Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - Open Water

Open Water is a literary love story, the story of a Ghanaian-British man, a photographer, trying to find an authentic, open way to love despite the trauma of repeated encounters with violence and police brutality. I had some reservations about reality of the love story: I was very unconvinced by how the protagonist and his girlfriend (both unnamed, though other characters in the book have names) supposedly became instant best friends when they met. The later stages of their relationship were rather better depicted. Part of the book is also devoted to the protag's interactions with other Black men (and a few women)--I found the sections about his friends interesting. It's quite interior, full of analysis of the protag's mind, which he is self-aware about although barely able to speak his thoughts aloud; also, it spends a fair bit of page space on reflections about being Black.

As befits literary fiction, the literal content of this book is overshadowed by how it's told: its interweaving of metaphors; its frequent flashbacks guided by similarities and emotions; its repetitive, rhythmed prose (which, sadly, was rather undone by the fact that the audiobook was monotonously narrated by the author himself). I like this kind of thing, but I wasn't entirely won over by how it was carried out in this case. Too often, I was jerked out of the reflective writing by the conventionality of a paragraph or the intrusion of banal language into a high-flying passage. A description of playing basketball, a list of physical and emotional experiences each prefaced by "You want to...," ends "You just want to be free" as if this was a climax.

I'm only referring to the narration, because most of the dialogue is impoverished on purpose, the protagonist being reduced to few words or silence at important moments. The girlfriend's verbal skills are something for the protagonist to aspire to. She lyrically describes what dancing is like for her: "I’m making space and I’m dancing into the space. I’m like, dancing into the space the drums leave, you know, between the kick and the snare and the hat, where that silence lies, that huge silence, those moments and spaces the drums are asking you to fill." The protagonist answers less inventively by inviting her to a club where he says there's "an energy that's very freeing, a bunch of black people being themselves."

Another problem I had with the book is that it's stuffed with talk about other works, mostly music but also literature, film, and visual arts. It felt too consciously academic. Overall, the experience of reading this book wasn't terrible, and it had some real high points (there are passages I'd enjoy quoting at length) and a satisfying ending.

Content Warnings