Bernardine Evaristo (2019), Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin books, pp.453
The book came to me as a gift, literally,
a discerning friend’s nod for my love of the literary.
I am glad this book and this author found me
they way they did,
when I was least expecting.
That’s when you are the most vulnerable
and completely open,
an attitude best suited to read
something so expansive as this novel,
the story and history of twelve women
through two centuries across many continents,
told in a compelling contemporary way.
Bernardine Evaristo,
writer, poet, playwright, professor,
the first black woman to win the Booker Prize
an accolade she shared with another great writer,
is a gifted story teller.
As you read through the novel
this aural quality pervades,
the prose is poetic and musical,
evocative and vivid.
So, you picture the protagonists and the places
and hear them speak and think,
walk through the gullies of your mind,
sashaying and shushing,
as they erupt into thoughts and doubts.
It is a tour de force of human history
in the last two centuries,
colonialism, slavery, racism, casteism,
sexism, queerphobia,
all roads taken
to be the human race we are today,
explored within
the microcosm
of individual lives,
specific plots and timelines.
And yet they interrupt each other,
invade and interact with one another
to give the map of a gnarly tree, the pedigree,
from which, these unlikely compatriots
hang like irreverent fruits.
They are ancestors and descendants,
peers and sisters,
exploring and bickering their way
through history and their stories.
Girl, Woman, Other has
the themes and temperaments
that Evaristo’s works tend to have,
an evaluative
perspective of received wisdom
from as many angles as possible,
and a lyrical quality to radical thoughts.
As winter buries us with an impossible longing
for a year that is fast slipping by,
this is the perfect companion
to soothe and comfort you,
enlighten and frighten you,
but above all give you so many opportunities
to live out the lives of others
however imaginary.
That’s what all good writers do.
