Upcoming Books: The River Knows My Name, by Mortada Gzar

Publishing Date: October 8th, 2024

 

ARC by Net Galley

 

Keywords: lots of possible triggers, r*pe, death, misoginy, violence, disability, lgbtq, family, translation, middle east, nudity, mutilation, swearing, complex, stories within stories, friendship, missing person, female characters.

 

 

*** Contains Spoilers ***

Supposedly a book of "coming of age", whatever that means, it's about a teenage girl who runs away only to find out her father is missing when she returns home. Set in Basra, Iraq, by the river One-Eyed Tigris, it tells the stories that move through the bubbling town while Charlotte looks for her father. 

It's difficult to have a simple opinion of a book that holds so many stories and different tones between it's covers. I'll start with what I didn't like. The violence and acts of aggression that were often dropped without warning, like a sudden ripple on the surface of a quiet pond. I understand that the matter-of-fact way these events were often described might represent a place where they are so normal that no one bats an eye, but often it felt that some (not all) where added just for shock value. There was also a great deal of genitals being shown or talked about. I wonder if some of the social "realism" is accurate or whether it was exaggerated for effect. There was a lot of violence against women and it was described as just another thing that happens, not really worthy of much emotion: even though the narrator was a woman herself, we are never lead to empathise with these women or made to feel for them. I get that maybe the society represented might not feel much for these women, but if we're seeing these acts from the point of view of a woman, who was a girl at the time, and a supposedly western girl too (though I didn't understand what her cultural background was exactly), then surely some sort of commentary wouldn't have been out of place. More emotion, depth and empathy was shown to the Overleaf Society and their love and devotion to calligraphy than to the fates of the brutalised women.

But this leads me to something else that bothered me about this book: it often only scratches the surface of the stories it tells before moving on to the next one. Much like the river it revolves around, it flows smoothly and continually between tales, without plunging into any depths about any of them. This often left me with more questions about what might perhaps be just cultural differences, than with a better understanding of the world of the story. Perhaps something was lost in translation? I don't know. I feel like I met a lot of people but got to know no one. Even the main characters. We learn that Charlotte is gay, but only in passing. We know that she yearns to escape, but what exactly? Her loving father? Nothing seems to be backed by some sort of more-in-depth context. One is left to guess from the morsels of information left here and there. Is that the goal? Perhaps. Nothing seems to be too defined either way. 

Now that's out of the way, I can move on to the things I liked. The writing is beautiful. The author is skilled at painting beautiful pictures with words. His prose, though not being employed as much as it could be in the description of emotional states, shines when employed in the description of events, actions, small details, anecdotes. The observations he makes are often original, interesting and amusing. There's a dry humour to his writing which is pleasant.

I know I complained about being given morsels of information that I had to use to help me see the full picture, like putting together a puzzle where the pieces where hidden in the middle of other puzzle pieces (and the box does not come with all the pieces). However, there is also a side to it that I enjoyed. You get to know certain characters as you would perhaps get to know a person: you arrive in the middle of their story, only know a few things about them (which might not make sense at first) and then gradually get to know them better, bit by bit. A lot of the story (or should I say, stories) is told like that and I found it interesting. If only the box came with all the pieces! Then I would have been content in making this journey morsel by morsel.

Overall it's an interesting book. I enjoy the way he conveys the dynamic interactions of the different realities in town. 

Some of my issues with this book might come from my own personal taste and a lack of understanding of the culture where the story unfolds. I would honestly have welcomed translation notes where appropriate.