The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana by Maryse Conde

She looked Ivan straight in the eye. All the love and desire they had for each other was revealed in this look. They relived their entire life like those who have come close to death might. Ivan and Ivana therefore relived every moment from when they emerged from Simone's womb on a warm, fragrant September night right up to this gray frosty  autumn morning. Some memories lingered more than others. When they had begun to stand on their own two feet Simone would measure them against one of the house walls. For a long time they stayed the same height as each other. Then one year Ivan began to grow and within a few months he had grown taller than his sister. At the time Ivana admired in bemusement his body that stretched out beside her. What a magnificent package of muscles.

Everything goes well for Ivana Nemele. She is hard working, charming, and intelligent, well-loved by everyone, whether in her birthplace of Guadeloupe, or in Mali, where she is sent to live with her father, or in France where she eventually settles, joining the police academy. But for her twin brother Ivan, the world is not so kind: a series of stultifying jobs and run-ins with various authorities leave him marginalized and defeated. Whereas Ivana grows up to have a gentle faith in the world and those around her, Ivan becomes radicalized, first by his socialist teacher in Guadeloupe, then a radical Muslim sect in Mali. His involvement in a local militia is what pushes both him and his sister to France, where he moves farther and farther down the ranks of society, and deeper and deeper into the world of radical Islamic terrorism, toward an act of stunning violence that will pit him irrevocably against his sister.

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana is what you might call a yarn. It skips from the Caribbean to Africa to Europe at a blistering pace, collecting and casting off minor characters in the space of paragraphs, dragging Ivan from humiliation to humiliation and catastrophe to catastrophe. How is that Ivan's experience in the world is so horrible, and Ivana's so good? Ivan and Ivana is a kind of fictional twin study, examining how social differences emerge under identical conditions. What leads one person to become radicalized, and another to join the police academy? One answer, given the precipitating conditions, must be masculinity: degrading physical labor, toxic ideas about manhood, homosexual panic, these are all part of Ivan's story. But Ivan and Ivana seems to me to suggest that much the answer is pure chance, that the geopolitical world is large and chaotic, and that it breeds unintended consequences in people, especially those at the lowest social rungs.

Through it all, Ivan and Ivana remain close, too close: they burn with a physical and romantic desire for each other. Practical Ivana sees the need to date and marry, and pushes Ivan to do the same, believing it will give him social stability, but Ivan is so caught up with his admiration and lust for Ivana that he has no eyes for anyone else. His increasing social alienation from his sister is a cycle of positive reinforcement: as he grows farther from her, he becomes more bitter, leading him into the arms of the radical imam who tells him he must have admiration only for God. Weird as it is, Ivan and Ivana's attachment works as a representation of the ways in which our most intense and treasured attachments can be undone by insidious social forces. At the end of the novel--spoiler alert--Conde makes this painfully, literally clear, when Ivana becomes the first victim of Ivan's bloody Bataclan-style shooting rampage.

My project this month is to fill out the ranks of the countries from which I have never read a book, so imagine my dismay when I discovered that Guadeloupe is not an independent nation but an overseas department of France. ("A French overseas department!" one of Ivan's associates laughs--"what is that?") No doubt the diminishment of Guadeloupean national identity--Guadeloupeans' subordination to France and their alienation from their historical and cultural kinsmen in Africa--are part of Ivan's story. So I declare this book read according to the spirit of the project, if not the letter.