A review by ceallaighsbooks
The Charm Buyers by Lillian Howan

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad 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? Yes

5.0

“In the night long ago, there were the Walkers, those who guarded memories. They walked through the night and they knew everything that had ever happened. It was how they remembered, by walking from when the sun went down and the moon rose. Memory in those times wasn’t little scratches of ink on paper: it was in their footsteps and their legs and their voices, chanting the long histories of the past, and it was in the night and the black ocean and the darkness that always returned.”

TITLE—The Charm Buyers
AUTHOR—Lillian Howan
PUBLISHED—2017
PUBLISHER—Latitude 20, University of Hawai’i Press

GENRE—literary fiction
SETTING—Tahiti, late 20th c. (the riots of 1995 happen halfway through the book)
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—the beauty of the Tahitian islands, Hakka community & heritage in Tahiti, imperialism, bon-bon chinois, CEP nuclear testing, cultural displacement, love & secrets, storytelling, mythmaking & oral traditions, unreliable narrator

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—The descriptions of the natural world of the islands were particularly vivid and enchanting. The subtle depth of the book’s themes was stunning.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“During the day, there was work, things to buy and sell, accounts to be settled, but at night came the stories of the past, things forgotten and now remembered, tales of wanderings and horses and terrible sacrifice. “We come from the North,” A-tai said, but it was so long ago. No one talked about why we, the Hakka, had left this North or where it was located: in China? Further north? It was vague like everything else, real only in the voice of the storyteller.”

I do not know why this book hasn’t been sweeping up all the awards and garnering reprints worldwide but this is one of the best, most beautiful and heartbreaking books that I have ever read.

On the surface this is a beautifully written book about the life of Marc-Antoine Chen, the son of a wealthy black pearl farmer and a member of the Hakka-Chinese community on the Tahitian islands during the late 20th c. The story centers the experiences and lives of the islanders in a world that is always trying to push them to the perimeter, that denies them their agency and, often, their futures.

But Howan does more with this story than just create a beautifully rendered portrait of the islands and its people, she explores the themes of family, community, identity, marginalization, euro-centrism in a colonized landscape, the utter destruction left in the wake of imperialism, activism & whose responsibility is it to “speak up”, traditional ways of life & belief in a “modern” (i.e. imperialized) world, injustice, the pressures of sociocultural expectations, oppression, love, and life’s purpose: specifically what does it mean to *live* one’s life.

Rereading this one will be a requirement for me. It’s too beautiful not to.

I would recommend this book to readers who want to read a beautifully written work of literary fiction set in the Tahitian islands—and who also want to cry a lot. 🥺😭😢

“I should know better than to start thinking that it would turn out all right, but here I was, thinking the same thoughts again. And what was I thinking? That it might be different. That you never really knew. Life was unpredictable and sometimes it surprised you with impossible hope.”

“I was so crazed I couldn’t speak, and then I had done the unthinkable. I touched her, on the cheek, on the corner of her mouth, and she closed her eyes and it all became possible.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // animal cruelty, illness caused by nuclear testing (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
  • THE BONE PEOPLE, by Keri Hulme
  • BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY, by Violet Kupersmith—TBR
  • ONCE WERE WARRIORS, by Alan Duff—TBR
  • THE EMPIRE OF DIRT, by Francesca Manfredi—TBR
  • FOX, by Dubravka Ugrešić—TBR
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