Reviews

Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali

serendipitysbooks's review against another edition

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

 Muriel at Metropolitan is set in apartheid era South Africa and shares the experiences of Muriel, a Black woman employed as a helper at a white owned electronics and furniture store (the Metropolitan - a microcosm for South African society) where many items were purchased on lay away. It highlighted the many micro aggressions - and some macro aggressions - Muriel encountered on a daily basis, some directed towards her and some towards the Black customers and other Black staff. The contempt, belittling and insulting behaviour was infuriating and the scene where Muriel is provided with a chair only to have its cushion quickly removed will forever stay with me. Yet, there was nothing unusual about any of the events in the novel; they were ordinary, everyday and totally unremarkable to those living them. The power of this novel lay in its understatedness, showcasing the everyday reality of apartheid. Interestingly Tlali struggled to get her work published. This is a heavily edited version. The unedited story Between Two Worlds (sadly I couldn’t find a copy), was finally published four years after this but was banned in South Africa for nearly a decade. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism

pilesandpiles's review

4.0

This was a random library find -- the spine caught my eye, so I checked it out. And it turned out to be a lost gem. Set in 1960s South Africa, it is the semiautobiographical story of Muriel, a Black woman who secures a secretarial job at a white-owned furniture and electronics layaway shop. The novel is not plot or character driven; instead, its structure is something like an accounting of microaggressions -- all the everyday acts of anti-Black dehumanization that Muriel and her coworkers are subjected to by their white workplace superiors, whose jobs they are capable of doing but are banned from taking on. It's literally an accounting of racism in that the layaway shop setting captures the recurring cycle of debt and aspirations of ownership that Black South Africans get trapped in by a system designed to prevent them from accumulating wealth. This novel perfectly captures how much of the structural violence of racism occurs in the guise of civility and banal interactions. And it is also about how people hold on to a sense of dignity and agency in the face of this.

berniemck's review

4.0

I enjoyed this book. Muriel takes a job at Metropolitan Radio in Africa during apartheid. The reader gets to listen to the employees conversations, to get a feel for the daily atrocities, that black people were subjected to. There was quite a lot, that was so unfamiliar to me. Reading this book was a great way to get a snippet of what my brothers and sisters had to go through in the Mother Land. I was originally drawn to this book because it was written by a South African author. I would recommend this book.

charliebnl's review

emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0