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codexmendoza 's review for:
Our Lady of the Nile
by Scholastique Mukasonga
This one is a bit difficult to comment on since I recommend it overall, but I think a harder editing hand could have let it become truly great. The overall bones of this are solid, Mukasonga has a great observational eye and the novel is teeming with amusing anecdotes (smuggled snacks from home! gifting a child to the Belgian queen! a nose job on a statue!) so you get a strong impression of both the youth and malleability of these girls, to the point where when the denouement happens with sudden acceleration (this is Rawanda fifteen years before the genocide after all) the hysteria, superstition, and violence have been set up all along.
When this book is good, it’s fantastic. For instance a seemingly throwaway gag about Dian Fossey (!?!?) suddenly comes back in a surreal and emotional way. It also has an understanding of the nature of collective violence: clumsy and yet terrifying. But unfortunately there are some very jarring transitions, and the dialogue is often extremely bad, in contrast to her mostly buoyant prose. Some of this awkwardness could possibly be laid at the feet of the translator, but a lot of it is structural: characters explaining themselves in a stilted authorial way or relating events in monologues indistinguishable from one another or the narration. Three quarters marks.
When this book is good, it’s fantastic. For instance a seemingly throwaway gag about Dian Fossey (!?!?) suddenly comes back in a surreal and emotional way. It also has an understanding of the nature of collective violence: clumsy and yet terrifying. But unfortunately there are some very jarring transitions, and the dialogue is often extremely bad, in contrast to her mostly buoyant prose. Some of this awkwardness could possibly be laid at the feet of the translator, but a lot of it is structural: characters explaining themselves in a stilted authorial way or relating events in monologues indistinguishable from one another or the narration. Three quarters marks.