Here's Djibouti. It's small.
Here's the summary. The font is small.
In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to France adopts a child. Now a young artist, this girl, Malaïka, travels to the troubled land of her birth in hope of finding her mother—and perhaps something of her lost self. Her search, at times funny and strange, is also deeply poignant, reminding us at every moment of the turns of fate we call truth.
Based on the description, I was so excited for this book. I loved the idea of flipping the world this way but, for me, it didn't really work. This was only because it was written really poetically, and I'm just really not in for poetry. It goes way over my head with all the imagery and metaphors. Also he talked about sperm a lot for some reason. No thanks. There was a line that I really loved though; "He is wearing a shirt the same color as his chronic cold..." And it's like, what color do you think a chronic cold would be? I mentioned it to Husband and the color he envisioned was completely different than what I had come up with (I thought of like a dingy tan).
Eventually the main character decides to go find her birth mother, and this part had less imagery and told more of a story. It was a little odd though; I think she found the mom, and it was kind of...okay, I saw her, that's fine now. Bye. No real description of what it made her feel or anything. Then there's something that happens in this possibly seedy underbelly in what I assume is a third world version of Paris, but I have no idea what actually happened. She hires this guy to help her find her mom, and he takes her to some weird building where she sees something that smells of "garlic and mummy". She's so horrified by whatever this is that she runs out, throws up, and then decides two things: she's going home, and she's going to send this guy to college in Africa.
What? And then that was it. She's going to go home and get back together with her fashion designer ex boyfriend.
For me, I wish it had been written more like a novel and less like a poem, because this is such a great concept. Somebody get on it.
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