12 women, 200 years

 

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.