A review by debatably_relavent
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

challenging sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I read the overwhelming majority of this book in 2023 but I finished it after new years so review #1 of the new year it is! Despite it by all accounts being very critically acclaimed and well-reviewed, I had absolutely never heard of it before opening up the packaging on a ‘blind date with a book’ thing a bookstore was doing (incredible gimmick, for the record). Overall a great book, if rambling at points and with a somewhat weak and confused ending. 

The story takes place in Kosawa, a village on the western periphery of a fictional west African country, with the incredible bad luck to have been built atop a fortune in oil. The story is told through several POVs, and follows the villagers struggle against the Pexton corporation and their country’s de facto neocolonial government to try and have their home restored to what it was before the river and soil were poisoned and children started dying. It’s told on a generational scale – stretching from the ‘80s to the mid 2000’s – and follows the main cast of characters from childhood into their forties, As might be expected from that, it’s not exactly fast-paced or full of heroics – lots of promises and reassurances being given and never lived up to, and dramatic actions being taken and leading to awful tragedies or only compromised half-successes. The book really beats in the theme that if you’re really powerless and the ones fucking you over have all the cards, a lot of time there really isn’t a winning move. Well, and maybe that the heroic, principled attempts at violent resistance repeatedly got everyone involved killed but did win real concessions and aid for the other villagers who were willing to play along (or just to sell out or give up Kosawa for dead), though I’m not entirely sure that’s how the story’s intended to be read. 

The prose isn’t usually eye-catching, but it’s extremely well-constructed, and beautiful at points. The story does a lot with shifting points of view, jumping from a corporate one of a particular age-group of children whose lives parallel the story, and closely individual ones from different members of a particular family whose daughter Thula ends up becoming the moral/intellectual heart of the resistance. Each voice feels incredibly distinct and focused on very different things, in a way that really worked for me. The massive timeframe covered also lets the book really indulge in showing what the day to day life of the villagers looks like – how they sustain themselves, the social rhythms of life, the rituals of adulthood, marriage, and childbirth, how widows and children are treated, and how the poisoning of the environment around them weighs down but doesn’t destroy any of it. It even does a great job of really selling the perspective and world-views of people for whom the world is enchanted and spiritual rites have real direct physical effects, which in my experience the vast majority of books about religious/spiritual characters totally fail to. 

The tone of things is pretty overwhelmingly melancholic – this is a story with a deep sense of history, which also means a very tragic imagination. Characters who really dedicate themselves to trying to change the world are portrayed as deeply admirable but almost certainly doomed and even likely to cause more harm than good. You see this most prominently with Thula, whose basically a genius and devotes her entire life from childhood to activism and social change with saintly (if not near-inhuman) purity and focus, and dies in her forties having not won much at all. The ones who take what they can, get government jobs and use the opportunity to become exactly as corrupt as the men who came before them and loot the country for the benefit of their friends and families meanwhile – well, they definitely aren’t making the world any better, but they’re shown as very human and sympathetic and they mostly end up with exactly the lives they were hoping for.