The Silence of the Spirits

Starred review from November 18, 2013
Immigrant stories are often about self-invention, but in his latest novel, in which an African escaping to America cannot leave his past behind, McArthur Fellow Mengestu (How to Read the Air) portrays the intersection of cultures experienced by the immigrant with unsettling perception. Each of the two narratorsâone speaking from the past in Africa, one in present-day Americaâhas a relationship with a young man named Isaac, and the two take turns describing these relationships. The African narrator, a 25-year-old aspiring writer, recounts how he leaves his rural village to subsist on the margins of a university in a city that he simply calls âthe Capital.â There, he finds a friend in the magnetic Isaac, a young revolutionary who draws him into an antigovernment insurgency. The second narrator is Helen, a Midwestern social worker, who takes under her wing and into her heart an African refugee named Isaac, knowing little about his situation and nothing of his history. The action is set after the first flush of African independence, as democratic self-rule proves elusive, while in America racial and social divides persist. In Africa, Isaac, the revolutionary, endures beatings and torture before confronting his own sideâs penchant for violence. In America, Helen and the man she calls Isaac face their own intractable obstacles. Mengestu evokes contrasting landscapes but focuses on his charactersâIsaac, the saddened visionary; Isaac, the secretive refugee; Helen, the sympathetic loverâwho are all caught in a cycle of connection and disruption, engagement and abandonment, hope and disillusion. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

July 3, 2017
An undocumented African ex-soldier and a lonely French nurse’s aide meet on a commuter train heading toward the outskirts of Paris in this slim, intense, and bleak portrait of an improbable love affair and its implications for postcolonial France. Clovis is fleeing the shame of the monstrous acts he committed during the chaos following the outbreak of an unspecificed civil war, and Christelle—accustomed to caring for others at the hospital where she works—takes pity on him after inadvertently helping him escape an ID check on the train. She eventually invites him into her home when she realizes that he has nowhere else to stay, and these two lost souls find welcome solace in each other’s company. But the limits of their newfound feelings for one another are tested when Clovis confesses what he did during his time as a child soldier, and what follows is a metaphorical examination of how people must confront the darkness of the past in order to forge a better future. Through the allegory of a single encounter between two people in a city of millions, this novel expertly investigates the precariousness of social order in a time of increasing intolerance toward outsiders.

Starred review from June 1, 2017
Pensive, meditative novel of war and its reverberations far from home.N'Sonde's small novel begins with an invocation, uttered by a woman in the distant Congo, for Mother Earth, "the temperamental Majesty that had created all that we see and that we cannot see in this world," to find a wayward young man who is now hiding in plain sight in Paris, carefully guarding the few coins that will buy him a sandwich or a tin of sardines for his daily meal. He is sans-papiers, an illegal immigrant in the French capital, and as the story unfolds, Clovis Nzila has good reason to be there: he has gone from being a country kid-turned-street urchin in a Congolese city to being a child soldier in a chaotic country whose leaders "rushed to disguise the misery and irreparableness as democracy." With his gun, Clovis has become someone; now, though he bears the name of a legendary French king, he is less than no one, though his deliverance through the love of a Frenchwoman helps him confront and reveal his terrible past--for, as it develops, Clovis was not just a soldier, but a leader, heading a band with barely pubescent lieutenants bearing names like Lord-of-Death and One-Eye-Two-Words. N'Sonde's novel is surely a contribution to the growing literature of child soldiers and post-colonial wars of terror; it contains horrific moments worthy of Joseph Conrad, as when Clovis recounts, memorably, "As we paraded proudly through the apocalypse, the shadow of hate oozed from our gaze and stuck to our skin." N'Sonde makes it clear that his characters have been abandoned by the gods and are alone in the world, left to fend for themselves--but as the tale moves through the streets of Paris and in and out of past and present, it is just as clear that redemption is possible in the company of other people. Scarifying and memorable and worthy of a place alongside the best modern African writing.

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