Uprising, Tahmima Anam

wadholloway Asia, Literature , , , ,

Uprising (2026) is a novel about young women trapped into prostitution, held against their will, with their girl children – boy children are sold – on a small, shrinking mud island at the mouth of a river in Bangladesh. It is told with a fable-like quality by a chorus of the children, interspersed with the stories of their mothers – how they were betrayed one way or another by their families and sold to Amma, the madame who runs the island.

The story begins with the mothers, in their brightest clothes and make-up, lined up on the shore to welcome the boats bringing customers from the village across the water. They work all night and then fall into bed with their children who are just waking to begin a day of chores and play.

The last young woman brought to the island, Kussum, is the one who fights back, teaching the children to read, and then leading a rebellion. Kussum’s parents were poor, but had managed to give her and her sister some years of schooling. When she passed puberty her parents found her a likely husband, an accountant. But when Kussum becomes involved in student protests, and her sister is shot and killed by police, the accountant pulls back, the parents are shamed, and Kussum is sold to Amma.

The subject matter is dark, but the telling is bright, reminding me strongly of the Kenyan/Muslim The House of Rust. Hearing the story from the children puts a distance between us and the protagonists: we know what the children jointly feel; we see the women act, and the children tell us why they think the adults act; but we are always at one remove, we are never inside the protagonists’ heads.

The author, Tahmima Anam (1975- ) is a Bangladeshi woman living in the UK. Her parents were diplomats and she grew up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok. This is her fifth novel. Anam says she got the idea for the novel after visiting the infamous “floating brothel”, Banishanta (The Guardian).

I feel strongly about our failure to protect children, about how often they are sexually abused. As I have got older it has become increasingly clearer just how many children of my generation were abused, by fathers, uncles and people in authority. And, of course, how many children are still abused.

The abuse of the mothers in Uprising, who were all children when they were sold, the imminent prospect of the older (10, 11, 12 year old) children being forced to follow them, ties in with two other works I read over the last few days.

Michael Bradley in Crikey, 6 July 2026 quotes the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: “Of all ordained men of the Christian Brothers order of the Roman Catholic Church from 1950 onwards, 22% had been identified as alleged paedophile predators. And between 1980 and 2015, 1,015 people made child abuse claims against the Christian Brothers, with 483 individual alleged perpetrators named. That, like all child sexual abuse statistics, was undoubtedly an underrepresentation.”

Now we discover that over the last decade the Christian Brothers have sold a large proportion of their property holdings for a token $1 each to another entity (now worth $2.3 billion) and are claiming that as a consequence they have insufficient funds for reparations in the 572 cases they are currently facing.

Bradley, a well-known lawyer, writes, and how can you not agree with him: “This behaviour is not merely amoral, deceitful, or corrupt. It is depraved. For a religious institution to be even capable of thinking like this, let alone executing it, then going to the court to say, ‘Oh, woe is us, making amends is costing too much’ — I can’t begin to fathom the internal darkness in the souls of the men making these choices.”

More surprisingly perhaps, I want to discuss #55 of the 64 “in Death” novels by JD Robb (a pseudonym used by romance writer Nora Roberts), Desperation in Death (2022). The “in Death” series is crime fiction set in New York in the 2060s and featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas who was rescued as a child after being sold into abuse by her father.

I like the series because, unlike most US crime fiction, there is very little killing (in fact, there are no guns, only stunners) and because nearly all the principal actors are strong, competent women. Desperation in Death, which is otherwise similar to every other “in Death” novel (I skip the obligatory steamy lovemaking between Eve and her husband), stands out for being quite obviously about the “Epstein files” – the capture, sale and abuse of young women for the pleasure of what seems to be a large number of American businessmen, almost certainly including the current US President, his Treasury Secretary, and the founder/owners of two of the major tech behemoths.

Desperation in Death starts with the kidnapping off the street of a pretty middle class white girl on her way home from school. She ends up in The Academy where girls are trained for sexual slavery, and there she becomes friends with a Black girl who has run away from a loveless home where she is routinely beaten by her mother. They escape and the story goes on from there. The Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell roles are played respectively by a rich unmarried businessman who runs auctions for the sale of young women into slavery, and by ‘Aunty’ his long-time friend who runs The Academy.

I admire Robb/Roberts for doing her bit to make clear to her vast readership that what was once an unlikely conspiracy theory – that rich men bought and sold young women and girls – is in fact a real and ongoing tragedy.

.

Tahmima Anam, Uprising, Canongate, 2026. 208pp. Audio ver. (from Borrowbox) read by Ayesha Dharker. 6 hours
Michael Bradley, ‘The Christian Brothers are crying poor and avoiding paying abuse survivors. They have no social licence to exist’, Crikey, 3 July 2026
JD Robb, Desperation in Death, 2022. 368pp (I listened to the audiobook, from my local library).

see also:
This Reading Life (Bron), The Orwell Prizes 2026

UKLG Prize 2026 Shortlist

wadholloway Science Fiction , , , , , , , , ,

Journal: 136

My intention this week was to post a review of Uprising (2026) by Tahmima Anam, a fable about a rebellion by women sold into prostitution and held with their girl children on a small, slowly disappearing island in the mouth of a river in Bangladesh; but I have run out of time.

I spent this past weekend at Denmark on my daughter’s bush block, variously minding grandchildren, watching my older grandson’s soccer game on a country football ground in the mud and the rain, and socializing with Milly. On the way down I listened to Uprising and on the way back last night to Thirst Trap by Grainne O’Hare – a sad story of 3 Irish women in Belfast, living together, turning 30 after a decade of grog, drugs and sex, and all they have in sight for the forseeable future is more of the same (Kimbofo and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year judges disagreed with me).

Tomorrow I’m loading to go north. I think I’ll listen to The Nix by Nathan Hill. That’s 22 hours, so depending on where I load home from that might keep me going for the whole trip.

Over the past three or four years I have found that the Ursula K le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlists have suggested some great new innovative writing. Marcie (BIP) and I try to stay ahead of the shortlist announcement but I certainly haven’t read anything the judges have selected this time. My two tries were Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva and Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei. I thought Dengue Boy – a Kafkaesque story about a boy who is a mosquito – was a shoo-in. I didn’t bother to fill in a nomination, but I should have.

So here is the 2026 shortlist for fiction published in the spirit of le Guin, in the US, in 2025 (publisher in brackets). I must write to ‘Dave’ who runs Neon Hemlock and see if he’ll send me a review copy again.

Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press)
Pip Adam is a NZ author, which makes me think one of you has already reviewed this. Audition is published in Australia by Giramondo (and in the UK by Peninsula) so it should be easy to obtain.
“Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.”

Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)
Alexander is Cuban American, this is his first go at SF. The novel “follows a planetary courier training adolescent androids in a solar system grappling with interplanetary conflict after a devastating explosion on Earth’s moon”.

Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock)
Fantastic short stories which “unravel the complicities of personhood and gender, slavery and war.”

Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin)
Bora Chung is a South Korean writer and translator. She appears to specialise in Slavic languages. Midnight Timetable is a work of SF Horror published in Australia by Scribe.
“In a labyrinthine research facility … the guard shares another tale of cursed objects and lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow, or revelation. But these are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or, perhaps, confessions … Our protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent.”

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books)
Ennes is a writer from the US West Coast. Three years ago they “burst onto the speculative scene with the startlingly original and compelling post-apocalyptic sci-fi, gothic suspense, and body horror mash-up, Leech” (Grimdark Magazine)
“As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny pests that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a worm the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork… its toxin reshapes the future of the city.”

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books)
Available from Pan Macmillan Aust
“A trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, which goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.”

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books)
Tashan Mehta is from India. This is her second or third SF novel.
“Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to their creator, the Great Wisa. For Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). She has written a number of SF novels and novellas.
This is “a collection of three brand new stories set in a morally ambiguous world of war and magic.”

Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit)
Published in Australia by Hachette.
Catherine Webb (1986- ) is a British author. As Kate Griffin, they write fantasy novels for adults. As Claire North, they write SF and novels based upon the work of Homer.
“Slow Gods is proper science fiction… Set in the far future and spanning a galaxy, it remains a high-concept effort full of delight and invention.” Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short) was born into debt, and charged for his birth. Every breath taken, every bit of sustenance consumed, in the ultra-capitalistic world of the Shine has a fee attached. (Strange Horizons).

That’s not a bad mix of men and women writers, Americans and others. I’m not sure why the prize is conditional on publication in the US, and I can’t tell how restrictive that is for non-US authors, bearing in mind that the first winner was from Kenya (The House of Rust), the second from Canada (Arboreality) and last year’s was from Sri Lanka (Rakesfall).

Official UKLG Prize 2026 site (here)

Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, Brett Heino

wadholloway Australian, Writers , ,

Brett Heino “is a legal scholar and historian in the Law Faculty at the University of Technology Sydney”. Last year, seeing that John/4ZZZ and I were discussing the works of David Ireland he asked would we like to review his newly released book. Nothing loath, we decided to give it a go, with reviews to be done by mid-2026.

“Ireland represented aesthetically the tension between the abstract space of capitalism and the struggle of the working class to transform that space into meaningful social place, a tension that, due to its affective dimension, is especially potent in the literary form.
(Introduction)

Heino describes his overall project as undertaking a Marxist analysis which furthers an understanding of the questions:
1. What is the nature of the geographic knowledge embedded in literature?
2. How does literature inform the constitution and reproduction of spaces and places? (p.36)

The first novel discussed is The Unknown Industrial Prisoner which “reads as a lengthy indictment of all the ways capital squanders resources (both material and human), locks in inefficient practices and more broadly pursues irrational projects that promise failure.” The abstract space within which the Puroil refinery at the heart of the novel operates is faceless, global capital, over which the Australian nation-state has very little influence, and the worker none.

It is central to Heino’s thesis, indeed to any understanding of political theory, that ‘the state’ is the system by which the dominant class maintains its control of society as a whole (and that governments are just the visible faces of this system). Heino divides Ireland’s treatment of the state into three epochs:
a left-nationalist phase,
a neoliberal phase; and
a post-neoliberal authoritarian phase
which is key, in my view, to understanding how his novels ‘progressed’ over the 50 years of his writing career.

Clearly The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971) is ‘left-nationalist’ and so, for Heino, are The Glass Canoe (1976) and Burn (1974), the story of an Aboriginal returned soldier, a “powerful depiction of the process of indigenous dispossession, which is central to how the state forges and reproduces the structural conditions for the creation of abstract space.”

So, the state creates the space in which capitalism operates, redefining native bushland as ‘industrial’ for Puroil to establish its refinery; or making Indigenous use of the land impossible – the whole settler/colonial dispossession and confinement of Aboriginal Australians was a necessary precondition for the establishment of the (Australian) nation-state.

“In the 1980s, however, we witness a very discernible shift in the handling of the nature of the state.” In Archimedes and the Seagle (1986) and Bloodfather (1987) Ireland “creates a potent aesthetic defence of democracy as an enshriner of individual rights and freedoms.” Both these novels are built around the philosophising of the protagonists as Ireland works his way to the neoliberal position (some years before Margaret Thatcher) that egalitarianism and the welfare state unfairly privilege ‘society’ over the individual and the family.

Finally, in his last three works, The Chosen (1997), The World Repair Video Game (2015) and Time Capsule (2016), Ireland goes beyond neoliberalism to “a thoroughgoing assault upon the ideologies of egalitarianism, bureaucracy and identity politics that he sees at the core of the modern state.”

The 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis made clear that “neoliberalism had created a rentier economy fuelled by financial speculation, debt-financed consumption and levels of inequality not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century”. One apparently contrary reaction to this was the rise of far-right populist movements around the world, which Ireland embraced.

Although Ireland’s individuals are defined by their nation or ‘group’, he became anti-state, believing the state must necessarily use violence to enforce equality. In his old age Ireland saw democracy as antithetical to individual freedom; saw ‘marxist’ governments, educated elites, and ‘others’, especially Muslims as the enemy; and entirely failed to see that the ills of society today arise mostly from unfettered capitalism.

For all this, Ireland in all his his fiction depicts capitalists as despoilers as they aggregate space to their own uses. Puroil flattening the mangroves and pumping waste into the Eel River (The Unknown Industrial Prisoner); “From the distance the city’s a big garden of hardy perennials, made of concrete, watered with money” (The Chantic Bird); or “a hill, a rise – once covered in trees and bush and grass … now crowned with a house that was fine once, surrounded by the slyly aggressive millions of cheap houses; small, resentful.” (City of Women)

In the final third of the book Heino discusses at length how Ireland shows the ‘lower’ classes temporarily at least reclaiming places for themselves in the face of mostly rampant capital.

Firstly the working class – when Ireland still believed in the working class: the “Home Beautiful” in the mangroves opposite Puroil; the Southern Cross Hotel in The Glass Canoe – transforming “the abstract and alienated space of capitalism into meaningful social place“. Places where you did things for yourselves and your mates and not for some remote other.

Heino in this context makes a connection between the current and previous/first occupiers of these places*. He says Ireland implies this connection, but I think he underestimates how old and oldfashioned Ireland was even in the 1970s. When Ireland uses ‘tribe’ he is saying, as white South Africans did at that time, that we whites are the tribe currently on this land.

Then the lumpenproletariat/the underclass in The Chantic Bird and The Flesheaters. Not being employed, the lumpenproletariat are necessarily dependent on either welfare or theft, with no permanent place to call their own. The narrator of The Chantic Bird moves frantically from place to place. The narrator of The Flesheaters lives in Merry Lands, an asylum for the unemployed.

And finally/remarkably A woman of the Future and City of Women mark Ireland’s venture into Magic Realism with two female protagonists reclaiming the spaces of male dominance; enormously at odds with the secondary places women occupy in all his other fiction.

Ireland is Australia’s greatest observer of the old Anglo working and underclasses. He remains relevant because with the coming of AI and automation we will soon all either be workers in a Taylorist machine – every action pre-determined and recorded – or unemployed: ‘Frees’ if we are lucky, or more likely lumpenproletariat. We must learn to make places for ourselves and then, to reclaim space from capital. Heino doesn’t say Vive la révolution, so let me say it for him.

The strength of this book for me was the often line by line analysis of Ireland’s writing and what it says about us as people – whether as cogs in the Capitalist machine, as escapees, or, increasingly, as discards.

.

Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. 319pp. The cover image is from WH Chong’s design for The World Repair Video Game

*Brett and I differ over the ‘real’ location of the fictional Puroil refinery, and therefore over who the original inhabitants might have been. Brett suggests Kurnell on Botany Bay and the Gweagal. I, Silverwater on the Parramatta River and the Eora.

Other David Ireland posts:
The novels of David Ireland (1927-2022), overview
The Chantic Bird (1968)
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), review
The Flesheaters (1972), review
Burn (1974), 4ZZZ review
The Glass Canoe (1976), review
A Woman of the Future (1979), review, Bonny Cassidy in Sydney Review of Books
City of Women (1981), review
Archimedes and the Seagle (1984)
Bloodfather (1987), 4ZZZ review
The Chosen (1997), 4ZZZ review
The World Repair Video Game (2015), review
Time Capsule (2016) verse novel

Reviews by Brett Heino at Progress in Political Economy
Vale David Ireland
Geographies of Space and Place in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Radical and Literary Geographies
The World Repair Video Game, Nature and genocide – ecofascism in world literature

Women’s Work

wadholloway Feminism , , , ,

Journal: 135

One of my earliest posts was ‘I am not a Feminist‘. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening years writing about the Independent Woman in Australia and elsewhere and reading women writers. But I’m still not a feminist. If I were, I think I’d be First Wave. Second wave feminists, women my age, Womens Libbers, have always got on my goat; too sure that they had discovered something new, that they were starting from ground zero (and admittedly the 1950s felt like ground zero for women’s rights). And Third wavers – is there still a third wave? – are like music post-rock’n’roll. Something’s going on, there’s lots of noise, but not anything I can make sense of. (How did I become my parents??!!)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been driving, firstly in the Eastern Goldfields around Kalgoorlie, then up north, past Broome. And home again, as always. It’s a very circular activity, driving. This means I have a few audiobooks to get off my chest, mostly from the library rather than Audible, and one from Libby which I am trying for the first time and had some problems with. And all by women.

The Bride Test (2019), Helen Hoang

A relatively well-off Vietnamese family in California ask a young woman from Vietnam to live with their son for three months, to see if she might suit him as a bride. The young woman, Esme, lives in a hut with her mother and grandmother, and a young daughter – which fact she keeps to herself. The young man in California, Khai, is autistic, runs a successful software business, and has a run-down house. Esme and Khai decide to share a bed, without the intention of having sex, because … the spare bed was uncomfortable, she was afraid of the dark, something, something.

This is a long book ( 2 mp3 discs) with of course Esme and Khai each misunderstanding the intentions of the other; but Hoang discusses the issues the two face in considerable detail and that – me learning how people interact – keeps me interested.

The Sisters (2019), The Ruin (2018), Dervla McTiernan

Dervla McTiernan is a solicitor, born in Ireland, now an Australian citizen living in Perth. She began writing detective fiction set in western Ireland, the Cormac Reilly series, after moving to Australia

McTiernan’s site says The Sisters, which is a prequel to The Ruin, is set in Dublin. I’m not going to listen to it again, but I thought it was set in Galway. Anyway, the gist is two young sisters sharing a studio flat are respectively a garda (Carrie) and a barrister (Aifric). Aifric, who has been given the opportunity to be the junior defending a murderer, leaves the case file on the kitchen table. Carrie reads it, and off her own bat begins interviewing witnesses. This goes as well as you might expect.

In The Ruin, Cormac Reilly has transferred back to Galway after a number of successful years as a detective in Dublin. In the Prologue, Reilly as a very young garda, is called to a decrepit house where two abused children Jack, 5 and Maude, 15 are downstairs while their alcoholic mother is dead upstairs of a heroin overdose. Back in the present, a young man in a committed relationship has apparently suicided by jumping into the river. It turns out that young man is Jack. Maude, and Jack’s partner, call for the suicide to be investigated as murder, but Reilly is instead assigned to investigate if Maude, 20 years earlier, murdered her mother. Carrie, who is now in Domestic Violence gives him a hand.

Both novels are ok, though like most detective fiction, a bit far-fetched. McTiernan strikes me as a poor man’s John Banville but she seems to be a success, so what would I know.

The Moroccan Daughter (2021), Deborah Rodriguez

As best I can gather Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser and an American. She spent some years establishing a hairdressing school in Afghanistan – creating opportunities for women – and now lives in Mexico. And yet The Moroccan Daughter is a very detailed description of Moroccan life.

Amina, a young Moroccan woman living in California (where her father thinks she is a grad student) with her American husband, Max, returns home for her sister’s wedding. She takes with her her hairdresser and best friend, Charlie and Charlie’s psychic grandmother Bea. They all stay for some weeks in father’s large house in Fez, joined later by Max, who is impatient for Amina to tell her father that she is married. There is a very complicated plot or plots revolving around Charlie having a secret ‘green card’ Moroccan husband; the lifelong housekeeper, Samira’s brother, an Amazigh (Berber) man from the Atlas Mountains, having been in the jail when Amina’s father was the Director; Amina’s father attempting to arrange a traditional marriage for her. And a very HMS Pinafore ending. All wonderfully and colourfully described, I must say.

A Great Act of Love (2025), Heather Rose

Heather Rose might be Australia’s most disappointing writer. She writes beautifully, but her novels apart from The Museum of Modern Love, lack originality.

A Great Act of Love is the story of a young woman, Caroline, who migrates from London to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. The author has (too) obviously researched her material: herbal lore, winemaking and 19th century life in some detail; Caroline does some interesting things; her father, born a French Duke in Champagne before fleeing the Revolution to become an apothecary in England, ends up a convict transported to Norfolk Island; we move seamlessly backwards and forwards in time as their stories are built up; but there is absolutely zero narrative tension. And Rose tells us nothing about Hobart or convict life that Quintus Serviton (1831), Caroline Leakey, The Broad Arrow (1859) and Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life (1874) didn’t do earlier and better.

It is routine these days for women writers to use historical fiction to present a more positive view of women, and I don’t blame them. But Caroline, apart from the fact that she doesn’t seem to need a man (or a woman), is a nothing burger, just quietly making her way through what for all its suffering is a relatively privileged life.

Bron at This Reading Life also posted a review of A Great Act of Love today.

The problem with Libby, which is where I borrowed A Great Act of Love, is that the book is downloaded a chapter at a time, so that if I happened to be out of phone reception at the end of a chapter – and along most highways in Western Australia phone towers can be 100 km or more apart – then the book came to a stop. Borrowbox, which has its own difficulties, at least lets you download the whole book,

Fools Crow, James Welch

wadholloway Literature, USA , , , ,

I’ve had Fools Crow (1986) in my Audible library since I first wrote about making Black and FN North American writing a ‘project’ – five years ago this month as it happens (Project 2022). That project has led to some amazing reading so I’m not sure why it took me so long to get here when Welch “is considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance” (wiki), though that link has N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as its ‘first’ before going on to list FN authors back to the 19th century.

Anyway, having got to Fools Crow, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

James Welch (1940-2003) was a Blackfeet and A’aninin man who grew up in Blackfeet country in Montana. The Blackfeet speaking peoples – the Piegan, the Siksika and the Kainai (or Many Chiefs) – were the dominant nation on the northern Great Plains of the US and Canada; the Piegan in what is now Montana, and the Siksika and the Many Chiefs over the border – the ‘medicine line’ – in Alberta.

The Piegan’s traditional enemies were the Crows, a Plains tribe whose connections extended along the Yellowstone River from southern Montana to North Dakota, where the Yellowstone feeds into the Missouri (where they run into the Ojibwe, the largest Indian nation).

If you, like me, are wondering how this geography connects with Reservation Blues which I reviewed recently, then the Flathead Reservation in Montana which the girls, Chess and Checkers comes from is about 100 km west of the current Blackfeet Reservation. I would say that the Flatheads are mountain people and the Blackfeet, as I said, are of the Plains. They don’t come into contact in Fools Crow.

Fools Crow, set in Montana in the 1860s, after the US Civil War, is a work of Historical Fiction set around the coming of age of young Piegan man, White Man’s Dog, who later earns the name Fools Crow. The novel reflects the duplicity of the US government in its signing of treaties which it never honoured; the ongoing encroachment by ranchers, with the support of the Army, on lands supposedly reserved for Indians; the active resistance of some Blackfeet; and, finally, government retaliation culminating in the massacre of 200 Piegan Blackfeet, mostly women, children and older men, by US Army forces under Major Eugene Mortimer Baker on January 23, 1870.

And speaking of massacres, it also reflects the spread of smallpox through the tribes, but not through the whites, at a time when vaccination had been available for at least a century. Even if it was not deliberately spread in the US as it was in Canada and Australia, it is still unforgiveable.

Though of course the US had their own ‘weapon’, the eradication of the immense buffalo herds the Indians relied on for food (see Prairie Edge).

The language of Fools Crow is straightforward English. Where other writers convey non-whiteness through the use of patois and (non-English) language, Welch uses Piegan names – for people, places and objects – directly translated. So, for instance, a repeating rifle is a ‘many shots gun’, and this works surprisingly well. The one main exception is ‘Napikwan’ for white people. It is never stated whether this means whites or foreigners or invaders, though occasionally the Piegan also use ‘hairy faces’.

Piegan children are given names which reflect the hopes of their parents, and which are then replaced by names referencing something significant about them, or something which they have done. So, White Man’s Dog got his name for following around another Indian called White Man. His later name arose from him escaping being killed, by fooling a Crow into believing he was already dead.

WMD is nearly always the main protagonist, but sometimes Welch will transfer his point of view to another character who is temporarily important, most often to WMD’s age mate Fast Horse who leaves the tribe and joins a small band of rebels who attack white farmers and prospectors and venture into towns, to the brothels and bars.

WMD and Fast Horse represent the two divergent paths which Indians were being forced into – an increasingly constrained traditional life; and lawlessness dressed up as fighting back.

We follow WMD, who is anxious and uncertain compared with the brash Fast Horse, on his first act of manhood – going with a raiding party of young men under the supervision of a more experienced brave, to steal a mob of horses from a Crow encampment, which I must say involves a lot of shooting people asleep in their tepees and lodges (I never did work out what a ‘lodge’ was). WMD barely escapes being killed, but is seen to behave more responsibly than Fast Horse, who causes the capture of their leader. From this point WMD grows into manhood, learning medicine, marrying, becoming listened to, while Fast Horse goes off to become an outlaw – both in the eyes of the Indians and of the US Army.

Traditional Indian life is coming to an end. The Army is intent on capturing the Blackfeet leadership and on punishing the raiders; as well as on restricting the Piegans to a smaller and smaller area of the Plains; hunters are slaughtering buffalo for their hides (or just for the fun of it in one case); and the smallpox epidemic is getting closer. The Piegans consider crossing the Medicine Line into Canada to join their brothers the Siksika, out of reach of the US Army, but family ties and obligations hold them in place until it is too late.

Ironically, the tribe that Major Baker’s soldiers massacre is led by the one chief, Heavy Runner, who was in favour of reaching an agreement with the Government. He runs towards the soldiers waving a paper, a safe conduct from a General he had been negotiating with, and is the first man killed.

A band led by Fools Crow come upon the site soon after and are left contemplating an uncertain future.

I have summarised the historical skeleton that contains this story, but through it all we get close to Fools Crow, to his wife, to his wider family and to everyday life on the Plains. It is very well done.

.

James Welch, Fools Crow, first pub. 1986. Audible version read by Darrell Dennis. 14 hours

Broken, Remote Control

wadholloway Africa , , ,

To be clear, this is two reviews – Broken: Not a Halal Love Story (2023) by Fatima Bala and Remote Control (2021) by Nnedi Okorafor. Both are Nigerian women living in N America and, as it happens, I read both on kindle. Apart from that they have nothing in common.

All that Bala’s bios say about her is that she is a writer and lecturer living in Vancouver. They generally have photos of a young African woman in a head scarf. Some also have pictures of two books with Bala’s name on them so I’m guessing this her second novel.

The main character in Broken, Fa’iza, is a young Hausa woman, from a very well-off, conservative Muslim family in northern Nigeria who goes to Toronto to study Law. The Nigerian ambassador to Canada has his residence in Toronto (and not Ottawa, which seems disrespectful. Also, Nigeria, like Australia, actually has a High Commissioner. So perhaps this is a way of creating a bit of distance between the actual and fictional offices). The ambassador’s family and Fa’iza’s parents are friends, and Fa’iza stays with them on arrival and during term breaks. Fa’iza is friends with the ambassador’s daughter and soon meets their oldest son, Ahmad, thirtyish, a wealthy entrepreneur and of course devastatingly handsome in the best Mills & Boon tradition.

What lifts Broken above an ordinary M&B romance is Fa’iza’s strict adherence to her religion. Ahmad falls for Fa’iza and begins taking her out, but he is a playboy used to a western lifestyle. To have any hope with Fa’iza he must give up drinking, womanizing and eating (non-halal) steak.

Just then, the soulful call to Asr prayer filled my room … After my four raka’ats, the series of movements during prayer, I seemed to have got more clarity about my outfit choice. I walked to my closet and brought out a pair of grey jeggings I’d never worn before.

The tension in the first half of the novel is all about him coming to understand just how serious she is about her (their) religion and how they deal with becoming more and more sexually attracted to each other. Interestingly, moving along in the background is the ambassador’s daughter whose boyfriend has married someone else and their secret plan for her to become his second wife.

In the second half of the novel Fa’iza is back in Nigeria with her parents, the religious gulf between her and Ahmad apparently insuperable. Fa’iza has established a home for single mothers (to which Ahmad is secretly a donor) and, over the course of five years both move towards making ‘acceptable’ marriages.

Would I be as interested in a similar book where the protagonists were Catholic? I’m not sure. One of the attractions of Broken is of being so deeply invested in the nitty-gritty of a new-to-me culture. Sure, the Mills&Boon element never completely goes away, but overall I enjoyed following Fa’iza coming of age as a Muslim woman.

Fatima Bala, Broken: Not a Halal Love Story, Masobe Books, 2023. 439pp

Nnedi Okorafor is one of my favourite authors. She lives in the US, but moves between America and Nigeria – where her family background is Igbo, from the south east. I haven’t read her YA fiction but have greatly enjoyed her adult Science Fiction Fantasy which she terms AfricanFuturism and AfricanJujuism (see my review of Lagoon)

Remote Control begins with Sankofa,14 dressed as though she were her mother, walking through the forests of Ghana, accompanied, at a distance, by a fox. She is universally feared as a bringer of Death. When she chooses to enter a house she is fed all the best food, and given the best clothes. Her talent is that she is able to glow green in the dark. If she glows too strongly she will kill the people around her, but she has learnt to control her gift and uses it to bring to an end the lives of the terminally ill.

As a much younger child she was climbing a tree when a meteor shower deposited a glowing green seed in the roots of the tree. A year later a box rises out of the earth, containing the seed. The girl keeps it in her room, but her father sells it to some government men who, on their journey back to the capital are attacked and the seed is taken.

A little later, the girl is struck by a car. She bursts into green light and all the people in her town, including her family, are killed. Sankofa can feel the seed tugging at her and so she begins to walk.

This is all so juvenile and it doesn’t get any better. Sankofa finds respite for a while living and working with a woman who owns a shop. Until she accidentally destroys the robot that controls the town’s main intersection, and she is forced once again to move on.

Okorafor says this is the same ‘universe’ as Who Fears Death (2010) and The Book of Phoenix (2015) but it has none of their complexity. Which is a shame as this is the first of Okorafor’s books I haven’t liked.

Nnedi Okorafor, Remote Control, Tor, 2021. 160pp

Desolation, Hossein Asgari

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

What is the Resistance? Brave patriots using any means at hand to fight back against the evil subjugator.
What is Terrorism? The Resistance as the subjugator would like you to see it.

On the weekend of 8-9 Sept 2001 I brought a road train* load of rice hulls up to Moranbah in central Queensland, unloaded Mon and ran empty to Rockhampton where, on Tues I loaded one trailer, “swam 3 km in S Rocky pool”, and shouted myself to a night in a motel ($46.00). So, on Weds morning – “9/11” in America – all I had to do was switch on the television to see the destruction of the World Trade Centre, and the beginning of the end of US invincibility.

Instead, I went back to work; loaded my second trailer and headed inland: Blackwater, Rolleston, Cunnumulla, Bourke, Echuca, home (Melbourne), picking up bits and pieces of news off the ABC as I passed in and out of reception. I thought then, and I think now, that if the people of the ‘Middle East’ were ever going to fight back against a century of British and US imperialism, then the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were ideal places to start.

In the quarter century since, the US has lashed out: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria are all more or less in ruins. As also of course is Lebanon, unfortunate neighbour/victim of the empire’s white colonial enclave in former Palestine. But it seems today that Iran will prove a step too far; that as my father saw in his lifetime the fall of the British Empire, I will see in mine the fall of the American.

Hossein Asgari is an Iranian Australian, living in Adelaide. Desolation (2025) is, like his first, Only Sound Remains (2023), framed as a story about Iran being told to an Iranian Australian writer in Adelaide. In this case the story begins in the late 1980s, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War. It is the story of a young man, Amin, falling in love with one young woman and then another, and how this leads him to an encounter with Al-Qaeda.

Amin, in his last year of school, lives with his well-off parents and siblings in a provincial city. A family escaping the ongoing bombing of Tehran move in across the road. Their daughter, wearing bright colours, makeup and no hijab(!) smiles at Amin. It is months before he can speak to her – Parvenah – and then start visiting her on Sundays when her parents are out, watching movies, discussing western books and music.

In a fit of madness, for which he is later awarded a medal, the Capitain of the USS Vincennes orders two surface to air missiles be fired at Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 flying in Iranian air space with 290 people aboard. All are lost, including Amin’s brother, Hamid, a mathematician en route to begin college in America. Amin sees Parvenah at Hamid’s funeral:

At that moment, he remembered that, on the day of Hamid’s death, a neighbour had spotted him sneaking out of her house. He hadn’t heard anything from Mr Bahrami [her father] or the neighbour. Death made every other concern seem petty and trivial.

The war ends, Parvenah’s family return to Tehran. By accident, Amin sees her again a year or two later, hopping out of what is obviously her boyfriend’s flash car. She approaches him. He turns away. (I am reading Proust, Book II. How can I not think of Marcel repeatedly turning away from Gilberte).

Amin begins his two years compulsory military service. He is posted to Zahedan, near Iran’s border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. His roommate takes him to the restaurant of his cousin Haroun. Amin is struck by the eyes – it’s all he can see of her – of a young woman – Ayesha – in the kitchen. Romance ensues.

Haroun makes mysterious journeys across the border. At the end of his military service Amin is persuaded to join him, to prove himself to Ayesha, rather than with any political intent. Things do not go well. The novel ends, as it begins, with Amin, an aimless drunk in an Adelaide park, telling his story to the author.

Desolation is only obliquely about ‘terrorism’. Rather, as with so much of my reading these days, it tells of everyday life on the other side of the them and us – white ‘Christians’/brown Muslims – divide. And the pressures, like the downing of Flight 655, which make ‘terrorism’ inevitable.

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Hossein Asgari, Desolation, Ultimo Press, Sydney, 2025. 260pp

*By coincidence, my employer at that time, Johnny Crossmatch – I never knew his real name – was a scientist from Iran. He said he was Assyrian, from northern Iran, though I gather the Assyrian community is centred further west, in Iraq and Turkiye.

Sugar Heaven, Jean Devanny

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

Jean Devanny (1894-1962) was born in New Zealand and migrated to Australia in 1929, by which time she was already a committed Communist. In the 1930s she was working for the Party in North Queensland and it was during this period she wrote Sugar Heaven (1936) about the struggle of sugar cane cutters for better pay and conditions.

This was of course towards the end of the Great Depression when workers everywhere were being sacked or forced to work for lower pay. At its height in 1932, one in three workers were unemployed. Judah Waten’s Time of Conflict which (coincidentally) I reviewed a few weeks ago, covers the role of the Communists in the unemployed workers movement in NSW at the same time.

Altogether, Devanny wrote 15 novels. Ron Store, in Devanny’s ADB entry, writes of them: “For her the novel was an instrument for propaganda, written often in a ‘fiery agitational style’. Well aware of her own literary defects, Devanny feared she had wasted her life: ‘I realise now that I have not exploited the small measure of ability for writing I possess one whit. I never really got down to it and THOUGHT. Thought was reserved for politics‘.” Store does not give a source for this, but it may have been Point of Departure: The Autobiography of Jean Devanny (1987).

Sugar cane was, then and now, grown in North Queensland along the narrow coastal plain east of the Great Divide. The setting for Sugar Heaven is the area around Tully and Innisfail, halfway between Townsville and Cairns, and in particular the strike of 1935 by cutters and mill workers which was organised by Communists and was opposed not just by the bosses and farmers, but by the Australian Workers Union and by the state Labor government, and therefore the police.

RECENT SUGAR STRIKE

On his return from Tully last week Mr. W. H. Doherty, general secretary of the Queensland Cane-growers’ Council, said that the recent sugar strike had been organised in Sydney, not in Queensland. With the exception of one or two key men who participated, the others were only pawns in the game. The industry could never have peace while a few trouble-makers were allowed to remain, and he expressed the determination of the sugar industry to rid itself of trouble-makers. It was much easier for those who were not in the fight to criticise and tell the industry how it could be settled.
The Isis Recorder (Childers, Qld)  Tue 15 Oct 1935 [‘in Sydney’ is code for ‘by outsiders, Communists’]

Sugar cane grows to a couple of metres tall. The cutters, with machetes, cut it at ground level, then make the canes up into bundles which are loaded onto rail trucks running on temporary tracks to the nearby mills. Devanny does not say here, but sugar milling was a near monopoly of CSR – the Colonial Sugar Refining Co., which meant that the often small farmers were also subject to that monopoly, and might in other circumstances have been allies of the workers. The cutters were employed by the farmers – not by the mills – and lived in houses or single mens barracks nearby. And it was the farmers who were being squeezed by the strike, as their cane began to rot, uncut.

Wages at that time, and up until the 1980s, were set state or nation-wide by Arbitration Commissions considering cases brought by the large unions and fought by employers’ organisations. The AWU was a right-wing union, with considerable influence within the Labor party. Once a union was ‘captured’ by one side or the other they were (and are) generally able to manipulate the vote to keep the other side out.

The particular grievance of the cutters during this strike was the prevalence of ‘Weil’s disease’ (Leptospirosis) an infection carried by rats, which killed a number of men each year. The men wanted the cane ‘burnt’, ie. the outer leaves burnt off which otherwise formed a litter on the ground in which the rats thrived. But this apparently reduced the farmers’ return.

The novel begins with Dulcie, a young, strait-laced woman from Sydney, and Hefty Lee, recently married without knowing each other very well, just moved into a workers cottage at Silkwood, near Innisfail, where Hefty has seasonal employment as a cutter. The first thing Dulcie learns about Hefty is that he has been married before, to Eileen, who went off with his brother, Bill, who works in the mill at Mourilyan, a bit further up the line, and so whom he often sees, and remains friendly with.

The next is that Hefty is on the local area (workers) committee and that she, Dulcie, is expected to support strikers and despise scabs. And so her education commences, very slowly at first, with only Gladys next door to talk to about it all. A great deal of the first half of the novel is drily didactic, reading like a series of reports from the Tribune, as Hefty and his mates muster support for the strikes breaking out all through the region. But through it all Dulcie is learning what it is to be a wife. Not just in keeping house, but what is expected of her in bed (by it must be said, a consistently loving and considerate husband).

Dulcie is not greatly interested in ‘news’, but overseas Mussolini is invading Abyssinia, and in Queensland, the government has enacted laws giving ‘British’ (ie. Anglo/Australian) workers preference in employment over Italians of whom there are a great many in the cane industry. It is notable that Devanny is very aware of the plight of the Italians, and of the then-approaching WWII, referring at one point to the internment of German Australians during the first War.

Once we are familiar with the course of the strikes, and with the main characters, the pace of the novel picks up. Eileen is having an affair – with Bill’s knowledge – with an Italian, Tony, who wants Eileen to go off with him where they won’t be known. Dulcie gets to meet, and like Eileen. And eventually, by the device of putting Hefty in hospital, goes off to Tully where she finally, fully embraces the aims of the strike and begins the work of forming a women’s committee, which the Party had ignored. Like all newbies, she’s fiercer than the old-timers: “I don’t know what to do! You know that! All you men who can talk and talk and —– and do nothing but lose strikes!”

This is a ‘scholarly’ edition and there are a number of essays attached which I have mostly skimmed, but I was taken particularly by the words of Amanda Lohrey (2002), and I will leave to her my summing up: ‘My first encounter with Sugar Heaven was a revelation. Though in many ways a crude and rough-hewn piece of narrative (openly polemical, for one thing) it seemed to me to have a visceral force and vitality rare in Australian fiction. Perhaps more rare was the degree to which that vitality was openly erotic… Devanny, it is widely conceded, is no great stylist in the conventional sense, but there is, nevertheless, an almost ecstatic joy in life that informs every corner of Sugar Heaven.’

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Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven, first pub. 1936. Edition pictured: Vulgar Press, Melbourne, 2002. 255pp

Other reviews:
Lisa, ANZLitLovers

Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie

wadholloway USA , , , ,

Reservation Blues (1995) is the story of a rock band, Coyote Springs, formed by three guys from the Spokane Reservation and two young women, Chess and Checkers, from ‘neighbouring’ Flathead Reservation (I think there’s a lot of mountain wilderness in between). The names of the guys are Thomas Builds-The-Fire, Junior Polatkin, and Victor Joseph. Chess and Checkers have other names but prefer not to use them.

The Spokane Reservation is mostly in eastern Washington state, and the Flathead Indian Reservation, ‘home to the Bitterroot Salish,  Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles tribes’, is in western Montana, 400 km east, the other side, once you get past Spokane city, of northern Idaho’s Panhandle National Forests (map). The author, Sherman Alexie (1966- ) is a Spokane man and grew up on the Spokane Reservation.

I have read only two other US First Nations novelists that I can think of – Louise Erdrich (Chippewa/N Dakota) and Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Dakota), author of A Council of Dolls. Compared with them, Alexie is far more savage about the level of dysfunction reservation life involves. (I’ve read Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian but not his fiction).

Reservation Blues begins with a Black man carrying a guitar walking up to the turnoff to Wellpinit, the Spokane Reservation town. Thomas, 32, short, slightly paunchy, and marked by loneliness – “Indian woman had never paid much attention to him, because he didn’t pretend to be some twentieth century warrior, alternating between blind rage and feigned disinterest” – pulls up in his old blue van and introduces himself. The Black man is blues guitarist Robert Johnson (b.1911) who has sold his soul to “the Gentleman”, the Devil, and is meant to have died in 1938. He is looking for the ‘old woman on the hill’ who, his dreams tell him, may be able to help him. Thomas gives him a lift. Johnson leaves his guitar in the back of the van.

Victor and Junior had been at school with Thomas, where they then and now, routinely roughed him up. Junior drives a water truck for the council. Victor, who has been away in reform school or prison, mostly just drinks. They all live in shoddily built government (HUD) houses, which their absent or dead parents had lived in before them; and eat community rations which are delivered once a month.

This is a novel about a short period of hope in a place where hope is dead; where three boys who are actually men in their thirties dare, briefly, to dream; where a guitar which can remake itself when it’s broken orders those three boys to form a band. Victor demands to be lead guitarist, Thomas is the bass player and lead singer, Junior plays drums. They practice in a derelict grocery store and soon people come to watch.

At first, Thomas had worried that his amplified bass and Junior’s drums would overwhelm the acoustic lead guitar, but Victor could have kicked the guitar around the floor and it would have sounded good enough. Even without an amplifier or microphones, Robert Johnson’s guitar filled the room.

Two new-ager white women, Betty and Veronica, turn up, standing at the front of the crowd and singing, sleeping in their car outside the store, and of course eventually going home with Junior and Victor.

Soon, Indians from all around the place are coming to watch. The guys have to choose a name. Thomas proposes ‘Coyote Springs’. ‘”That’s too damn Indian”, Junior said. “It’s always Coyote this, Coyote that”. “Fuck Coyote,” Victor said.’ During the night Coyote interferes with the water truck and Junior loses his job. So ‘Coyote Springs’ it is. Then ‘some Flathead Indian’ from the Tipi Pole Tavern in Arlee, Montana offers the band a paying gig.

On the first night Chess and Checkers stand in the front row. Thomas serenades Chess with a song he has written, and that’s it. Chess invites Thomas home. The girls join the band. The band gets invited to a gig in Seattle ‘for $1,000’. Betty and Veronica turn up again. It’s mostly downhill from there.

There are some side stories – Checkers in love with the Spokane’s Catholic priest; the ancient enmity of rival basketballers, Thomas’ father and the Council Chairman; Big Mom and Robert Johnson up on the hill. The relationship between Thomas and Chess holds the novel together, but all around them is the shared experience of dead mothers and drunken, unreliable fathers. Will they be able to transcend that? Maybe.

This is a grunge novel, written from Grunge central (Seattle) and during the years of peak Grunge; written with wry humour in “if you didn’t laugh you’d cry” mode, as grunge writing often is. I’m a fan of Grunge and would have enjoyed it for that alone. But it also manages to draw a picture of Indian life that would break your heart, and that takes it to another level.

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Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues, Grove Press, NY, 1995. 306pp

The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mohammed Mbougar Sarr

wadholloway Africa, Literature , , ,

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (1990-) is from Senegal, a former French colony on Africa’s north west coast. He was educated in Dakar and Paris and writes in French. The Most Secret Memory of Men, his fourth novel, came out in 2021, in which year it won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. It was published in English in 2023.

I haven’t really looked at Francophone African writing up till now – maybe one novel from Cameroon – nor for that matter writing in Arabic or in the many languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Two or three years ago I believed that the writing of novels by Africans began with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) but it is clear to me now that is not even true for Nigeria, let alone the rest of Africa.

In a future post, I will review an essay I have just come across by Wendy Laura Belcher, Early African Literature: An Anthology of Written Texts from 3000 BCE to 1900 CE, which, as you can see by the title, asserts that Africa has in fact a very long of history of stories in writing. (Alex Haley implies something similar in Roots, at least in relation to Black Arabic speakers in Gambia).

The French were discussing African literature well before Things Fall Apart. See for instance Jean Paul Sartre’s essay Black Orpheus (1948) and more generally the whole Négritude movement pre-WWII. I think when I start looking I will find African fiction in French dating back decades before the beginnings of post-colonial writing in English in the 1950s and 60s.

That’s enough background. The Most Secret Memory of Men is of course contemporary, but its premise is that the protagonist, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young (male) Senegalese writer/doctoral student in Paris in 2018 is given a fabled French/Senegalese novel, presumed lost these past 80 years.

TC Elimane was born in Senegal. He received a scholarship and moved to Paris, where, in 1938, he published a book whose fate proved unusual and tragic: The Labyrinth of Inhumanity.
And what a book! The masterpiece of a young African Negro! A first in France! The novel ignited the kind of literary quarrel for which that country alone has the aptitude and appetite,

Faye learns about The Labyrinth of Inhumanity in school in Senegal. How he finally and unexpectedly gets hold of a copy is that some years later, in a Paris cafe, he sees Siga D, a 60-ish Senegalese woman author, well known for her revealing writing about herself; tells her that he admires her breasts which he has just glimpsed but which he ‘knows’ from her writing; she invites him up to her hotel room, reveals herself to him, but pulls back at the very last minute. They smoke a joint. She gives him the book, tells him to read it and then to come and see her in Amsterdam where she lives and she will tell him how she came to have what may well be the only surviving copy.

Faye reads it, is blown away, shows it to his circle of African writer friends, they are blown away. His exploration of how the book was lost begins with newspaper files from 1938; he discovers the publishers, a young couple who were friends with Elimane; he discovers the ‘plagiarism’ scandal which led to the book being pulped.

The novel expands in all directions, encompassing a number of points of view. To Siga D’s unhappy childhood in a Senegal village; her father’s long deathbed story about why he made her unhappy, and how he came to have the copy of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity she much later gives to Faye; Faye’s pursuit of the book, its author and publishers; long, very interesting discussions about whether quoting/referencing/’sampling’ constitutes plagiarism; Faye’s love life; and through it all, what it means to write, to be a writer.

In the last couple of chapters – there are only seven, so they are all long – Faye returns to Senegal, to a country riven by unrest around the suicide of a young activist. His long search leads him to Elimane’s home village which is not so far from his own.

As always, especially when I am away working and able to listen straight through, I become immersed in audiobooks, but am unable to say a lot when I get home and sit in front of my computer. Luckily, for this review I was able to secure a print copy at my local library.

… only a mediocre or bad or ordinary book is about something. A great book has no subject and isn’t about anything, it only tries to say or discover something, but that only is already everything, and that something is also already everything.

So is this a great book? It’s certainly close. I absorbed The Most Secret Memory of Men principally as Sarr writing about writing, about, in particular, the difficulties of being an African writer living in the West and writing as an expatriate. But it is also a literary mystery looking back to France before and during WWII, with a subsequent diversion to Argentina; with characters whose lives are unexpectedly entwined; and plenty to say about both traditional and modern life in Senegal. Highly recommended.

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Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men, first pub. (in French) 2021, trans. by Lara Vergnaud, 2023. 475pp. Audible version read by Ayesha Antoine (and others) 15 hr.