Homegoing is an expansive novel tracing the lives and descendants of two half sisters born in the mid-18th century in Ghana, Effia and Esi. The sisters were raised by rival tribes ( the Fante and the Asante) at a time when English slave traders were fueling the tribal animosity for their own profit. The Fante and Asante peoples raid each other’s villages, taking captives to be sold as slaves to the English traders at the Cape Coast. They also allowed the European soldiers to marry their daughters in exchange for generous gifts. Effia is married off to the Cape Coast British Governor, leaving her Fante village to live in the Cape Coast Castle. Esi is captured in a Fante raid and sold as a slave and imprisoned in the lower levels of the same Castle, to be shipped to the plantations in Mississippi. The stories of Effia and Esi and their 8 generations of descendants, is the complex history of the slave trade, the legacy of miscegination, and the struggle to preserve culture and identity in the brutal face of forced displacement. But the novel does not assign blame to one group or people for slavery and its legacy. Slavery is part of all the cultures in this book – Fante, Asante, English and American – and all bear its scars. As one character notes, “sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home.”

Homegoing has a rigid structure, as the stories of Effia and Esi’s descendants are each given a chapter, alternating between the descendant of Effia and the descendant of the Esi. Characters you meet in one chapter return in later pages as we meet their children and grandchildren. So although this is the story of one family, there is not one character through the novel for the reader to identify with. Each chapter had a new cast of characters, and all these characters were sometimes difficult to keep track of. There is a family tree at the beginning of the novel which I frequently referred back to. I didn’t mind this though, and was gripped by these mini-stories, such as the attempt to escape the plantations, being sent as a convict to work in the coalmines, and the privilege of passing as white in Harlem. There are many pockets of American history that I know little about and the book provided a lot of information to absorb.

The broad vision of this book is ambitious, particularly for the first novel of a 26 year old writer. I was struck by the restraint with which Gyasi describes conditions of violence and depravity, often describing one or two specific (and often horrific) details which conveyed the whole.
The Asante slave girl being forced to carry the large container of water without spilling. The urine dripping through slaves stacked in the Castle prison waiting to be shipped to America. These details stick, get under your skin and do not go away.

Disclaimer: I read Don Quixote for my NYPL reading group, and I don’t think I would have made it through the 940 page novel without that incentive. Truthfully I didn’t make it through the 940 pages, but did read the whole first part, started the second, and read the last 120 pages. The Quixote scholar who came to our reading group, said the second half, published 10 years after the first, was the better of the two. So admittedly I didn’t get the full experience, but I think that the 650 or so pages I did read gave me a pretty good sense of the book.

Don Quixote is an astonishing novel on many levels, and though it was written in 1615, it has employs very contemporary narrative strategies, such as meta-narrative, intertextuality, and various extra-diegetic rants on literature and religion. The central story of course is about Alonoso Quixano, the nobleman who reads two many chivalric romantic novels, and convinces himself that it is his destiny to travel the countryside as a knight errant, defending damsels and orphans and others in need. So he saddles up his mangy horse Rocinante grabs a poor neighboring farmer Sancho Panza, dubs himself “Don Quixote de la Mancha” and wanders off in the countryside looking for adventure. Don Quixote is so steeped in his fantasy that he’s able to explain every situation through the lens of the chivalric novel. He encounters a series of windmills, and is convinced they are giants, so he attacks the sails. They come to an inn, and he is convinced it is a castle, the prostitutes are ladies in waiting. The combination of his delusional state and his impulse to intervene (usually with violence) results in one absurd mishap after another. Sancho Panza, the half-witted “squire” is a skeptical tag-along throughout the story, who frequently bears the brunt of Don Quixote’s adventures. Quixote has told Sancho that when his deeds become known world wide and he marries a princess, he will give Sancho an Island “insula” to govern. Sancho so wants that insula, that he goes along with Quixote’s crazy explanations for his behavior, sometimes becoming his enabler, other times trying to hold Quixote back from destruction.

This central story is compelling and comical, particularly the aphorism-filled banter between Quixote and Sancho while they are on the road. There are many stories within stories, as the protagonists encounter characters on their travels who recite ballads, poems, or tell them stories. Since their wanderings have no particular aim, the journey seems to just be a vehicle for Cervantes to keep us entertained with one inventive story after another. One of the more famous of these stories in Part 1 is the story of “The Impertinently Curious Man,” in which a man becomes obsessed with his wife’s fidelity, and asks his best friend Lothario to try to seduce her as a test. His experiment has disastrous consequences, as the ruse becomes reality and Lothario tries to seduce his wife.

Periodically Cervantes voice pops up quite strongly in the book, particularly in his not-so-veiled literary criticism of his peers. In one scene, Quixote’s friends, the Priest and the Barber, are going through his library trying to understand the cause of his dementia. They decide the books of chivalry must be removed from his library and burned. Book by book they make their way through his collection, discussing each book’s merits and whether it should be saved or scorched. They come across one of Cervantes’ books appears and it is rescued from the bonfire.

In addition to the compelling story, literary criticism, and stories-within-stories, there is also the meta-narrative. The reader is told that in fact Don Quixote actually existed, and what we are reading is a historical account by a Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. In fact, we are told, Cide’s first book on Quixote (the first half of the novel) is so popular that many people Quixote meets while back on the road in Part 2 have read the book and know who he is. The book’s central question of the relative nature of the real takes on yet another dimension.

I spent two months making my way through this book, and could have easily spent several more. The Cervantes scholar at our reading group described reading this for the first time while in graduate school, and knowing for certain that he had found his life’s work. The book is quite dense, and sometimes Cervantes’ rants become a little tedious. But the layers of storytelling, are definitely worth wading through.

We are reading Don Quixote for my NYPL book group and I’ve whipped through two David Ignatius novels in rapid succession this week as I procrastinate on my more difficult reading. (The Quantum Spy was the other one.)

I’m new to David Ignatius and the only other spy books I’ve read are the Gray Man series by Mark Greaney. Ignatius is not all action and adventure like Greaney, it’s more of a kooky (spooky) travel log with a great deal of administrative detail on the CIA. I gather that Ignatius spent time as a journalist working “with” the CIA, but after reading this book which goes into some detail on how the CIA recruit agents, it’s hard to believe he didn’t also work for them.

Siro focuses on the late 70s and a rogue group of operatives at different stages of their careers who see an opportunity to end the Cold War by igniting religious fervor among the Muslim groups across Central Asia. (This is post Iran hostage, pre Afghanistan.) They set up operations in a phony carpet store Karpetland (spelled with a K because “Nobody in his right mind would think of carpets and ask the operator for the ‘K’s‘”) in Rockville, Maryland. Much of the book focuses on the logistics of their maneuvering and it is this administrative part of the story which rings most authentic. Although the narrative arc of the book is ostensibly the generation shift at the Agency and the new sense of morality represented by the younger agents, this was less interesting than the minutiae of the day to day life at the CIA and the journeys into the edges of the Soviet Union –   Tashkent, Yerevan, and Istanbul. 

My fiction group most recently read Scribe. The novel takes place in an unexplained war-torn landscape in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main character, an unnamed woman, has somehow manage to eke out an isolated existence in her decaying family homestead, supporting herself by providing writing services to the “Uninvited” refugees who mass on the borders of her property. Then one day she is visited by a stranger named Hendricks, who not only wants her to write his story, but also to leave the safety of her home to deliver it. As the narrative progresses, the uncanny becomes increasingly fantastic. We see our narrator possessed by her dead sister, hallucinate the evil intentions of her neighbors, and get visited by a spirit child guide. What seems to start out as historical fiction slides into fantasy with elements of magic and mysticism.

There are moments of great poetry in the writing but I felt an underlying disorientation in the placelessness and timelessness of the narrative. What has created this post-apocalyptic future/past that has so devastated culture and society? How do the magical elements of the story play into the underlying pre-story? These questions left me (and my reading mates) feeling a little genre confused. So even though we all described “settling into” the reading of this novel and accepting the journey it wove, we were left with many questions.