The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

"We're gonna make it to Italy. Everything'll change," said Serafim. "There'll be no more Moldovan mud in our lives, no more terrible poverty hanging over our heads like a scab on a bald tramp's noggin. No more of this interminable, hellish work, which makes you want to howl louder than a dog on the doorstep o fa penny-pinching priest."

The dream of everyone in Moldova, Europe's poorest country, seems to be to move to Italy, where work, one hears, is plentiful. Of course, dreaming is one thing, and doing is another. In a town called Larga, the citizens hatch a number of wild schemes, led by one Serafim: they pretend to be a curling team, en route to a tournament in Italy, but the driver who takes their money simply drives them around Moldova before dropping them off in Chisinau, pretending it's Rome. They build an airplane, then a submarine, out of the remnants of an old tractor, but in each case are turned back by the Italian armed forces. Even the president of Moldova gets in on the action, faking a plane crash on an Italian mountainside so that he can sneak into the country and take up the more desirable life of a migrant worker. But through all this, Italy remains a dream, a kind of symbolic Eden always just beyond the schemers' reach.

Eden, paradise, heaven--these words are not hyperbole. So strong is the image of Italy in the mind of the Moldovans that Larga's priest gins up a crusade to bring the faithful to the Italian promised land. When it doesn't work, he tries again with a children's crusade, just like the real crusades. The belief in Italy is so strong that it generates equally strong naysayers: one of the village's old men insists that Italy is, in fact, a myth, and doesn't really exist. For this heresy he is tortured and killed. In this way, author Vladimir Lorchenkov takes the dream of immigration to its most absurd extremes, turning The Good Life Elsewhere into a shaggy dog-satire that reminded me of some of the work of Bohumil Hrabal. The book is extremely dark--one of the first thing that happens is that the wife of one of the protagonist hangs herself from a tree as apology for the failed curling team scheme--but profoundly funny, and illuminating of a part of Europe that is typically forgotten, if not ignored completely.

With the addition of Moldova, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Perhaps one of the dead women I'd seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silene. There is nothing we can do about it.

Thirty-nine women are gathered in an underground bunker. They are watched over by three male guards, and their days are torture: the lights are kept on all the time; they are given meager food and made to cook it themselves; they are whipped if they touch each other. They can remember their lives before they were imprisoned, but they can't remember how they got there, and the taciturn guards give no clues. They are sure they will live and die like this, in hell. One, a fortieth, is not a woman, but a girl, one who seems to have gotten mixed up among the others. She alone is too young to remember the world outside, and because the guards do such a good job isolating them, she grows up sullen and aloof, unable to connect with the other women who are so much like her. She is stunted, not going through a full puberty--her body, we're told, intuiting that its energies are better sent elsewhere--but she is shrewd. She is only beginning to warm up to her elders when a siren interrupts a mid-day meal, and the guards scatter, leaving the door open, and the women make their way to the surface.

I imagine that for many people who read I Who Have Never Known Men, a kind of cult book that has recently received a renewed following, the first and most obvious touchstone is The Handmaid's Tale. What regime is this, where men imprison women without wanting anything from them, not labor or sex--and why not just kill them? But a better comparison is (I know, I'm always talking about this one) Marlen Haushofer's The Wall, a book about a woman who finds herself in impossible, isolating circumstances with no information about what's happening to her or why. Like in The Wall, there is no explanation forthcoming; all the narrator can do is try her best to survive. When they emerge from the bunker, none of the women are even sure this featureless landscape is Earth; one theory has been that they have been transported somewhere. They come across other bunkers where it seems the residents were not so lucky to have an open door when their captors fled; all have died. Some even appear to be groups of men, which kind of throws a wrench into the whole gendered oppression thing.

The rest of the novel takes place over years, as the narrator's compatriots become old, and then die, as they have always known would happen. In the bunker, the women pity the narrator because they know that ultimately she will be left alone; above ground, it happens just the same. No explanations, no revelations means no surprises. It's interesting, though, to watch the small society that grows up among the women, how they feed and arrange themselves, how they manage the difficult relationship with their past selves, and how the narrator grows up among them, receiving an understanding of another world only secondhand. She, of all people, is made for this strange new world, though she feels keenly the lack of understanding and memory that others have. The book is so strange that it's hard to say what is revealed in this strange experiment--a glimpse, perhaps, of how one manages to get by in the face of the narrowness of any given life. But few lessons emerge for the narrator, as for us--whatever happened here, the only possible response is to live through it.

The Price of Their Toys by John P. Loonam

The red dress is still spread out on her side of the bed, and I reach down, run a hand along its empty length once again. I take off my pajamas, pick up the dress and, raising my arms above my head, slide it down, twist my shoulders through and tug the silky sheath past my belly. As the hem flutters against my thighs, I feel the dress fill up with flesh again and turn toward the mirror, looking for Anna's native grace to come alive in my own awkward pose, but see only my hairy chest and shoulders pushing out around those spaghetti straps, my belly stretching the fabric out of shape. From the window, a loud, raucous car horn gives an extended beep, followed by a voice, shouting the one word, "Pervert," loud and clear. I fall to my hands and knees, hiding behind the bed.

I'm really pleased to be able to write this review of The Price of Their Toys, a collection of stories by my friend and workshop partner John Loonam. Several of these stories I have seen in earlier drafts, and I enjoyed being reminded of several I had forgotten about. I had forgotten how much I enjoy John's story "Make the Man," in particular, about a man who is pushed, before he's ready, to get rid of his late wife's dresses, and begins to wear them instead. His private grieving is complicated by the increasing dementia of a neighbor across the street who has been showing up in his yard without clothes of any kind, and when these two collide of an emergency--man in dress meeting man without pants--the story reaches a kind of comic fervor that belies the deftness with which it deals with the difficulties of aging and loss. I think it's one of the best stories in the collection.

John's stories often take place in the Long Island suburbs, in bedroom communities where the Catholic Church continues to circumscribe the emotional and cultural range of what is possible. The stories really evoke an era of suburban life in the 60's and 70's that is, if not gone, surely drastically changed, and the stories show, to my mind, why such an existence might have been as fragile as it is narrow. I really liked one story I hadn't read, titled "Trump" (no relation) about a young gay Catholic school student who befriends the school's new and only Black student. The relationship becomes complicated by the attentions of a Father who is deeply unpopular among the student body, and the protagonist, Frankie, ends up choosing a difficult and violent betrayal to keep his precarious place in the school's ecosystem.

Another that I liked and hadn't read moves the action to Manhattan, where a young and disillusioned legal assistant becomes obsessed with Richard Nixon, who after the end of his presidency has moved his law office into a nearby building. The protagonist, for reasons that are unclear even to him, keeps demanding to be given access to the former president--who, in the end, shows up in the public plaza to give him a bit of dubious advice. This story, I thought, has only a tenuous relationship to the politics that are the invisible backdrop of so much of the book, but the parallels it draws between the failed president and the directionless protagonist, are really powerful.

It was a real honor and pleasure to see some of these stories being crafted, but the best part of The Price of Their Toys was, for me, getting to read the ones that were totally new to me. If you're interested, you can by John's book here.

Sister Carrie by Lauren Fairbanks

Would you be willing to give us a profound remark on the concept "LOVE" and what tie-ins that may have to Carrie?

My opinion? It may be a strange concept to you. It doesn't spurn those who abuse it most. I saw a man pick it up in a fistful, so that alone must have hurt. He hurled it against a wall, kicked it when it was down. I didn't see how Love could live. Love got up and begged for more. It got more of the same treatment only worse. Love is Rasputin. Then Love must have tired and, pulling a knife out of its beehive hairdo, slit the guy stomach to neck. Not pretty. But a clean cut. Now Love must be just as much a lonely stinkpig as the next guy. Meaner 'an hell. What happens when love comes to town.

Sister Carrie is about Carrie Meeber, a small-town girl who seeks her fortune in the big city. She falls in love with a rake named Hurstrwood--oh, wait, no. That's Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. In this one, Carrie is Asian-American, and her American Dream involves getting involved in two of the United States' most sinister industries: advertising and prostitution. She works for a pimp whose name is, you guessed it, Pimpo. The narrator, who reminds us time and again how omniscient he is, seems to seeking out information about Carrie's exploits, having risen from a humble prostitute to something of an underground legend. She may have killed a man, perhaps one named Valmouth, though it's possible that she and Valmouth are actually the same person. She has fallen for, and had a child with, a guy named Chuck, and both, perhaps, are on the lam? I don't know. It's actually really hard to tell what's going on in this book, if anything really can be said to be "going on" at all.

Lauren Fairbanks' avant-garde novel was a little too much for me: a little too avant, a little too garde. when I was able to let the spiky, irreverent language wash over me (check out the passage above), I entered into a state that resembled something like enjoyment. But ultimately I found the discursive, non-sequential nature of the narrative to be a little too much to penetrate. It reminded me of some of the more difficult books by John Hawkes, but I walked away fairly sure that there was nothing much that I had missed, because questions of fact and story really are irrelevant to Sister Carrie. It could be described perhaps as choral, with all the voices of the underground figures, from Pimpo to Carrie's mom Zenobia, layered over each other, but Carrie herself remains truly elusive, even to the book's end. And even now I fear that describing the book has laid a kind of sense or system that the book is trying hard to repel. So I'll stop here.

Airships by Barry Hannah

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers.  They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner was dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've survived. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

"Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed," one of the best stories in Barry Hannah's collection Airships, is narrated by a Confederate officer who meets his hero, Jeb Stuart. General Stuart suggests that the officer shake hands with his Black ensign, George, something the narrator hasn't done and isn't too happy about being constrained to do now. Except George takes one look at the narrator and correctly clocks that his interest in the General exceeds the bounds of simple admiration: "Ain't shaking hands with no nancy." I wonder if a reader from outside the South might find the humor in this, or if it would only confirm certain at-least-partly-true suspicions about the South. For my part, I love the way the story skewers the myths and pieties of the Old South. None of these people--not the officer, nor the ensign, nor even Jeb, a towering figure in Southern legend who's clearly happy with the myths he inspires--is quite what they seem. They're not too far off, in fact, from the whopping fish-tale swappers of the opening story, "Water Liars."

Many of the stories in Airships are about the South, though what they have to say about it is not always easy to parse. Mostly, I think, they tend to see the South as a place where, perhaps contrary to its reputation as a place of rigid social hierarchies, grand collisions happen. I was really delighted by "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," a story about a white guy who chides a Black one for eating a banana with too much enthusiasm, which ends with the Black guy coming over to the white one's house to watch him eat bananas. Some of the stories are snappy and short, but the collection is held up by a series of longer novellas, the plots of which are so ridiculous I'm not sure I even want to waste time describing them. Take, for instance, "Return to Return," a story about a talented young tennis player driven mad by the attentions of his mother's long-time lover; is it even worth talking about how he ends up with a shady doctor named Baby, stabbing people in Central Park? It's a little easier, maybe, to guess how we get from the homemade mortar shells of "The Testimony of Pilot" to the fighter jets of the Second World War. These stories proceed by a strange logic, almost more like an unraveling then a building up--nothing about them is predictable.

Hannah shares DNA, I think, with a writer like Charles Portis: both write shaggy-dog stories about Southerners that are wildly funny. But Hannah's stories have a disquieting strangeness underneath them that begins with the way they pack a truly staggering amount of information into a paragraph, a sentence: check out that first paragraph above from "Green to Green," which piles absurdity upon absurdity. As a result, Hannah's prose is decidedly clunky and unmusical, though I don't even mean that as a criticism. The shorter ones have the air of someone flipping over a bag and letting all their bobs and bits onto a table; the longer ones can be said, by their end, to make a certain kind of sense, though I would challenge you to identify that sense at their beginning. All in all, I found them frequently difficult to penetrate, but always incredibly funny, energetic, and fun.

You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

He switched off the lamp. In the dark, as he suspected, the salt became an incandescent snow. He rubbed at that substance and the glow spread over the palm of his hand. Awed and puzzled, he observed the celestial combustion. There between the blue glow and the shadows of the scrap metal behind him, an idea began to emerge in his brain like the head of a mushroom pushing up after showers. He would make a gift for his wife; the most beautiful, shimmering, unusual ring. He smiled.

The title story of Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's collection You Glow in the Dark reimagines the true story of a Brazilian scrap metal dealer who came upon a bit of uranium. Not knowing what it was, he fashioned a piece of jewelry out of it for his wife, with predictable results. Colanzi tells the story through a series of brief vignettes from different vantage points and in different registers: not just the scrap dealer or his wife, but a young receptionist who, evacuated and bused out to a different town, where the fate of her own has already become known, is pointedly asked: "Do you glow in the dark?" Another, heart-rending section, details the numbered lots of buried radioactive ephemera that had to be abandoned: a doll, a dress, a diary, and even the remains of family pets. In this way, Colanzi circumscribes the rippling effects of the disaster, like the spread of the radiation itself, and the havoc brought on innocent people by capitalist neglect.

Many of the stories here are in this polyphonic mode. Some of them take big swings that don't connect, as with "Atomito," a story very reminiscent of "You Glow in the Dark," which imagines a nuclear fallout in the Bolivian community of El Alto as being in the shape of, perhaps enspirited by, the cute cartoon mascot of the local plant. Much more successful, I thought, and perhaps the best story in the collection, was "The Cave," about a single cave over the course of thousands of years. In prehistory, a cavewoman paints the handprints of her newborn twins before killing them (such births are taboo); later these same handprints are wondered at by tourists and interlopers. A fungus grows in the cave that turns out to be the birth of White Nose Syndrome, the disease which has been decimating bat populations for years, or something like it. In the future, the cave becomes a node in a teleportation game. What might have been cheesy or forced is, I thought, quite effective, turning the cave which is at heart a kind of absence into a historical presence. Perhaps it works because the manifold nature of the stories keeps them from being too easily summed up or resolved; the best ones feel as if something else is going to happen next, just out of reach of the story.

With the addition of Bolivia, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 118!

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We only have to find the spring and release it.

An Imaginary Life is the story of Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for being a little too cheeky with his writing. As Malouf points out in his afterword, not much is known about his life there, which makes it a fertile opportunity for the imagination. (This is, perhaps, one meaning of the title.) What Malouf imagines is that Ovid, despondent to find himself among rustics who do not speak his language, struggles to reconcile himself to his fate, until, when on a hunting trip, he discovers a feral boy in the woods. The locals know all about the boy, and Ovid convinces them to capture him and bring them into the town, where he forms a connection with the boy, teaching him the rudiments of speech. Later, when sickness strikes the village, the boy is blamed by superstitious elements, and Ovid and the boy run away, even further into exile.

I think An Imaginary Life is a pretty bad title for a book that ought to be titled something along the lines of Metamorphoses. As in the passage above, Malouf often writes beautifully on the topic of metamorphosis and transformation. There is the metamorphosis of Ovid into the new person he has become at the edge of the Empire. There is the metamorphosis of the boy, who resembles something like the halfway point of Ovid's characters, stuck between human and beast. But for all that, I was surprised how little An Imaginary Life was interested in making literary connections to the work of Ovid. The fanciful "feral boy" story might have belonged to anyone, and feels a little grafted on to the story of the great poet. But maybe that's the kind of critique that looks for the book that isn't there rather than the one that is. The book that is here is often lovely, elegiac, though I found it a little slow and at times bordering on mawkish. It's a genre of book that I really love--here I'm thinking of John Williams' Augustus, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves' I, Claudius--but compared to those, this one felt very forgettable.

Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet

Septimus, jealous of my love for plants, despised them all. He attempted to justify this hatred when he insisted that plants, the whores of the natural world, fornicate with whatever comes their way: the wind, bugs, bats, birds, bees, snails, slimes and even men. In fact, the beauties of Evangelista's Palace were far more promiscuous--if less adventurous--for they copulated with only members of their own species.

My son had a morbid hatred of females, and whores in particular. Whores, like orchids, are the female archetype par excellence, painted, scented, seductive. Beneath their masks, the women of the Palace were fragile, luscious, and unique. But the men who visited them were so blinded by lust they never saw what was there, only what was painted there.

Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire has two narrators: the first is Lamprias de Bergerac, a Victorian botanist and world traveler who spends most of his life absent from his family in France, exploring the wilds of the Amazonian jungle, where he adopts the free-love ethos of the women at the roadhouse known as Evangelista's Palace, and eventually falls in love with an Indigenous woman named Cucla. Lamprias is a recognizable kind of 19th century adventurer, who approaches all things, places, pants, and pussy (sorry, I couldn't help it) with the same sense of gleeful adventure and abandon. The other narrator is his son, Septimus de Bergerac, whose resentment at being abandoned by his father curdles into a rejection of everything his father stands for. Septimus, in turn, turns toward the savage nationalism and racism that will come to dominate the European landscape in the early 20th century.

It's a bold move to start your book with the words of an anti-Semite. You have to trust your reader--and your publisher, frankly--intimately. The first victim of Septimus' anger is his half-brother, the son of Lamprias and a Chinese woman whom he brings back from his travels named Dust. This son is named, somehow, "True Man," and his beauty and symmetry are an indictment of Septimus' own physical ugliness. Septimus delights gleefully in True Man's ultimate destruction--hanged for a minor crime--but it's the whole kit and caboodle of his father's worldview that he seeks to ultimately destroy. We get to watch as Septimus' Nazis take over Europe, and then collapse; Septimus flees (where else) to the South America that his father had loved, like so many other Nazis. But this turns out to be only a pit-stop on the way to the Catskills in New York, where his father and Cucla have taken up residence, and Septimus--slowly disintegrating thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from the women he despises--sets up a final watch on his father. 

Like with her other (incredible) novel, The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet seems to be really interested in the particular shape and pattern of history. How did the Victorian era, with its interest in open science and exploration, curdle into the inwardness and smallness of fascism and Nazism? (Of course, the seeds of race science were sown beginning with Darwin, someone whom Lamprias much resembles, but the novel, I think, is as loathe to blame Darwin as it is Lamprias.) In doing so, I was really struck by how Ducornet identifies racism as something psychological, even psychosexual or Oedipal, the son striking out at the father who abandoned him, Septimus' dalliance with Jewish prostitutes (whom mostly he wants to, like, kick him in the chest). And Septimus' seizing on whiteness as a way to obviate his own ugliness, both physical and mental, seems to me very shrewd. In fact, I was struck at just how recognizable Septimus' racial resentment is, its essential smallness and pettiness, its need to be made large by associating itself with a larger historical movement, which, of course, is all imaginary:

Time is on the march and Time is on my side. Like fish and bread I am multiplied; the armies of Hitler, upright and invincible, fan out in all directions like the spoke of a wheel. And France--the France of philosophers, Protestants, dissimulators, atheists, heretics, impostors, the spontaneous, the autonomous and the perverse--lies crushed beneath this wheel.

Looking back, I think maybe I have not said enough about Lamprias' half of the book, which is as lovely and free-spirited as Septimus' half is unsettling and difficult. Lamprias, perhaps, is guilty of many things, including abandoning his family (although the racist nastiness of both Septimus and his mother makes it hard to think so), abandoning Dust and True Man to their fate in that horrible household, and doing as he wished. But Lamprias' adventures among the whores and cutthroats of 19th century South America seem to capture something Ducornet really admires about the figure of the Victorian adventurer. Lamprias' tragedy, perhaps, is that he simply lives too long, all the way into the 1950s--long enough to be hauled into an interview by the House Un-American Activities Committee!--and long enough to receive a kind of final bittersweet triumph over his son's revenge

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer

Stella had always been a little clumsy and shy, and even when she was cheerful, her regular, wide face was immobile. Then it blossomed from within to her lips. Stella had been very happy for a short time, but she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn't adapt and she had to perish.

Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a dissatisfied housewife whose husband, Richard, cheats on her constantly. She's reconciled herself to this life, which is mostly miserable, though she maintains her grip on family life by nurturing an intense attachment to her son, Wolfgang, who seems not to have much of an attachment to anyone. Another, younger daughter, Annette, is still too young to understand just how dysfunctional the family is. Into this world comes Stella, the teenage daughter of a friend, who upsets the delicate balance that Anna has struck: she isn't happy, but it might be much worse. We know from the beginning that Stella's visitation ends with her demise--killed by a passing truck--and Anna must tell us, by way of expiating her own guilt, an glee, how it came to be.

Anna's theory is that Stella was fated to die. She begins to waste away quickly in the household, falling into spells of depression and tearful explosions. Stella, Anna reasons, has fallen in love with Richard, and is tortured by Richard's lack of regard. Is that true? Or is it only Anna's projection onto Stella, derived from her resentment toward her husband's philandering? The trick of Killing Stella is that Stella herself is always something of a black box. Anna tells us that there was no other fate for Stella than to step in front of that truck, and the logic of this seems to emerge from the teenager's declining demeanor as well as a sense of Anna's own fatedness: she is stuck in this marriage, and anything that threatens to disrupt it, for better or worse, must eventually be expelled. No, the real central character here is Anna, whose conflicted feelings about Stella are terribly frightening. It's not suggested that Anna had any hand in the death, of course, but her claims to feel guilty are unconvincing, and her insistence that Stella's intrusion in their life necessitated her death only makes her feel, somehow, more implicated.

Even for Short Book February, this is a slim little book, a snapshot of misery and resentment that is incredibly dark. Unlike The Wall, which has become a book I recommend to everyone anywhere I go, nothing unfolds and no one changes, except perhaps for Wolfgang, who hightails it out of Dodge. The Wall is about a woman trapped beneath a glass dome, but the barriers that enclose Anna seem somehow even smaller, and more impermeable.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

But you, Maya, where are you really from? What woods did you come out of? Stone by stone, you build your own edifice. You've raced through your life with your elbows close to your sides without ever looking back. The result of the race: if you admit everything you owe to others, it's because you're also well aware that you didn't engender yourself, and to a certain extent you are still determined by your place of birth, your family, your culture, and your origins, since a generic, self-engendered human being does not exist. At least not yet.

In Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa, 20th century history has been reversed: the "United States of Africa" are a prosperous conglomerate of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states, while Europe and America have plunged into civil war and famine. French, Swiss, German, Spanish, Italian refugees flock to the capital of Asmara to find work and food, where they form a despised and unfortunate underclass who live and die invisibly. Against this backdrop Waberi tells the story (in second person) of Maya, a sensitive young sculptor who discovers that she is half French, and who becomes increasingly socially aware of the plight of her European kinsmen, ultimately fleeing to troubled France to find her birth mother.

Part of me thinks: what's the point of this? There is, or could be, a kind of facileness in simply reversing the polarity of society in this way. At best, it reveals the way our language fails at universalism and becomes absurd when its applications become reversed, talking about, for instance, the "warlords" of France. At its worst, it becomes a kind of easy joke, a "what if" repeated a couple hundred times. But I think that's all redeemed by Waberi's writing, which is clever and erudite, full of cultural knowledge and allusion that gets pulled apart and remixed in ways that keep the worldbuilding fresh and curious. (Interesting to see how, for instance, Black Americans like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain part of the historical scene--don't get too tripped up on the "well, what if" of that--and become celebrated figures after whom schools and airports are named.) 

The second person narration keeps us at a distance from Maya that keeps the focus on the topsy-turvy world, I think. She never quite emerges as a real character in a way that might elevate the imaginative qualities of the book even further. And yet there are scenes of real pathos, as with Maya's disillusionment upon discovering her destitute French mother, who has little to provide her, a victim, like so many, of world circumstances, and Maya's flight back to the safety of Africa. Change the victims, let the exploiters become the exploited, and still the shape of the world feels tragically familiar.

With the addition of Djibouti, my "Countries Read" list is up to 117!