We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel has just been added to the long list for the 2013 Booker Prize. A short story of hers called “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Literature and became the first of several astounding chapters in …New Names. The work feels brave and completely fresh--raw even. The perspective, voice, and language held me spellbound.

On Bulawyao’s website is a quote from Chinua Achebe:

“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”

It seems an appropriate quote for someone who has taken such liberties with language and point of view.

Narration begins in the voice of ten-year-old Darling, whose father is away, whose school is closed, whose friends (Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, Stina, and Chipo) scream-sing with her as they run riot through the neighborhoods in search of guavas to steal. Bulawayo’s Darling tells us what they find besides guavas, and it is her words, reactions, and attention that feels real and tells us what we have always wondered: how does a child grow up in a world like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? What does the world look like and from where do these children acquire knowledge of concepts like “justice,” “fairness,” and “freedom”? Do these concepts include any notion of personal responsibility?

Very quickly in this novel one senses the danger in child’s play. The world is life-threatening, and the children know it. Their play, their home-life, their worship--it all has an edge that makes them brave and vulnerable at the same time. They rely on one another. The chapter “We Need New Names” was another breathtaking high-wire act that left my heart in my mouth. From this point I did not relax my guard with Bulawayo’s book in my hands. It felt explosive.

In “Shhh,” Darling hides the fact that her father has come home and is very ill. When her friends find out, they push their way into Darling’s shack, immediately intuiting that Darling’s father is dying of AIDS. Even Darling hadn’t grasped that—she was angry with her father for having left, and angrier still that he came home with a sickness. But the children face the man lying on the bed and talk openly about death and heaven and then they begin to sing:

"When Godknows starts singing Jobho, Sbho joins in and we listen to them sing it for a while and then we’re all scratching our bodies and singing it because Jobho is a song that leaves you with no choice but to scratch your body the way that sick man Job did in the Bible, lying there scratching his itching wounds when God was busy torturing him just to play with him to see if he had faith. Jobho makes you call out to heaven even though you know God is occupied with better things and will not even look your way. Jobho makes you point your forefinger to the sky and sing at the top of your voice. We itch and we scratch and we point and we itch again and we fill the shack with song.
Then Stina reaches and takes Father’s hand and start moving it to the song, and Bastard moves the other hand. I reach out and touch him too because I have never really touched him ever since he came and this is what I must do now because how will it look when everybody is touching him and I am not? We all look at one another and smile-sing because we are touching him, just touching him all over like he is a beautiful plaything we have just rescued from the trash. He feels like dry wood in my hands, but there is a strange light in his sunken eyes, like he has swallowed the sun.”

That passage ripped my heart out.

Every once in a while Darling will break into our attention with “This is real” or ”Is this even real?” She captures that sense of incredulity we experience when life starts to feel a little ludicrous and outside our control. In the last half of the novel she is a teenaged high-schooler in Detroit, Michigan (Destroyedmichigan). Her outsider status gives her the requisite distance for maximum observation but she retains her need for community. She is continually questioned about, and always questioning, “home.”

This is an exceptional debut and NoViolet Bulawayo has created a fictional world that stuns as it captivates. I remember thinking that Bulawayo and Jesmyn Ward are sisters of the pen, for both have the ability to flay open the skin to get to the “real.” This is a bravura performance. I do wonder, however, if such a performance can be replicated.

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Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

“There is a fine line between living and dying,” a character observes in Kate Atkinson’s new novel. And it does certainly seem to be the case here, in the midst of two world wars, during the Great Influenza, at the beginning of the twentieth century in Britain. Characters come close to death, and some do not escape it: alternate histories are woven together until we are not really sure what is true. And this is the message. “History is all about ‘what ifs’” a character says late in the novel. More to the point here, perhaps, is that fiction, and this fiction in particular, is all about ‘what ifs’.

This is my first experience with what I would call a literary mash-up. Mash-up is a relatively new concept in literature that was borrowed from music where two or more songs are combined, usually by laying the vocal track of one song over the instrumental track of another. Wikipedia defines a literary mash up as taking a pre-existing work of fiction, often a classic, and combining perhaps thirty or forty percent of it with a vampire, werewolf, or horror genre. Atkinson has taken “classic history,” which is the Führer’s horror story, and overlaid many possible stories (love stories, family histories, employment possibilities) so that outcomes in some cases are different for individuals, but not, that we can see, in the larger history.

Stories cascade upon one another, all centered around a single family, indeed, a single person, Ursula, who we meet in the first chapter and who succeeds, we think at first, in killing the Führer.

“Don’t you wonder sometimes, “ Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don’t know, say a Quaker household—surely things would be different.”

The juxtaposition of the chapters makes one remember those times when we stare into the unknowingness of the future and wonder what it will hold for us…and once there, looking back at the innocence of the early years, when we proceeded with our lives as though we had any control at all. Which brings me to a larger observation in this novel and in Atkinson’s fiction in general: oftentimes Atkinson’s characters are not agents of change, but reagents, possibly causing a chain reaction when they are introduced, possibly having no discernible impact at all.

“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously making history for the future.”

Sometimes there are exceptional people, but even they cannot escape that possibility that “one thing” could change everything. Therein lie our power, and the power of the fiction writer.

The title, Life After Life, points to those lives impacted by another’s life, or a close escape from death, or lives that continue after another has died, or simply the alternate histories we all might have if “one thing had been different.”

When the book and the stories were drawing to a close, I admit I didn’t want to get to the end. I didn’t want another person to die unexpectedly. I didn’t want Ursula to grow older. I didn’t want to know which story was true. So, you see, I was caught, too.


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The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

This second in a series about the “Complaints” department of Scottish law enforcement is big. In the process of investigating a relatively straightforward sexual harassment claim against a sergeant and his colleagues, the person who made the initial accusation ends up dead. Investigating this new mystery uncovers the scent of corruption and death that extends back decades.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the estimable Peter Forbes, who makes the Scottish accent understandable but also gives the reading unforgettable flair and flavor.

Rankin gave himself a lot to work with in this plot and scenario, but he managed to hold it all together, and ratcheted up the tension by having one of the three-man team of investigators always pressing to do less and close the case down without the bigger story. But Malcolm Fox, the lead investigator, has blood in the game and will not stop searching. Meaty.

If you haven't read this series, you are missing something special. The audio gives this Scottish tale its nip. Start from the beginning, with The Complaints.


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