life's so much simpler for men, simply because women are so much more complicated than them
Combining poetry and prose, eschewing capitals at the beginnings of sentences and punctuation at their ends, reading mostly like a collection of short stories (featuring twelve protagonists and the countless other characters who flesh out their histories), Bernardine Evaristo has crafted a loose and freefloating form in Girl, Woman, Other that allows her to flit between interior monologues and exterior dialogues, exploring the experiences and relationships of girls and women (and one “other”). Her subjects range from a teenager to a nonagenarian (but by detailing entire lives, we follow most of them from childhood through middle age), most of the characters are black (or mixed race), most currently live in England (although we do learn immigrant stories of those who came from Africa or America or the Caribbean, and the stories of those who went back), and many of the characters are feminists/activists/queer. The cover's overleaf notes that this book is about “centering voices we often see othered” and that's where I found this read to be most successful: I was very interested in the wide variety of ideas and experiences that Evaristo has included in this book and I am unsurprised that it (co)won the Man Booker Prize; this is important and it's literary. On the other hand, it could get a bit dull. It was a bit long. I don't know if it needed quite so many characters to make the point that the black British woman's experience is not monolithic. Yet, they all deserve to be heard; it seems a conundrum of a complaint that we got too much of a good thing.
As a sort of framing device, Girl, Woman, Other opens with the story of Amma: a black, feminist, lesbian playwright whose decades-old antiestablishment theatre company has finally broken through and her latest play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey (about fierce warrior women from Benin), is about to open at the National Theatre in London. After learning Amma's life story, the sections that follow introduce characters who are close to her, and then peripheral characters and the people who are close to them. In the end, many of these unrelated characters find themselves at the play's afterparty. In the book's epilogue, there's a scene that demonstrates that we are all more related than we may know.
So, this book is about girls:
when Yazz talks about her unusual upbringing to people, the unworldly ones expect her to be emotionally damaged from it, like how can you not be when your mum's a polyamorous lesbian and your father's a gay narcissist (as she describes him), and you were shunted between both their homes and dumped with various godparents while your parents pursued their careers?
this annoys Yazz who can't stand people saying anything negative about her parents
that's her prerogative
And women:
Nzinga was a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking, radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder, living and working on wimmin's land all over America before moving on, a gypsy housebuilder
Dominique was a drinking, drug-dabbling, chain-smoking lesbian feminist carnivorous clubber who produced theatre by women and lived in a London flat
she soon became a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking radical feminist lesbian housebuilder on wimmin's land called Spirit Moon, which only allowed lesbians to reside there
And other:
Megan wondered aloud how she could put her gender-free identity into practice when they were living in a gender-binary world, and that with so many definitions (sane and insane, she refrained from saying), the very idea of gender might eventually lose any meaning, who can remember them all? maybe that was the point, a completely gender-free world, or was that a naive utopian dream?
There are characters who engaged in mixed race relationships long before they gained wide acceptance, feminists who were radical in the Seventies, lesbians who paved the way for others, and modern university students who consider themselves “woke”: and all of them lecture others on sex/gender/social theory; and that might get tiresome if there weren't other characters pushing back or gently mocking their earnestness or evolving their own beliefs. There are also conventional relationships – straight marriages and divorces; having babies, losing babies; cheating and faithfulness – and Evaristo treats them all with equal respect:
Penelope decided she would go to college, marry a man who idolized her, become a teacher and have children
all of which would fill the gaping, aching chasm she now carried inside her
the feeling of being
un
moored
un
wanted
un
loved
un
done
a
no
one.
I included long quotes (and especially that last poetical one) to try and give a sense of the writing style; it may not work for everyone. As for me: I enjoyed each of the twelve pieces separately, and the underlying concept, but I'm not sure if it added up to a novel that I loved. Even so, it's worth four stars for ambition and execution; it certainly does centre those voices which have traditionally been othered and there's plenty of value in that.
Man Booker Longlist 2019:
- Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
- Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
- Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer
- Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
- Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
- John Lanchester , The Wall
- Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
- Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive
- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
- Max Porter, Lanny
- Salman Rushdie, Quichotte
- Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein
Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
