"Ain't no haints in Detroit."
WHO FEARS DEATH
Nnedi Okorafor
A fortuitous sighting at the Mid-Manhattan library moved this to the top of the queue. I'd first heard of this novel when it won the World Fantasy Award, and shortly thereafter, its author penned a remarkable and memorable essay on Lovecraft and being a writer of color while receiving a trophy in his likeness.
All of this and more (incl. my propensity for cheering for any effort/endeavor/product with an Igbo behind it), I took with me into this tale set in a post-apocalyptic Africa replete with obsolete computers, deconstruction of patriarchal societies, mythology brought to life, and weaponized rape.
The protagonist is a child of such violence and grows up treated with repulsion for how she was conceived. But inside her is a power that allows her not only to battle her past but to right a much more celestial wrong. It wasn't so much the external trappings of the world, the descriptions of the magic and how the battles happened as well as the terrifying rendering of genocide at work that captivated me so much as the extended stay inside the mind of a young woman struggling with her womanhood both in the contexts of what is demanded of her by the society in which she grows up and those through which she travels, but also what her Power does to her and what being able to traverse the spirit world in turn demands of her. It speaks perhaps more to my own deficient reading habits than anything else that this was the most mind-expanding part for me and the most demanding of my credulity. At times, I found Onyesonwu too willful, too angry, not willing to accommodate those episodes as necessary portions of her character within the story. I can't remember the last time a book so actively challenged my prejudices. For this reason, I feel Who Fears Death is one of those books I'm a better person for having read.
THE TURNER HOUSE
Angela Flournoy
A recent lament of mine, expressed in conversation with a dear friend, was that contemporary American fiction was nowhere near as exciting and legitimately ambitious as what I'd found recently in the Commonwealth or in certain post-colonial arenas: whether the minutely realized juxtaposition of a nouveau pauvre family in the India of the 1960s and 1970s, or an intimate confession that manages to implicate both its original source material as well as the grand French colonial enterprise, or the political history of an entire nation disguised as a crime novel. That marrying of personal and political vectors, the cosmic and the terrestrial commingling, its absence in what little of the contemporary American landscape I'd surveyed was palpable.
It turns out, to scratch that itch in its near-entirety, all I needed to do was read Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, a family novel more deftly accomplished and heart-bustingly human than the best, most successful parts of The Corrections. The Turner House concerns the domicile that witnessed the birth of the thirteen Turner children and the novel concerns them and their offspring as well as the family matriarch on the occasion of the discovery that their home in Detroit's East Side is facing foreclosure.
The book made me wonder what Isabel Wilkerson's tome might have looked like were any of the threads in it fictionalized. But here I am leaping to make comparisons to this book or that or seeing how one fits against the shape of the other when really I think The Turner House is a wonder sui generis. It manages to contain within 338 pages enough for a book twice that length, is an object lesson the beauty of implication and the power of linguistic precision, and so brims with love for each of the characters that not once, while reading, did I have to consult the gargantuan family tree at the book's beginning.
That'll teach me to underestimate the work being generated by American authors.
Nnedi Okorafor
A fortuitous sighting at the Mid-Manhattan library moved this to the top of the queue. I'd first heard of this novel when it won the World Fantasy Award, and shortly thereafter, its author penned a remarkable and memorable essay on Lovecraft and being a writer of color while receiving a trophy in his likeness.
All of this and more (incl. my propensity for cheering for any effort/endeavor/product with an Igbo behind it), I took with me into this tale set in a post-apocalyptic Africa replete with obsolete computers, deconstruction of patriarchal societies, mythology brought to life, and weaponized rape.
The protagonist is a child of such violence and grows up treated with repulsion for how she was conceived. But inside her is a power that allows her not only to battle her past but to right a much more celestial wrong. It wasn't so much the external trappings of the world, the descriptions of the magic and how the battles happened as well as the terrifying rendering of genocide at work that captivated me so much as the extended stay inside the mind of a young woman struggling with her womanhood both in the contexts of what is demanded of her by the society in which she grows up and those through which she travels, but also what her Power does to her and what being able to traverse the spirit world in turn demands of her. It speaks perhaps more to my own deficient reading habits than anything else that this was the most mind-expanding part for me and the most demanding of my credulity. At times, I found Onyesonwu too willful, too angry, not willing to accommodate those episodes as necessary portions of her character within the story. I can't remember the last time a book so actively challenged my prejudices. For this reason, I feel Who Fears Death is one of those books I'm a better person for having read.
THE TURNER HOUSE
Angela Flournoy
A recent lament of mine, expressed in conversation with a dear friend, was that contemporary American fiction was nowhere near as exciting and legitimately ambitious as what I'd found recently in the Commonwealth or in certain post-colonial arenas: whether the minutely realized juxtaposition of a nouveau pauvre family in the India of the 1960s and 1970s, or an intimate confession that manages to implicate both its original source material as well as the grand French colonial enterprise, or the political history of an entire nation disguised as a crime novel. That marrying of personal and political vectors, the cosmic and the terrestrial commingling, its absence in what little of the contemporary American landscape I'd surveyed was palpable.
It turns out, to scratch that itch in its near-entirety, all I needed to do was read Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, a family novel more deftly accomplished and heart-bustingly human than the best, most successful parts of The Corrections. The Turner House concerns the domicile that witnessed the birth of the thirteen Turner children and the novel concerns them and their offspring as well as the family matriarch on the occasion of the discovery that their home in Detroit's East Side is facing foreclosure.
The book made me wonder what Isabel Wilkerson's tome might have looked like were any of the threads in it fictionalized. But here I am leaping to make comparisons to this book or that or seeing how one fits against the shape of the other when really I think The Turner House is a wonder sui generis. It manages to contain within 338 pages enough for a book twice that length, is an object lesson the beauty of implication and the power of linguistic precision, and so brims with love for each of the characters that not once, while reading, did I have to consult the gargantuan family tree at the book's beginning.
That'll teach me to underestimate the work being generated by American authors.