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nvaynberggmailcom's review
3.0
Part spiritual journey, part ethnography, Anna Badkhen's Fisherman's Blues does an adequate job of bringing a West African fishing village to life. Though it is most certainly interesting to hear stories and excerpts of lives that are so different than ours, Badkhen's tendency to flowery prose and unnecessary allusions gets a bit tiresome and keeps the prose from ever taking off.
Focusing primarily on one extended family, the Souares, Badkhen traces the daily life of a fisherman and his relations. Fisherman tell many stories, they love their greasy, sweet and carb-filled foods, they have a strong focus on family life and they struggle for a way out of a dying business. These themes are compelling; they underscore what we already know, the world is changing quickly and those that cannot adapt will be left behind. It is all the more heart-wrenching to put real faces and real stories to this abstract understanding.
However, Badkhen never quiet gets to the heart of the matter. Instead she focuses too much on her own musings--referencing every Western myth she can think of, from Greek mythology to Goethe and beyond. Why she feels the need to drag these to a land where stories and myths are ripe for the picking remains unclear. There are also oh so many philosophical refrains on the transience of life, the shifting nature of the oceans and so on and so forth--yet this does not add anything to the story, only gives us a better picture of the author herself.
Never quite getting beyond the obvious, Badkhen simply shows us a glimpse of a different place, briefly introduces us to the friends she's made. If this was part spiritual journey, part ethnography, it may have been better to embrace one or the other, as it stands, this book feels unfinished and without a clear purpose.
Focusing primarily on one extended family, the Souares, Badkhen traces the daily life of a fisherman and his relations. Fisherman tell many stories, they love their greasy, sweet and carb-filled foods, they have a strong focus on family life and they struggle for a way out of a dying business. These themes are compelling; they underscore what we already know, the world is changing quickly and those that cannot adapt will be left behind. It is all the more heart-wrenching to put real faces and real stories to this abstract understanding.
However, Badkhen never quiet gets to the heart of the matter. Instead she focuses too much on her own musings--referencing every Western myth she can think of, from Greek mythology to Goethe and beyond. Why she feels the need to drag these to a land where stories and myths are ripe for the picking remains unclear. There are also oh so many philosophical refrains on the transience of life, the shifting nature of the oceans and so on and so forth--yet this does not add anything to the story, only gives us a better picture of the author herself.
Never quite getting beyond the obvious, Badkhen simply shows us a glimpse of a different place, briefly introduces us to the friends she's made. If this was part spiritual journey, part ethnography, it may have been better to embrace one or the other, as it stands, this book feels unfinished and without a clear purpose.
graywacke's review
4.0
Badkhen uses the phrase "like an itinerant storyteller" near the end of this book. A Russian born American whose books are about journeys through war zones, the African savanna and Afghanistan, this may have served as her self-description. In a poetic voice she does a complete immersive journalism, trying to become part of a Senegalese fishing village, invisibly of course. Except that she fails to become invisible, as she acknowledges. She does join these fisherman on their long fishing voyages in their rickety boats, hiring herself out and helping with the labor, getting very intimate with many of those around her, even as they see her always taking notes, and sometimes ask her to write things down for them.
This is a community on the edge, starved out of the Senegalese interior, they are still viewed as migrants some hundred years or so since they took to the sea, only to witness the fishing stock crash and continually diminish (she doesn't analyze too much, but the fisherman blame the large international fishing vessels with gigantic nets and no restrictions.) The community lives a precarious life where death is cheap, crews are lost, and bodies wash up routinely. They are surrounded by temporary unmarked graves which all seem to wash away eventually. And yet they are connected to the larger world in numerous ways, and many of the men she talks to have left Senegal to find work, usually illegally, in Spain and elsewhere, sometimes doing very well, sometimes just to be imprisoned.
I finished this book, which she reads herself, very much in it's thrall, very enchanted by everything she reported and sees. Yet, I notice a lot of negative reviews, and complaints about her prose. She writes in a thick poetic prose where the facts and the story come second to the atmosphere she is trying to create. And I suspect that the same discomfort readers tend to feel with poetry in general today crops up in these reviews. So, recommended to those with more poetic tastes.
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36. Fisherman's Blues : A West African Community at Sea (audio) by Anna Badkhen
read by the author
published: 2018
format: 7:54 overdrive audio (304 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Library
listened: June 8-19
rating: 4
This is a community on the edge, starved out of the Senegalese interior, they are still viewed as migrants some hundred years or so since they took to the sea, only to witness the fishing stock crash and continually diminish (she doesn't analyze too much, but the fisherman blame the large international fishing vessels with gigantic nets and no restrictions.) The community lives a precarious life where death is cheap, crews are lost, and bodies wash up routinely. They are surrounded by temporary unmarked graves which all seem to wash away eventually. And yet they are connected to the larger world in numerous ways, and many of the men she talks to have left Senegal to find work, usually illegally, in Spain and elsewhere, sometimes doing very well, sometimes just to be imprisoned.
I finished this book, which she reads herself, very much in it's thrall, very enchanted by everything she reported and sees. Yet, I notice a lot of negative reviews, and complaints about her prose. She writes in a thick poetic prose where the facts and the story come second to the atmosphere she is trying to create. And I suspect that the same discomfort readers tend to feel with poetry in general today crops up in these reviews. So, recommended to those with more poetic tastes.
-----------------------------------------------
36. Fisherman's Blues : A West African Community at Sea (audio) by Anna Badkhen
read by the author
published: 2018
format: 7:54 overdrive audio (304 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Library
listened: June 8-19
rating: 4
mostlyshanti's review
3.0
fascinating journalism, the woman had never met a nice phrase she doesn't like or an amorphous thing she wants to anthropomorphise, would have liked more insight into ethics, fact checking, and the reporting process but this is basically anthropology and it's pretty good and would have been better without random interludes about irrelevant shipwrecks. But maybe everything is profound.
lmdo's review against another edition
1.0
I was interested in learning more about fishing communities in West Africa, but found Badkhen impossible to read. She has a stream of consciousness style that was at times poetic, but mostly confusing and some of the weirdest narrative non-fiction I've ever read.
whatsbookinjenni's review against another edition
DNF at Page 114--this was just not really what I thought it was going to be; it's much more lyrical/introspective non-fiction writing, which is not really my style. Additionally, I did not feel like Badkhen had given the reader an adequate picture of the different members of the community she discusses, so I had a hard time keeping track of who was who. I loved the idea and would definitely read more about this topic (how commercial fishing and climate change are impacting small fishing communities) but the execution of this one didn't work for me personally
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