Golding's Lord of the Flies. I think I'm going to read the aforementioned, so I think I will go with the Life of Pi which has been languishing on my shelf for months or years!

Maybe for form’s sake, since quite a few of the books mentioned above fall outside the remit of Reading Globally, I should just put out a reminder that this group is meant to encourage us to go and look for books from outside the main English-speaking bits of the world. If you want to talk about books from US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand here, then of course no-one’s going to attack you for it, but we should try to keep to the “global” focus as far as we can.

For instance, instead of/as well as Robinson Crusoe you could read J M Coetzee’s Foe;
Instead of/as well as The Tempest you could read Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest;
Etc.

Ya know that may be my fault, since my intro included English speaking authors . I forget where I am sometimes when posting. I'll try to make a better focus on global after this.

>11 thorold: gotcha! Didn't think of that!

Just went back and edited my earlier posts above, to make the thread more in tune with reading globally!

here's one that kidzoc recommended else thread

Travelers
by Helon Habila

>15 cindydavid4: Given Mark's comment in >11 thorold: I wasn't completely certain that Travelers fit the spirit of this theme. Helon Habila is Nigerian, but, according to his Wikipedia page, he is currently teaching at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The main character is a Nigerian graduate student in the United States, although most of the novel takes place in Germany and other European countries. If it's deemed acceptable I'll write a review of it and post it here.

>16 kidzdoc: oh ok Sorry about

>15 cindydavid4: >16 kidzdoc: I don’t think we need to be too pedantic about the rules. If the book seems to you to fit into the RG ethos, i.e. it’s written from a perspective that’s outside the “main English-speaking zone” as we’ve defined it, then by all means discuss it. If we “ban” postcolonial writers who happen to teach at US universities, we wont have many left.

I think Ellbogen fits the theme, as it is a story of a young woman of Turkish descent who is neither at home in Berlin nor in Istanbul where she instantly stands out as a "Deutschtürkin". But it didn't really work for me, it was too much general teenage narcissism and "everyone hates me, so I hate the world" for me and not so much a consequence of being part of minority discriminated against.

ETC

Think I will read by the sea not only for this theme, but also for the Indian Ocean theme - since Iv been readig about Zanzibar elsewhere

I’ve been digging around a bit into tagmash lists that might be relevant to the theme (I’ve often found this a good way to track down interesting books):

(1) https://www.librarything.com/tag/castaway,+fiction — the obvious one, brings up a lot of the books already listed here. A few that caught my eye, might be worth following up:
— Friday or the other island by Michel Tournier — a French reworking of Robinson Crusoe from the sixties
— The island of the day before — an Umberto Eco novel I never got to, although it seems to be one a lot of people don’t like
— Storm rider by Akira Yoshimura
— Naufragios by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca — a Spanish expedition shipwrecked in 16th century North America (not fiction, despite the tagmash…)

(2) https://www.librarything.com/tag/exile,+postcolonial — brings up a lot of the usual suspects, not all really about exile. But I think if you do any tagmash with “postcolonial” in it, you get Edward Said, Chinua Achebe and Derek Walcott.

(3) https://www.librarything.com/tag/exile,+memoir — this is a nice one, with a lot of really good stuff.
— Christ stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (internal exile in Southern Italy under Mussolini) is a gem it’s always worth re-reading
— The emigrants by W G Sebald is another longstanding favourite (but it’s a novel, not really a memoir…)
— The world of yesterday by Stefan Zweig is on my TBR, I’m hoping to get to it for this theme
— Before night falls by Reinaldo Arenas (memoirs of a dissident gay Cuban writer) is another favourite of mine

Well I love Zwwieg so i.. have to try that for sure. And I think I tried The Emigrants, probably have it on my shelf Friday looks intriging as well

This find probably doesn't work here since the author I believe is English, But this is a topic I have long explored and would like to see with new eyes (book came o ut last month) After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in ParisHelen Rappaport

>21 thorold: Interesting selections.
The Island of the Day Before is a long novel, which I made it about half way through, but there was never anything which felt compelling enough to continue, so it became one of the rare books I didn't finish once started. Who knows, I may finish it yet, but first I would have to find it.

I may go with Christ Stopped at Eboli which is here somewhere. I really must unpack the rest of my books from my move almost five years ago, but I desperately lack the wall and shelf space here that I had previously.

Arenas is someone I hadn't thought of for this theme, and I do know where two of his books are, so another possibility.

I like the sound of the Tournier book and Naufragios.
______________
At the very end of 2021 I read Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, the story of her trip out of Russia as the revolution progressed. I was taken by the idea of how she could pretend, along with all the other emigrants, that she could go back, but deep in her heart of hearts, she knew she was a refugee. I wonder how many Ukrainians are thinking the same things.

>23 SassyLassy: I should read that Teffi book. It would be an interesting counterpoint to Odette Keun’s Sous Lénine, which I read a few years ago. That would sort-of fit this theme as well, she had to make her journey across Russia (the opposite way to Teffi) after the British deported her from occupied Istanbul.

>21 thorold: I'm one of those who didn't care for Island of the Day Before nor, surprisingly, The Emigrants.

>23 SassyLassy: I have the Teffi on my shelf as well. I hadn't thought of it for this challenge.

Reading a book thats giving me a different facet of exile - in Caspian Rain the young iranian jewish girl is trying to hold her family together, while at the same time she s going deaf

"what i didnt know yet for me, being deaf would mean not only losing my hearing, but also the memory of sound...there would come a day when I would see a word on my mother's lips, know what it means, can even say it with my own voice but being unable to recall the music of it when she speaks. It would be a greater loss - this loss of memory-than the deafness itself. When I went deaf, I became an exile in my own land; when I stopped remembering sound, I felt I had never existed at all"

Helen Keller even said '"Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people,"

Anyway I was very moved by that. and think of people being isolated from others, even in the same room.

despite that, Id give the book 3* I agree with a reviewer who said this story could have taken place anywhere anytime. Very little was said about Iranian culture or about the Jewish community that lived there. Would have liked more of that.

>23 SassyLassy: Teffi is a book I think I wold enjoy reading; always been interested in the romanovs and the revolution and what happened to people afterward

Will be starting By the Sea next

>26 cindydavid4: On a similar theme, you might like My father’s notebook by Kader Abdolah — There’s a parallel story of the deaf-and-dumb father and the son who is cut off from his family and Iran by political exile, both writers of a kind, but the father writes in a language he has invented himself and the son writes in Dutch, a foreign language learnt in exile.

Very interesting, that sounds interesting Ill definitly seek it out .

I am loving by the sea! What a great storyteller, and love that he weaves the history of his home and what colonialoism did to the culture within those stories. I love the stories of each narrator, life as a prisoner and as an exile is strong here as well. This wont be the last book I read of him!

ETA just finished.The initial meeting between the two exiles is a master class in differing perspectives, esp between generations and different memories. i could see both stories being the truth. and ultimately love how they combine.

Michel Tournier became a translator and broadcaster as a fallback after failing to get an academic post in his first choice of career, philosophy. This, written at the age of 42, was his first published novel, and an immediate success, winning him the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française. His second novel, Le Roi des aulnes, won the Prix Goncourt in 1970.

(Tournier wrote a further — "better", not "abridged", he said — version of the Robinson Crusoe story for children, under the title Vendredi, ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson), in 1971)

Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday, or the other island) by Michel Tournier (France, 1924-2016)

  

Where J M Coetzee's Foe is a playful reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story informed by late-20th-century ideas about gender, colonialism, and how narratives are created, Tournier's version is — as you might expect — a philosophical exploration of where the solitary castaway stands in a post-Sartre world in which "hell is other people". Does the world have any existence outside our own perceptions if there are no other people to challenge those perceptions?

Tournier starts out with a fairly straightforward recap of Defoe's picture of the indefatigable British capitalist gritting his teeth to re-create all the elements of a productive economy — except sexuality — on his uninhabited island, then gradually subverts it, as Robinson becomes obsessed with the technology of production and creates vast excesses of agricultural products he has no use or market for. And of course his Robinson is not an asexual being like Defoe's, but finds himself experimenting with various kinds of sexual relationship with the island of Speranza herself. What could be more 1960s than X-certificate tree-hugging..?

Robinson's rescue of Friday from the human sacrifice he's been designated for is an accident — Robinson has already made the rational decision to side with the stronger party, but his bullet goes astray — but the entry of this new person into the island is the key moment in Robinson's philosophical release from his previous life. Friday starts out as the willing slave, but he has something Robinson lacks, being prepared to commit himself to projects without a utilitarian purpose — in particular, to create playful works of art. This ends up transforming the way both of them see the world. It liberates Friday to return to a new life as a full-fledged adult, and it brings Robinson into a meaningful spiritual communion with the island, free from his capitalist baggage.

wondering is sci fi/fantasy would work here?Reading the inhabited island. When this book was first publised it was banned, but some translations came out that had most of the story. This edition is the whole thing.

""When Maxim Kammerer, a young space explorer from twenty-second-century Earth, crash-lands on an uncharted world, he thinks of himself as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. Eager to establish first contact with the planet’s humanlike inhabitants, he finds himself increasingly entangled in their primitive way of life. After his experiences in their nightmarish military, criminal justice, and mental health systems, Maxim begins to realize that his sojourn on this radioactive and war-scarred world will not be a walk in the park."

>23 SassyLassy: Just received the Teffi book and reading the preface; already learned a new word "feuilleton' A small section of a newspaper or magazine devoted to essay or review or some such. This was what she was well known for. Looking forward to reading it.

Just finished Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea and I am in love with thie author! A moving tale of finding a way out, and missing home. I also appreciated the footnotes, which gave me background information. Want to read everything I can find translated. Think I'll start with Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi Like you Sassy, I thought of the ukranian refugees and the syrian refugees. Its definitely their story too (5*)

I have finished The namesake which tells the story of a Bengali couple moving to the States and bringing up a family there, not quite at home in the US and no longer truly at home in India.

My grandmother's braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Published 2019, English translation 2021, 159 p.

I like Alina Bronsky's writing: stark, concise, and darkly humorous. Baba Dunja's Last Love is a favorite, and Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is indelibly etched in my memory. In this, Bronsky's latest book, the protagonist is once again an acerbic, domineering older Russian woman dealing with dislocation, loss, and mother-child-grandchild relationships. Although not as abusive as the grandmother in Hottest Dishes, Margarita Ivanovna is not a particularly likeable character. She is manipulative, secretive, tyrannical, and sharp-tongued; yet there is something compelling in her familial loyalty and enthusiastic living of life.

Max and his grandparents have escaped the collapsing Soviet Union (another Bronsky theme) and are living in immigrant housing in Germany. His grandmother is extremely overprotective and treats Max as both stupid and sickly, neither of which is true. When his grandmother befriends a single mother, Nina, and her young daughter, their lives are irreversibly changed.

Bronsky has been described as one of the authors bringing a post-Cold War, Soviet influence to German literature. She moved to Germany from the Soviet Union in the early nineties, at the age of twelve. She writes in German and created her pseudonym to differentiate between the professional German and familial Russian sides of herself. She has said in interviews that her grandmother characters are not based on any one person, but are a composite of a type of Soviet woman. As regards the humor in her books:

“Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things,” Bronsky says. “I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.”

Bronsky's work is not for everyone, but if you like dark slice-of-life stories and sardonic wit, give her a try, if you haven't already.

***Edited: I had They Called Us Enemy here, forgetting that this is a Reading Globally theme. Have replaced it with this German book I finished last night. Sorry!

just received the Teffi plus My fathers notebook will probably read that next!

Just finished Tolstoy Rasputin, Others and Me by Teffi. She wrote many of these stories when she was in exile in Paris, from the 20s to 50s.

Didn't like it as well as Memories as that was more of a story of her escape from the revolution, didn't care for her cute stories of her childhood all that much. But was very interested in her stories about Rasputin (very surprised she managed to escape with her life) Lenin (did not know that germany sent him in a covered carreage to russia with money to disrupt the country) and other emigrants with her, trying to hold it together against odds. I can see why she was so very popular. Might try more of he books sometime, Ultimately giving thise 4.5* and highly recommend her work

nevermind

Wow, just finished my fathers notebook I am so thankful to Thorold for recommending this book, about an Iranian man, who was born deaf, but invented his own language to communicate with. His son is trying to decipher it his notebook while in exile. . I have some quibbles regarding how quickly they all learned sign language and how well they were able to use it but it doesn't matter. this is a novel, not fact, and so well done I can't help but forgive all. I know how difficult it is for CODAs ( children of deaf adults) struggle as they are often required to interpret for their parents and often feel shame and guilt ove their reluctance. In this book the son is the same, but he love for his father shows in everything he does. Of all the books Ive read about Iran this month, this book was the most informative about the culture, the revolution, the history than anything else. 5* despite my silly quibbles, highly recommended.

Outcasts in a land that used to be theirs...



Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between by Laila El-Haddad
Published 2010, 442 p.

Laila El-Haddad is a journalist, blogger, and parent who writes passionately about life in the Gaza Strip. This book is a compilation of her blog posts, article excerpts, photos, and interviews from December 2004-August 2010. Each chapter covers a roughly a year and begins with an overview of what happened both politically and personally during that time.

When the book opens, her son Yousuf is nine months old, and much of her blogging is devoted to work-life balance, trying to negotiate border crossings with a baby, and day to day life with a soon-to-be toddler. But interspersed with this are stories about Palestinian children killed by sniper fire while on UN-school grounds, the difficulties of travel in and out of Gaza (even for, or especially for, residents), and corruption. As the book progresses, more and more time is spent on the politics of life in Gaza, including the intifada, infighting between Fateh and Hamas, and the ever draconian measures taken by Israel.

Gaza Mom is a difficult book to read. It's unflinching in describing the impact Israeli occupation and control has on Palestinians, from destroying the economy, razing homes, closing the borders to even humanitarian aid, shutting off electricity and water, to the 2009-2010 outright war the Israeli's called Operation Cast Lead. There are no answers, only questions and growing resentment and anger. The situation is incredibly sad and frustrating. I wish I had read this book when it came out in 2010. It feels a bit dated now, and yet not much has changed on the ground, which is in itself telling.

I remember growing up being taught that Israel could do no wrong. Was a couple of decades later that I was shocked to find out what they the government had done and was still doing. It is incredibly sad and frustrating to realize that not much has changed, and that no one seems to be even attempting to work for change. I just have no words any more.

Hi all, found a few books that might make interesting reads

The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina by Michaela DePrince

The Lightless Sky Guwali Passarlay

Sea Prayer Khaled Hosseini

My name is Maryam Nadiya Herbish

what else has everyone been reading?

I think Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe fits the theme, as it features an old woman who returned to her native village near Tchernobyl after the accident. Some others followed her, but the people from the nearest town regard them as freaks and won't go beyond the official boundary limit.

>44 MissWatson: Just reading the section on Kazakhstan in sovietistan about the atomic testing the soviets did; the area is fillled with radiation, but they give pensions to people who move there ...No wonder the russian soldiers werent concerned when they were in Chernoble

>44 MissWatson: I love Baba Dunja.

The Bad Immigrant by Sefi Atta
Published 2022, 362 p.

Lukmon hadn't been keen on immigrating to America, but his wife, Moriam, was a force not lightly denied. She convinced him that their two children would get better educations in the US than in Nigeria, and, educated in London himself, he let himself be convinced. They first stay with his cousin in New Jersey, but soon find their own place. Moriam begins studying for the nursing credentials she needs to practice in the US, and Lukmon begins looking for a job in academia.

Moriam and the kids seem to adjust relatively easily, but Lukmon has a harder time. For him, racism in the US is a complex and pervasive force that is a constant threat to his family.

I was so prepared for being black in America that I could separate the racist from the person and deal with the unracist part of them. In fact, racism was a given now. Yes, because it was safer for me to assume white people were racist until proven otherwise. It was also reasonable to, because if I were white, it would take a lot of effort not to be racist in America. You passed someone sleeping on a street, what color was he or she likely to be? You watched breaking news about an innocent suspect shot to death by the police, well, you could easily misconstrue that black people were inferior.

As for black-on-black crime, or whatever it was called, I wasn't worried about that. I was coming from a country where practically every crime committed was black on black.

As he tries to untangle both interracial and intra-racial relationships in America, he find himself becoming isolated from his wife and children. To them, he is making everything a race issue. To him, they are denying essential parts of themselves in order to fit in.

I was winding {Moriam} up again and she was in no mood. To be honest I was nervous about meeting Alice's parents. I hoped they were my kind of immigrants—bad ones, not the kind who aspired to be honorary whites.

For most of the book, Lukmon is an observer, and the reader sees everything—race, politics, gender roles—through his eyes. It is only at the very end of the book that he acts, and it is in an unexpected and uncomfortable way.

I was very impressed with this novel, the first I've read by Atta. The writing is superb, the plot compelling, and the ideas thought-provoking. The characters are complex, with no easy passes for anyone. It's a book that begs to be discussed, and it would make a great book club selection.

>44 MissWatson: Yes, she is quite a character! I'm on the lookout for Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche now.

>48 MissWatson: I found Hottest Dishes to be a very difficult read. The protagonist is not Baba Dunja, let's just say that. I look forward to your thoughts when you get to it.

>48 MissWatson: >49 labfs39: Yes, the Baba in Hottest dishes is not exactly a sweet old granny...

---

This is a book by one exile about another set of exiles:

Jacques Stephen Alexis was a Haitian journalist, doctor, and novelist, a direct descendant of Dessalines and an important figure in the exiled left-wing opposition to the Duvalier regime. Exiled after the "surrealist revolution" in 1946 (so called because of André Bréton's involvement), he was murdered by Duvalier's secret police during a failed attempt to launch a coup in Haiti in April 1961. I read his best-known novel Compère Général Soleil a few years ago when we had the Caribbean theme.

L'espace d'un cillement (1959; In the flicker of an eyelid) by Jacques Stephen Alexis (Haiti, 1922-1961)

  

This was Alexis's last full-scale novel, intended as the first part of a tetralogy. It's basically grand opera: La Niña Estrellita and El Caucho catch sight of each other in the crowds celebrating Palm Sunday in Port-au-Prince, are smitten immediately, and provide us with some three hundred pages of gloriously passionate arias in free indirect speech before they end up in bed together. They are both Cuban exiles living in Haiti: she's a sex-worker in the waterfront Sensation Bar, with a column of US Marines queuing up outside her bedroom door; he's a mechanic and trade-union organiser in a shipyard. Alexis structures the story around the days of Holy Week and the senses, as their relationship progresses from sight through smell, hearing, taste and touch to that sixth sense that lovers are supposed to have.

Along the way we learn more than we might expect to about the situation of the working classes in the Caribbean and what should be done to improve it. Alexis does exploit the exotic brothel setting for all it's worth (including rather more male-gaze-type lesbian soft porn than strictly necessary), but he also makes it clear that the women are every bit as much exploited workers and victims of capitalism as the men in the shipyard (it's no accident that the US Navy is in port).

Fun, in the sort of way Porgy and Bess would be with a libretto by Friedrich Engels and Henry Miller...

my father's rifle this was recommended by a good friend and looking at the synopsis looks like it would fit here. I would like to learn more about the people,of Kurdistan

A book about a character who is a serial exile, by an author who is himself an Argentinian exile in Spain:

Fractura (2018; Fracture) by Andrés Neuman (Argentina, Spain, 1977- )

  

This was Neuman's reaction to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, as experienced by Mr Yoshie Watanabe, a double-hibakusha who survived the Hiroshima bomb as a child but lost all his family to the Nagasaki one. Watanabe, retired and living in Tokyo after a long business career spent mostly overseas, is an oddly elusive character and Neuman doesn't claim to get inside his head: we see him mostly through the eyes of his four ex-girlfriends (in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid) and through the Argentinian journalist Jorge Pinedo who is collating information from the ladies and is hoping to interview Watanabe but never quite catches up with him.

Watanabe seems to be a kind of serial exile, someone who has been made to feel by his hibakusha status that he doesn't quite belong in the realm of the living any more, and who also feels a serious disconnect with the Japanese culture that he has grown up in, but is never quite at home anywhere else either. Neuman has a lot of quiet fun with the successive layers of cultural and linguistic confusion observed by the women and with the things they tell us about postwar Japan as well as about fifties France, sixties/seventies New York, eighties Argentina and nineties Spain, and about the notions we have of rootedness and exile. When Watanabe travels to the Fukushima region in the closing section of the book and spends time talking to the — mostly elderly — residents who have stayed in the danger area around the nuclear plant despite the advice to evacuate, he seems to find an emotional connection that gives him a kind of closure.

A very interesting and ambitious book. I'm not sure if Neuman has quite got away with it in the way he did in El viajero del siglo — it's hard for the reader to deal with an opaque character like Watanabe, especially when the four women are all modelled in such detail, and it's disorienting in a novel to have a string of serious relationships that just stop without any kind of emotional repercussions. But it's certainly worth plunging into to decide for yourself.

I happened upon letters of transit on my bookshelves. Not sure if it was mentioned already, and while I have it on my shelves, not sure I remember reading it! This would be a good read for a long weekend I think

>53 cindydavid4: That sounds interesting!

---

More exiles:

Pélagie-la-Charrette : roman (1979; Pélagie: The Return to Acadie) by Antonine Maillet (Canada, 1929- )

  

Britain occupied the French colony of Acadia (roughly corresponding to the modern Maritime provinces and eastern Maine) during the North American wars of the mid-18th century. We learnt a lot about Wolfe and the Heights of Abraham in our school history, but not so much about the way most of the French settlers in Acadia were forcibly deported around 1755. An estimated 11,500 people — most of them families who had been farming and fishing there for over a century — were displaced to the southern colonies or the Caribbean, and up to half of them are thought to have died by accident, disease or starvation. Many of the survivors ultimately settled in Louisiana, where their descendants turned "Acadian" into "Cajun".

Others found their way back to Canada "by the back door", and it's this return from exile, the foundation of the present-day French-speaking communities in places like New Brunswick, that Maillet documents in her famous novel, which won her the Prix Goncourt in 1979.

The Acadian widow Pélagie has worked for fifteen years in Georgia to earn the money she needs to buy a cart and a team of oxen to take her family back to the North. They face endless difficulties during what turns into a ten-year journey, picking up numerous other exiled Acadians as they go, and Pélagie becomes a kind of Moses leading her people to the promised land.

Maillet gives the story a deliberately epic quality, rooted in an oral tradition, by reporting it to us as told around the hearth by people three generations after Pélagie and her companions, traditional storytellers who are Maillet's own direct ancestors. Pélagie's companions are straight out of the quest-story tradition: the wise old storyteller, the traditional healer/midwife, the intrepid young hero, the fey young girl, the (ghostly?) sea captain who turns up in moments of crisis, the giant (Rabelais is constantly hovering around in the background, not surprising given that many of the Acadians came from Poitou in the early 17th century), etc. But they are never just stock types: in their truculent arguments and witty dialogue, they come over as fresh and very individual, as does Pélagie with her mix of spiritual leader, Mother Courage and all-too-human middle-aged woman.

All the dialogue is in Acadian dialect, with the third-person narration in slightly more standard French, but still making extensive use of local words. It's intelligible with some lateral thinking, particularly if you've read Rabelais, but it's a bit of a shock at first. It took me a while to work out that Acadians use "je" for the first person plural pronoun as well as for the singular, for instance. And the dialect is clearly a large part of the book's character and one of the reasons for its obvious classic status in Canada.

And another sort of exile:

Der Reisende (written 1938; first German publication 2017; The passenger) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (Germany, 1915-1942), edited by Peter Graf (Germany, 1967- )

  

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz came from a middle-class Berlin Jewish family. He and his mother emigrated in 1935, and he lived first in Sweden, where his first novel Menschen neben dem Leben was published successfully (in Swedish, and under a pseudonym) then in France before moving to the UK in 1939, where this, his second book, was published in English translation, originally as The man who took trains (The fugitive in the US). Like many Jewish refugees he was interned by the ever-hospitable British as an "enemy alien", being sent to a camp in Australia for a couple of years. He died, together with 361 other passengers, when the ship bringing him back from Australia was torpedoed in October 1942. The unfinished manuscript of his third novel was lost with him.

Despite attempts by Heinrich Böll and others to get it published after the war, the original German typescript of Der Reisende languished in an archive for decades and was in danger of being forgotten altogether until Peter Graf, who has republished other exile-literature, heard about it through the author's surviving relatives, and brought out the first German edition of the book nearly eighty years after it was written. This rediscovery also led to the publication of a new English translation as The passenger. Menschen neben dem Leben has also now been published in German.

Der Reisende, written at great speed in a few weeks at the end of 1938, is Boschwitz's reaction to the events of early November, the orchestrated anti-Jewish riots of the "Kristallnacht" which gave Jewish Germans an unambiguous indication that they could not safely remain living in their own country, but unfortunately didn't motivate neighbouring countries to open their borders to refugees.

Berlin businessman and First World War veteran Otto Silbermann has so far been able to accommodate himself reasonably well to living under the Nazis, but from one day to the next he finds his world falling apart. His friends are unreachable, or take the opportunity to buy up his remaining assets at rock-bottom prices, his non-Jewish wife runs away to her family, and he's only just able to escape in time when thugs break into his apartment to smash it up.

All Silbermann can think of to do is to get on a train and head for the nearest vaguely friendly country, but of course he doesn't have any means of getting over the frontier legally. He's given a tip about a people-trafficker, but arrives only to find that the man has already been arrested. He tries for the Belgian border, and manages to cross secretly, but the Belgians send him straight back, and it's back to the railway, criss-crossing Germany haphazardly in express trains. At one point he tells himself "I have already emigrated: I'm not in Germany any more, I'm in the German Reichsbahn." And eventually, of course, he finds himself back in Berlin, having achieved nothing except to escape arrest but lose his remaining money. All rational planning being exhausted, he decides on one last, glorious piece of symbolic resistance.

It's a book written in a rage by a young and highly engaged writer, so even with Graf's tactful cleaning up of the typescript it's a bit rough around the edges here and there, but it's an astonishingly vivid picture of what it feels like suddenly to be unwanted, an outlaw in your own country. A worthwhile rediscovery. What a shame Boschwitz didn't get the chance to leave us more than those two novels.

Just saw this list and it looked interesting

The Life Before Us by Romain Gary. ...read this and its fabulous. loved the humanity and resourcefulness of this young boy and his devotion to his Madame Rosa. Stayed with me for a very long time

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat. ...

Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco. ...

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami. ...another Ive read and enjoyed

I Saw Ramallah

thanks to everyone who could join in; as Mark said feel free to keep adding reads here!

>31 thorold: (etc.) I came across another very interesting Crusoe reworking, from East Germany this time, Lutz Seiler's Kruso, which I wrote about in the Q4 "Prizewinners" theme: https://www.librarything.com/topic/344814#7983868