Literary Fiction by People of Color discussion

Since April is fast approaching, here's an overview of Aminatta Forna's career (from her website:

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the award-winning author of The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones and The Devil that Danced on the Water.

The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury), published in April 2010, was selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and Times.

The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father and of Sierra Leone, was runner up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003, chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series and serialised on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper.

Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor's Choice book, selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006 and one of The Listener Magazine's Best 10 Books of 2006. Ancestor Stones is winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction; the 2008 winner of the Liberaturpreis in Germany; the 2010 winner of the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award.

In 2002 Aminatta helped to build a primary school in her family's village of Rogbonko. The building of the school was the first step in what would become known as the Rogbonko Project: a community effort to create an escape route from poverty through multiple initiatives in the spheres of education, agriculture, infrastructure and health.

Aminatta is a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and sits on the advisory committee of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She has also published essays and articles, and written for television and radio. Her television credits include the arts documentary Through African Eyes (BBC), the documentary series Africa Unmasked (Channel 4) and in 2009, The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (BBC). Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Sunday Times, The Observer and Vogue Magazine among others.

In 2007 Aminatta was named by Vanity Fair as one of Africa's most promising new writers and her work has been translated into ten languages.

The Memory of Lovehttp is winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa) and has been short-listed for the £50,000 Warwick Prize. Aminatta's story "Hayward's Heath" was recently short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award.

Aminatta lives in London.

Here is an outline of Forna's life, from wikipedia:

Forna was born in Bellshill, Scotland in 1964 to a Sierra Leonian father, Mohamed Forna, and a Scottish mother, Maureen Christison. When Forna was six months old the family travelled to Sierra Leone where Mohamed Forna worked as a physician. He later became involved in politics and entered government, only to resign citing a growth in political violence and corruption. Between 1970-3 he was imprisoned and declared an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience. Mohamed Forna was hanged on charges of treason in 1975. The events of Forna’s childhood and her investigation into the conspiracy surrounding her father’s death are the subject of the memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water.

Forna studied law at University College London and was a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

Between 1989 and 1999 Forna worked for the BBC working both in radio and television as a reporter and documentary maker in the spheres of arts and politics. She is also known for her Africa documentaries: Through African Eyes (1995), Africa Unmasked (2002) and The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (2009).

Aminatta Forna is married to the furniture designer Simon Westcott and lives in South East London.

I just got this book from the library today, after a long stay in the queue! I'll be reading madly to join in!

hi everyone. this month we are discussing aminatta forna's The Memory of Love, which has received much critical acclaim. i myself finished reading it last night so i don't expect those who want to be involved in this conversation to have already finished it. i thought we could go in chronological order, analyse it in the same order in which it unfolds on the page, so that those who have not yet finished it won't have the end spoiled.

this might be a conversation starter: all through the book, elias cole tells a very intimate story to adrian, a british psychologist who is visiting sierra leone to help out after the wars. how does it feel to you to think of an african from sierra leone telling a very intimate story to a white man who, as his friend kai tells him at some point, may view his trip a sort of medical tourism? what does this dynamic between the two men tell you? do you like it? does it make you uncomfortable or does it give a sense of the universality of human pain?

Jo, I was surprised that Elias was relating his story to Adrian, however it did not make me feel uncomfortable. I would imagine that so many horrors occur in the aftermath of war that one does do and say surpring things. Especially as Elias is aware that death is knockin, ridding himself of some of the mental anguish is more important than tradition.

I think story does give a sense human pain universally, because the emotional pain Adrian endures when he tries to come into a war torn country with a superman mentality, that he can come in and save everyone he counsels until reality sets in.
Kai has a alot of pain to deal with due to the post tramatic stress of the war and the love of his life he has not gotten over yet.

ah, but does he really have a superman mentality, or little concept of his vulnerability in the world? There's nothing about the dynamic between the two that makes me feel uncomforable, but there's a great deal to make me think I know less than I think I do.

the information about who adrian and elias are filters in slowly. at first we simply don't know anything about them. in fact, i remember not being sure of adrian's "race" either. i knew he was english, but not that he was white. it isn't clear, either, why elias chooses this man to tell him his story, and why adrian listens.

in the first chapter or two elias talks about the intoxicating and almost compulsive experience of falling in love at first sight. any thoughts about this? another universal experience? convincing?

Hmmm, its funny you are saying that about the character descriptions, at first i had a hard time figuring out if Elias Cole was either black or white. I don't think she did a good job with the character descriptions at all. I think that might be another reason why i could not getinto this book.

you know, there are writers who spend a lot of time on skin color. they really revel in shades and shapes. not this author. she leaves all that stuff pretty much in the background, like it doesn't matter. i think i sort of like it, cuz why should it matter?

at the same time, she is a biracial writer -- white mother. maybe she wants to make a point. what do you think?

I too like the idea that she doesn't labor over race but I must admit that at the forefront of my mind I kept trying to remember who was which race. It did seem to play a part, in my mind, as to who was voicing particular statements and their reasoning.

It was difficult to believe that Elias could fall so madly in love having seen Sarafina only once. It appeared that he was obsessed with her and I could not get my mind wrapped around this.

I also had a hard time trying to remember who was who in the book, i guess i am reader that really likes detail and focus.

I haven't finished the book yet, but so far, I find Elias' obsession with Saffia to be a bit creepy. This is not the way a healthy person behaves.

I haven't found it difficult to keep straight which characters belong to which ethnic groups. I would like fuller descriptions of the characters - the descriptions of the women seem to be largely focused on their bodies.

I'm well into the book and so far, I haven't found much to like about Elias at all. He does go into a brief dialog at one point trying to say that he's not really a stalker. So, yeah, I'd say he's a bit creepy and then some.

Yes, I'm more thrown off by the time changes that aren't clearly demarked, but it does keep me thinking while reading the story. I find the writing style very interesting, although it took me a while to get into the characters and the storyline. for a bit there I found myself admiring the style more than the substance.

the style was the one thing that kept me returning to the book over and over, looking forward to it. i tried to remember who it reminded me of... michael ondsatje? nadine gordimer? it's definitely a style i've encountered before. i thought of how to describe it and i find "lyrical and stark," as katrina says, pretty good!

the fact that the author tells us so little was tantalizing to me -- it felt like i was learning about these people as if by myself, without too much introduction, the same way as they get to know each other.

i like that george wonders about adrian: "does he really have a superman mentality, or little concept of his vulnerability in the world?"

this vulnerability in the world is definitely a big deal in the novel, maybe something we can return to.

mina says the characters get little description, and the women are described mostly in connection to their bodies. i wanted to introduce another element that kept me much intrigued while i read: this is a book written by a woman, but its main characters are all men. i am not sure there's anything to analyze here, but i wanted to mention it, especially because women mostly enter into it as objects of attraction.

yet, the book doesn't have a lesbian feel at all, and, also, it doesn't feel like the author is identifying with the characters much, except maybe kai. or maybe she is, and i didn't get it because i didn't feel any of the characters except kai.

i wonder what characters you identify with most, so far, and which ones you'd like to know more about. and i wonder in what sense, if any, this feels like like a woman's book.

jo wrote: "this is a book written by a woman, but its main characters are all men...."

I was just about to make that comment! That is something that really surprised me in a book written by a woman. You don't get inside the women's heads at all. On the other hand, I thought that she did a good job of writing from a male perspective. What do the guys think?

I have finished the book, and I am extremely happy that I did. If this hadn't been a group selection, I'm sure that I would have given up after the first 50 pages, but I became much more interested in the book at the point where the moon landing party is held, and for the last 150 pages, I couldn't put it down. For anyone who is still struggling with the book, my advice is to stick with it. Not only did the book become much more compelling to me, it made me want to go back and read the beginning again.

"Lyrical and stark" - I agree! Forna is quite a writer.

oh wow. well done mina!

so, is this what we expect when we read a book written by a woman? i know i'm going to put myself into a square minority, but i choose to read books by women specifically to see women talked about, discussed, analyzed -- especially when the majority of our culture focuses on men's thoughts and feelings. do women have a responsibility to write about women? am i been too radical, too black&white here?

Ok, I am REALLY having trouble getting into this narrative. I haven't read any of the posts above to prevent spoilers, but I wanted to wave a hand and say that I am here, struggling though.

hey mistinguettes, we are going very slowly, not giving away anything, because other people are still reading. so we are still tackling the beginning and some very general points. feel free to read the posts and chime in as you read!

jo wrote: "so, is this what we expect when we read a book written by a woman? i know i'm going to put myself into a square minority, but i choose to read books by women specifically ..."

I don't know - I do expect to hear women's voices in a book written by a woman, but maybe that's not fair. From what I have read (having absolutely no ability to write fiction myself), authors often start to write a book from one person's perspective, but as they write, other characters begin to dominate the narrative. I haven't read her earlier book, Ancestor Stones: A Novel, yet, but if I understand correctly, that book focused on women in Sierra Leone. Maybe this time, the men's stories were what drove her writing. In this case, what jo said about men's voices being abundant in our culture wouldn't hold. Neither the men nor the women of Sierra Leone are front and center in popular literature.

That being said, I think that any author, male or female, would want to write women characters with more depth than the ones in this book. That is the one point that really disturbed me about this book. The 2 main women characters are idealized, desired, and adored, but that's about it - we don't get past the surface with either of them. The rest of the African women, with a few exceptions, are completely relegated to a sexual role. The women here are not much more fleshed out than the ones in The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey that we complained about last month. Surprising, coming from such a brilliant woman author.

I had much the same thought on this month's selection vs. last.

Wilhelmina wrote: "In this case, what jo said about men's voices being abundant in our culture wouldn't hold. Neither the men nor the women of Sierra Leone are front and center in popular literature."

yeah, except this is not a sierra leonian book. it's an english book, aimed at a western audience. i think.

i thought that the relationship between elias and julius is one of the most interesting in the book. they are never really friends. there is like this barrier between them. is it status? religion?

also: i concur that elias is not a sympathetic character. do you think forna meant to write an unsympathetic character or that she meant to write a sympathetic one and failed?

at the same time, some of you find him creepy, but i'm not sure i see him that way. he seems quite simply in love with saffia, totally entranced by her. is that creepy? how can a story like this be described in a non-creepy way? or are there other things that make elias creepy?

i think what makes him unsympathetic to me is a creeping sense of self-loathing. he describes himself as underhand, dishonest, insistent, even undignified in pushing his presence on saffia. there's great sadness in that.

well, I haven't finished the book yet, but I think there will be reveals at the end that will clarify things, and I doubt it will improve anyone's impression of Elias. What I do know so far hasn't elevated him in my opinions of him. anyway, his feelings for Saffia are more based on obsessions than anything I'd consider love. He hardly knows the woman at any point, he just wants her, and seems willing to do almost anything to acccomplish that.

jo wrote: "yeah, except this is not a sierra leonian book. it's an english book, aimed at a western audience. i think...."

Why don't you think that this book will be read by Sierra Leonians as well as western readers, jo? I read an interview with Forna about Ancestor Stones: A Novel where she says that that book created a major stir among her generation in Sierra Leone, that it reopened the whole conversation about the war. I'll try to find it.

And I really, really don't see Elias' feelings for Saffia as genuine love - just creepy obsession. I have more to say about this when people finish reading, but for now I'll just say that we are only hearing Elias' side of this and he is an extremely unreliable narrator.

Oops - she's talking about her memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Memoir of Her Father, Her Family, Her Country, and a Continent. But it's clear that she has a Sierra Leonian readership:

Although the memoir received considerable critical acclaim in the Western world (some compared her voice to the Orange Prize-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Vanity Fair magazine later named her as one of the most promising new writers in 2007), but the impact in Sierra Leone was unprecedented. Her exploration of her father's death opened up a Pandora's Box among her generation, who began asking questions they had not dared ask before. "It was like a bomb. I broke the silence and it was nerve-wracking for me. I didn't know how it was going to go down but it absolutely galvanised a generation.

"I gave talks at the university and people were standing in the aisles. It re-wrote history. It wasn't just about my father. There were plenty of other people who were excised from history. Now they are all coming back into it."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

I just got the book the other day, and I feel like I've been reading and reading and getting somewhere, then I looked at the page to do my status update, and I'm only at 52. Wow. So, I guess you can count me with the folks that are having a hard time getting into it. I am at this point, also struck by the lack of women's voices here. Not finding either Elias or Adrian particularly endearing so far, a similarity between them seeming to be their dismissal of the others around them. Don't know enough about Kai yet to have a real impression.

thanks for the information, mina. i actually did a wee bit of research (turns out it was way too little) and gathered the impression that forna was basically british. in fact, her nationality haunted me a little in the reading of the book. maybe it was a consequence of having just read dinaw mengestu, and seeing the way in which the protagonist of his second book How to Read the Air defines himself squarely as a midwesterner. there is also this part of me that is an expat, and feels very much unable, now, to think of herself as italian, so that if i wrote a book about italy it would be a book about italy written by someone who has a memory of italy rather than a live experience of it. it's kind of complicated with these african writers who live abroad. irene sabatini is another one. they mess me up because *i* am messed up.

hahaha, rashida. elias and adrian are not exactly endearing, though one might make the case that as the story continues you see what they are struggling with and grow in empathy toward them. and the book is long, but it's also captivating -- the plot develops nicely, but, for me, the language was the main draw; i couldn't wait to re-immerse myself in it.

please feel free to read the comments. we are not giving anything away and are going very slowly, following the order in which the book was written.

Wilhelmina wrote: "And I really, really don't see Elias' feelings for Saffia as genuine love - just creepy obsession"

i think i'd like to return to this. i am not good with love and have a hard time keeping love and obsession straight, but let's agree for the sake of argument that what elias feels for saffia is not love but obsession. i think this ties somewhat to his rapport with julius. what is about these people that elias is obsessed with? do you think he is also a little obsessed with julius? beside saffia, does julius have something that elias crave?

jo wrote: "do you think he is also a little obsessed with julius? beside saffia, does julius have something that elias craves? ..."

I absolutely think that it is Julius' life that Elias craves and that his obsession with Saffia is mainly as a symbol of that life - the happy, passionate partnership between Julius and Saffia in the Pink House; the circle of friends; the trust of political allies. To me, that became clearer and clearer as the book progressed.

I agree, and I'd have to say that as I read further and further into the novel I find it impossible to grow in empathy towards Elias. quite the opposite in fact. he's merely creepy early on. he develops into something more problematic over time.

I think part of the problem in dealing with the racial and national identity of the various characters is that we are dealing almost entirely with the cultural and educated elite in Sierra Leonian society, which appears to have been predominantly male, and I think the author is saying that they are more alike than they are different in general outlook and motivation in comparison with their European colleagues. except for their experiences of the war and its horrors. That is obviously quite profound on its own, but it doesn't overwhelm their similarities. We don't see very much of the undereducated working classes of that society and get very little insight into them or their motivations. We'd get a very different sense of Sierra Leone if we got into the heads of Adrien's patients, but it seems we never do. haven't quite finished the novel as of yet.

i am intrigued by george's observation that the book deals solely with the middle-upper classes. this is a really good point, and something we need to keep in mind. i don't know how many folks here have read chimamanda adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, but she, too, chooses to discuss the civil war in nigeria through the eyes of the middle-upper classes. i wonder if this is an attempt on the part of african writers to move away from depiction of poor/rural africans, or if these writers are simply depicting the lives they know.

thanks christine for saying that if elias says he's in love, you are willing to take him at his word. i like taking characters at their word. on the other hand, mina has pointed out above that he is an unreliable narrator.

i wanted to introduce two more topics. one is kai. what do you make of the ease with which he lets himself into adrian's house, and of his haunted persona? he seems very kind. at the same time, he's also very troubled. what do you think of his rapport (in his mind) with his ex girlfriend, with his friend who moved to america, and with his nephew?

the second topic is about adrian's "projects." do you like the way he approaches his patients? do you like the way the hospital's head (don't have the book with me now so forgive me for not using names) deals with his patients? what do you make of the whole mental hospital set up and of the fact that they seem not to have much work for adrian in spite of being in pretty desperate straits? do they treat their patients in any meaningful sense?

The prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction announced its shortlist today and   The Memory of Love made the list. I made a valiant effort to finish this book, but i just couldn't do it. I stopped reading last night @ page 196 but I just couldn't read anymore. Adrian's character/story line especially had me in a flux. Maybe I'll pick it up again later. Maybe.

http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/prize.ht...

thanks for the news, columbus! i guess the people who put this book in the orange prize shortlist and you don't see eye to eye :) what about adrian in particular bothered you?

Jo, sorry I couldn't respond sooner.

First of all, I think there's a magnetism to Forna's writing. I'm reading along to some of the passages and some of the writing is just mesmerizing. One can easily see why she's garnering so many awards and acclaim. 

The problem for me is there's a lull in the book when Adrian's story is presented. At least for the first half of the book, I find Adrian's story completely boring. Forna, for all the beautiful writing fails to make Adrian's relationship with the patient(s) interesting for me. I'm reading just for the sake of reading and once I realize it the chapter's over. If the story becomes more interesting and catches fire 3/4 of the way into the book (as someone sort of suggested), what's the point? The book is practically over at that point and the connection is made too late. Would love to hear what other's think about this.

I was never able to form a warmess toward Adrian. Did he view himself as the knight in shining armor, the maker of all things right, or a bored Englishman who needed something to do?

I was most impressed when the director revealed to Adrian the reality of the poor and insane in his country and queried Adrian as to what he would be returning these people to. I don't recall Forna exposing Adrian's feelings in regard to this revelation.

Adrian never really connects. he's sort of well meaning, particularly compared to most of the other expats we are exposed to. I'd say his expectations for his patients become somewhat more realistic over time, perhaps due to the director's comments. His relationship with Mamakay is rather amorphous, but his departure alone by the end of the book destroyed what little empathy I'd ever felt for him.

so glad to see this conversation reopen. i, too, wanted to write about adrian. it's late now so it's going to have to be tomorrow, but i think i agree with everything you say in the last three comments -- including what columbus says about the gorgeous language being ultimately what carries the book.

I felt more sympathetic toward Adrian than most people seemed to, but, like George, I lost sympathy at the end.

i think at this point we can discuss the end. columbus, be warned.

i wasn't sure, throughout my reading of the book, what forna was doing with adrian. i tried to see him through her eyes but i was never quite sure how she felt about him. there are certainly hints of charity tourism in the description of his trips to sierra leone. he says clearly that he likes to go there and one has the impression he doesn't mind getting away from his family. there's nothing wrong with liking to go to a place, but this is VERY HURT place and adrian seems to make little sense in it.

but the most striking thing is that he doesn't seem to do any good at all. why does he become so fixated on agnes and her "fugues?" well, mostly because fugues are an interesting and understudied topic and he imagines a good paper coming out of this. the sessions in which agnes sits across from him with the nurse in the room seem torture to me. does she want to be there? it seems to me he is trying to pry information from her; but for what purpose? she certainly doesn't want to see him when he goes to her house, and we may only imagine the unpleasant consequences his visit may bring on her. she is carrying a terrible burden of secret, and adrian isn't helping at all. even if she told him about the secret, what could he do?

so the only thing he does is enable us to hear elias's story. does he help elias? i don't know. i hope so.

and then there's the whole story of mamakay and of his leaving her behind (which frankly makes sense, but still), and leaving his own child behind.

is the end suggesting to us that kai doesn't after all go to the US in order to take care of adrian's child?

i see this child as a tangible new symbol of colonization. the well-meaning psychologist goes to sierra leone for six months and all he manages to do is make a beautiful light-colored baby.

this may be unfair to mamakay, who is a very strong character. there is no way we can describe his relation with her as exploitative. but what is he doing there in the first place?????

i think i'm being too harsh toward adrian. maybe i'm being more harsh that forna intends us to be. he's just a guy looking for a place to go, maybe offer help. i don't know. why do any of us go to spend time abroad?

well, I suppose charity tourism is as good a term as any, and pretty much how his presence is perceived by Iliana, the director and others. I think his general intentions are relatively good, but he brings no real commitment to it and will walk away soon enough Plus they're based on a very superficial understanding at best of what went on in Sierra Leone, and what can reasonably be done. What does it really mean to restore the sanity of a few people in a fairly insane environment? Mental illness becomes a rational response, and defense, in a totally irrational existence. So, Adrian's goals become more and more modest over time as his understanding develops and by the time he gets around to Kai, he's just trying to find ways of helping him minimize the nightmares, so that he can more easily function. But how would he help Elias under the circumstances? give him the chance to confess, repent and seek absolution? what good is that to him? Is there any reason to want to help Elias?

Agnes is just an intellectual puzzle for him, and one that can perhaps benefit him professionally as well if he figures out how to solve it. In the end, once he understands the cause, there is no possibility for a solution that will have any meaning for her or benefit her in any way.

As for his relationship to Mamakay, to me it's more of a convenience for the two of them, that offers the possibility that perhaps something will evolve out of it for the two of them, until of course that is shut off completely. it's not nearly as exploitative as the majority of the relationships we see in the book. Walking away from their child though is incomprehensible, particularly as Forna makes no effort to help us comprehend it. it's just sort of tossed off, but I find it hard not to lose all respect for Adrian at that point. as for Kai, is this just some way to allow him to redeem himself and retain his ties to Sierra Leone or does it allow him to retain some memory of love?

so, george, would you go as far as to say that the whole book is construed as a critique of adrian and what he represents?

btw, i like your comment and the way you put things.

"I don't get the point of Adrian."- That's exactly what I planned to type and then elaborate on, and I open the discussion and see that's essentially already been said. There was a brief moment in the vast middle of this book when it seemed like he would undergo some arc of character development. When he's actually committed himself to working with the men in the wards, and seeing progress that seems more centered on them than on himself. And then he gets all caught up in his wildly inappropriate relationship and it goes straight back to being all about him and his existence. By the by, there are all kinds of crass and unfortunate terms and turns of phrase that I wanted to use to describe the situation between him and Mamakay/Nenebah. But I will demur.

Adrian is so flipping obtuse about the things going on around him that I almost laughed aloud when Ileana said "physician, heal thy self." I mean now? He criticizes Elias Cole for not seeing the similarities between himself (cole) and Johnson, and projecting his shortcomings on to Johnson. Does Adrian not see that the obsessive, creepy "love at first sight" without any real insight to the person but only a desire for complete domination, that Cole put onto Saffia is exactly what he is doing with their daughter?

I would like to believe that Mamakay is a strong woman character. But Forna just never shows her to us. I have this full length mirror from Ikea with wavy edges, and in my mind, Mamakay just walks around holding that in front of her. She's there as a set piece to reflect Adrian and his little midlife crisis, or to show us Kai before the trauma. But who is SHE? What does she think and feel about these men, these relationships, these times? All we see of her are a collection of idiosyncrasies and the hardline stance that she will not forgive her father and she will not leave her country.

My test for Adrian in the end was whether he stayed or he left. If he stayed, then maybe he really did find his place in the world, and he really was interested in helping. If he left, well then, it would be true: he only really started enjoying the place once he was [edited for crassness, again] and once that was over, he bounced quicker than a rubber check. And he left his child behind with apparently no second thought. Because it was what Mamakay would have wanted?? Horrid, horrid person.
I know the question was directed at George, but jo, unfortunately I don't think the book critiques Adrian, and that's what I found so maddening about it. I kept saying to myself, in these circumstances, Adrian is the least interesting person, yet he is the one that we get to know the most about. Why is Forna doing this. Shouldn't she show us more of the Sierra Leoneans, and let the outsider be the one we get glimpses of? Is it because she feels more like a Brit than a Sierra Leonean? Is it because publishers thought the story of a Westerner would sell better than the story of the "native"? why, why, why is this book the way it is?

No, I wouldn't go so far as to say the book is contrued as a critique of Adrian or what he represents, unless you see Sierra Leone as the illegitimate child of the UK who walks away from this child. I suppose one could make a case for that, but I'm not at all sure that's the author's intent.

I don't really see the book as primarily a criticism of Adrian. that would make the book all too Eurocentric for me. He is largely ignorant of Sierra Leone and seems to have gone down there on a whim due to his ancestral colonial connection. He's not evil, just misplaced and disconnected. what damage he causes is unintentional. He'd like to help, but doesn't understand enough to do much and he's unwilling to pay the price of really committing himself. I thought briefly that he would, but then things happened. the other expats in the book with the exception of Iliana are far worse, totally exploitative, as are many number of the Sierra Leonians. but he is the central figure that connects everyone else, more or less.

I can't say I really understand entirely the dynamics between Adrian and Elias though.

I suppose for me Adrian is not so much a real character as a mechanism to allow everything else to happen and unfold, to allow us to discover the various truths in the individuals' stories.

I agree with Rashida that Mamakay is not really a strong woman character. nor is anyone else really. perhaps Mamakay could have been had we been allowed to see and understand more about her, but that never really happened. why not is an interesting question, but not one easily answered.

I haven't read Ancestor Stones: A Novel yet, but apparently Adrian appears in that earlier book also. I'm going to have to pay better attention to where I read things, but I read that Forna started this book with Adrian in mind. In an interview, Forna talked about talking to people from all groups in Sierra Leone - governmental officials, professionals, students, poor folks, etc. - and asking if they could name one NGO project that actually did any good. They all thought for a minute and all of them answered "No." I think that Adrian thought that he could do some good in a country with which he felt a connection, even though it was a distant connection through a colonial era grandfather. I don't think that he understood how little good he would be able to do ahead of time. I don't think that he causes damage and he may do some marginal good, but what could he possibly do in this situation to help? The only Europeans we see who are actually useful are medical doctors. I think that Forna's view of Adrian is expressed through Kai. He likes Adrian, but basically sees him as useless in this situation.

To me, Adrian's main purpose in this novel was to listen to Elias' twisted tale. Forna makes the point that this is a small country, a small city, and when you restrict yourself to the part of the population that is middle class and educated, everyone pretty much knows each other. Elias wants to rewrite history, and for that, he needs someone from outside who might buy his story. For me, this book hangs on Elias as an unreliable narrator. I don't even believe that he was in love with Saffia, any more than, for example, Iago was in love with Desdemona in Shakespeare's "Othello". If Iago had told his story to a naive psychologist, it might have come out similarly to Elias' story. For me, Saffia, like all the women in this book, was just a pawn in the story. Rashida's image of Mamakay being presented as if seen in "full length mirror ... with wavy edges" is perfect for Saffia as well. We have no view of Saffia other than the one created by Elias, plus a few faded memories that Mamakay has of her mother. Mamakay saw nothing of this "great passion" that Elias claims to have for Saffia. Elias, in my opinion, was pathologically envious of Julius. When he was unable to duplicate the relationship that Julius had with Saffia, he lost interest in her altogether and returned to his mistress. He has a need to rewrite history - his role in Julius' death, his betrayal of the protesters over many years and his rise to power because of it, his reasons for what he did - and the approach he takes is to start with a far more noble emotion - love. As Tina said, "What's love got to do with it?"

I do believe that Adrian was in love with Mamakay, and, as horrified as I was by Adrian leaving his child - and I was, at least initially, SERIOUSLY horrified - I do not think that he would have ever left Mamakay had she lived. To be honest, my guess is that this is why Forna killed off Mamakay - the thought of Adrian hanging around Sierra Leone, unable to do anyone any good and trailing after Mamakay was just too pitiful. With Mamakay gone, he took the easy out. He didn't want anything else to do with Sierra Leone. To keep from throwing the book at the wall, I had to remind myself that he also has a child in England. Deserting her would be no better than deserting Mamakay's child. He could, of course, have taken the baby to England, but he justifies leaving her in Africa because that's what Mamakay wanted. Pitiful. (But I also wondered if it reflected a longing in Forna herself - to have been raised in her father's homeland rather than her mother's.)

dang, i had managed to FORGET that mamakay dies. what a terrible scene. it broke my heart.

i want to do some research into interviews given by forna. the stuff you bring up about NGOs, mina, is very interesting (and awfully depressing). i think i'd really like to see what aminatta thinks of these characters and this novel.

you guys are making a ton of really astute observations. great comments!

i would like, in theory, to understand elias better, maybe in the context of the corrupt system in which he lives. i'll look for pieces in which he is discussed in historical context.

you know, we seem to have nothing to say about kai, who is just about the only uncontroversially likable character in the whole book. do we have nothing to say about him because he's so nice and therefore less interesting? the torture scene is entirely flabbergasting. a very hard passage to read.