Fiction Fever: February & March Edition
There was a time in secondary school (spanning an academic term or two) when I was unhealthily obsessed with reading fiction. All the good stuff, Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, and many more books I am too embarrassed to admit I went through the pages of. For reasons I am not sure of (whispers *imposter syndrome in college*), I spent my university days generally ignoring fiction because any time not spent on reading Economics was supposedly wasted. It is not like I even read that much non-fiction anyways.
Fiction Fever is about that slow journey of dragging myself back into stories that are not simply corroborating quantitative analysis, characters that are not found in agent-based modelling, and plots that are not solely describing data in Stata or Gretl (this might be the most pretentious line I have ever written but I am keeping it). This is where I will ramble on and overanalyse beautiful works of fiction, hopefully in two-month intervals where I struggle to not spoil the plot of the books for you guys (I am still rethinking this part). Anyways, in February and March, I read the following beauties:
“Seven Days In June” by Tia Williams
“They both had their twisted compulsions, different corners of the same hell”
There are books you enjoy and then there are books that drag you back to the first time you felt loved. The inconcealable childish giddiness on your face at the beginning of it all, your first fight, your breakup that was not a breakup and your break that was a breakup. Seven Days of June takes you through that flurry of emotions, shuttling you from past to present, character to character with the wit to match.
The story revolves around the romantic history between Eva and Shane, and how the seven days they spent together in high school indelibly left scars they carried throughout their lives. It takes you through those seven days and immerses you in the tornado of feelings between them when they cross paths again after fifteen years. The book feels like a book within a book, that’s how much I loved it.
Throughout Seven Days in June, Tia Williams shows that trauma is not just felt but is intrinsically linked to various ways (good or bad), someone copes with it. I think beneath the main plot, the book is whispering to the reader to be kind, because they are people fighting demons that they can not slay on their own, and being numb for today means they can maybe fight another day.
Rating: 5/5 (Up there with my all-time favourites)
“Tender Underneath” by Angasa Salome
‘And who am I?’ He paused, as if searching for the best way to answer. ‘You’re not somebody who gives all of themselves’.
I keep saying I do not like Young Adult (YA) Fiction, but I have liked all of the YA books I have read so far. In my defence, not every YA book walks you through a character’s life so intricately that you feel the tension in their dilemmas, the desperation in their pain, the confusion in their actions. This was what it felt like reading about Tender Underneath’s Effie May. Angasa Salome has this gift where you see Effie actually making decisions, whether mundane or existential, you are part of the process, you are with her. The impressive part about this is how this is done without muddling the story with excessive details.
While the book starts off with a high school scandal and is fleshed out around a love triangle (one of the reasons I am not big on YA), Angasa is extremely adept at dampening these main narratives throughout the book. Effie has these things weighing on her mind, but like any other person, you watch her get distracted and veer off into other aspects of her life for pages and pages have gradually dissolved. You watch her lose herself in grief, wallow in loneliness, ruin and mend friendships, get caught in family drama, and drown in fear and laughter.
While I had some apprehensions about the range of male characters and how one of the moral tensions was reconciled, I think Tender Underneath showed me that YA can go beyond mainstream high school drama and provides astute social commentary, as it did on parenting (from the perspective of those on the receiving end), love (how random, feral and reckless it is) and most importantly, what it means to be there for your friends.
Rating: 4/5
“The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” by Ayi Kwei Armah
“What, after all, could it mean? One man, with the help of people who loved him and believed in him, had arrived at power and used it for himself. Now other men, with the help of guns, had come to this same power. What would it mean?”
There are limited pieces of analysis that capture post-independence Africa better than satirical works of fiction. These show everything that falls through critical analytical frameworks, the bits that capture the rollercoaster of emotions that was independence and the fear from the consequent tyranny. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is centered on the life of a train freight clerk trying his best to navigate a corrupt society without getting his hands dirty. Ayi Kwei Armah vividly paints the pre-independence hope that made the despair of corrupt regimes unbearable, the collective anti-colonial rebellion that made the betrayal of the subsequent governments cause an unconsolable resignation.
Flicking through the pages, it was impossible for me not to think the book is about the illusion of choice. About how different constraints dictate your options so much that your actions are no longer your own. It’s about self-preservation. Crucially, I think that etched in the character’s disillusionment is the question that everyone thinks but rarely says aloud, is it really “… not a choice between life and death, but what kind of death we can bear, in the end”?
Going through the book, you are given a snapshot of the past we mostly idealise (understandably because of the current neoliberal hellscape), where you realise that the structural adjustment programmes and the worsening global economic environment were not the only reason for the underwhelming performance of post-independence states. There was a pent-up frustration, a well-founded one, regarding the way things were being run, that probably made it easy for the people to accept a regime change. Aye Akwei Armah reminds us of all this.
Rating: 4 /5
“When We Were Birds” by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
“He tell himself, the same way somebody have to clean the streets, and somebody have to collect the garbage, and somebody have to pave the road, somebody have to bury the dead. He say it over and over till he believe it, and think of the envelope for his mother in his dresser drawer, getting fatter through the weeks and then slimmer each time he deposit some in her account, praying her pride don’t stop her from withdrawing it. He put his uncomfortable feelings in the envelope with the hundred-dollar bills and try not to look at either of them too hard”
Revolving around the stories of Yejide and Darwin, this story traces the lives of these characters as they navigate complex family relations, responsibility and ghosts from their past. Although the overarching theme of the two protagonists’ connection with the dead, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo brings to life how these characters’ relationship with death evolved, diving into elements of grief that are both raw and unfiltered. My favourite aspect of the book lies in how the author blurs the line between Darwin and Yejide’s reality and their imagination, leaving space for the reader to question that grey area.
If not for these features, and the fact the book walks you through what it is like growing up a Rastafarian (I have always been interested in this), I would have dropped this book after about 100 pages. I thought it took too long for the connection between the two main stories to be evident. By the time it started piecing itself together, I think I had started to lose interest (unfortunately, I am not as patient as I should be). This is the main reason for the low rating. Given how much I liked the ending of the book, I believe it would be an interesting read for anyone interested in mythical storylines AND who has any modicum of patience. I am honestly pretty embarrassed that all the reviews I have read about this book were fabulous and I could only manage to give it a 2.5. I will definitely have another go at this book.
Rating: 2.5/5
See you all in two months (hopefully)!
PS: The Amazon links to the books are embedded in their respective titles!