#grove press
Mary Oliver, from Dream Work
Mary Oliver, from Dream Work
Euphoria by Lily King
I did not anticipate a tale about three anthropologists mired in the tribal cultures of 1930s New Guinea to be a one-sitting read. As you may have garnered from reading my other blog posts, I am often wrong.
I should have known from anthropologist Nell’s observation about half way through that things were bound to end painfully, but I simply couldn’t stop myself. She says, “Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?” (140). And there is some terrible mistake, but who made it exactly, I’m not entirely sure. Was it one of the three scientists triangulated against the others? Was it of timing? Of place? Of circumstance? Or was it a mistake of more innate inevitability, of humanity, a mistake we ourselves didn’t make, but are doomed to pay for forever.
That inevitability, as tangible as it was, pulled me through the pages. Navigating the river for hours in the oppressive heat and blackness, plagued by bugs and desolation in equal measures, the anthropologist Bankson notes: “Sometimes at night it seemed to me that my boat was not being pushed by the engine but that boat and engine both were being pulled by the river itself, the ripples of wake just a design, like a stage set moving along with us” (38).
This is exactly how the novel drew me mercilessly onward, slapping at pesky and painful bugs, forcing in fetid thick air when it got difficult to breathe, like an anthropologist myself, determinedly highlighting passages I was hoping would uncover some mystery to the book or humanity, I’m not sure which.
If Virginia Woolf had written Heart of Darkness, with editing by Jennifer Egan of a visit from the goon squad, the result might be this book. Yesterday evening, discovering I had turned the final page, I groaned - out of pain, or satisfaction, or surprise. I’m not sure which. And maybe I found that place of “euphoria” where Nell says you think you know everything - but really you discover you know nothing.
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5 Questions with Aminatta Forna, author of The Window Seat
Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones,The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna’s books have been translated into twenty-two languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta,The Guardian,The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University.
Aminatta Forna will be in conversation with Eula Biss about her new book, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (published by Grove), in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, May 19th, 2021!
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Where are you writing to us from?
I’m in Arlington, Virginia.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
A childhood spent in developing countries where things were often not as you would have wished: power cuts, curfews, coups. Dogs have always kept me sane and we had adopted a Blue Heeler a few months before the pandemic began. I have been running a good deal over the last twelve months and encouraged a friend to begin. Now she can run a 5K. I also go sculling on the Potomac. The outdoors, basically.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I am loving for Kimmerer’s intimate and yet authoritative voice. Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer, which is about the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and also blends history, memoir, and science. Also The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I saw recommended by Rabih Alameddine on Twitter in a discussion about joyful novels. I found I was in the mood for a restorative Italian holiday.
I don’t return much to books, my natural curiosity tends to lead me to new books. Books I love and own in every form from E-book to signed first edition are A Heart So White by Javier Marías and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
This book: Pico Iyer, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Eula Biss. My wider influences: everything I have ever read.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
It would be in Freetown, Sierra Leone where we don’t have enough bookshops–the result of poverty and war. People in Sierra Leone love poetry. There are lots of good local poets and also excellent musicians who have won a national and regional following, such as Khady Black and Emmerson. Their hard hitting, political lyrics have propelled their very successful careers. Sierra Leone has a long history of political pamphleteering. I’d bet if someone ran off a few thousand copies of their song lyrics they’d sell in a day.
