The Silence of the Choir, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Europa). In this ambitious, Goncourt Prize-winning novel, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters—refugees, politicians, advocacy workers, xenophobic vigilantes, a priest, an eminent poet—while probing the complexities of Europe’s debate over asylum. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is not only members of the far right, “obsessed with their phobia,” who deserve excoriation but also those more sympathetic to migrants’ plights who nonetheless “reduce a refugee to a walking tragedy.”
In Tongues, by Thomas Grattan (MCD x FSG). The protagonist of this moody novel is a young man attempting to make a fresh start in New York City at the outset of the twenty-first century, seeking—through dead-end jobs, anonymous sexual encounters, and a gradual infiltration of the art-world élite—a new way to be seen. Amid his adventures, he wonders whether self-scrutiny is anything more than self-obsession, and if answering questions like that one is really a path to maturity. Grattan casts early adulthood as a period of inertia, in which a person is trapped between the urge to be present and the desire to move on—a time of life whose outward expressions are, above all, absurd.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
Woman of Interest, by Tracy O’Neill (HarperOne). At thirty-three, O’Neill, a writer and a professor who grew up in the Northeast, embarked on a quest to locate the South Korean woman who gave birth to her. In this dark, deeply funny memoir, O’Neill relates the story of that quest. Although her tale contains familiar elements (DNA searches, a trip to the motherland), she handles them uniquely. Framing her narrative as a detective story, she writes in a comedic voice that’s at once old-fashioned and contemporary—Dashiell Hammett meets “Fleabag.” Discursive detours give the book an intentionally shaggy feel: “Unruly story forms imply how a writer believes the shape of life goes,” she notes. It’s a keen observation, elegantly illustrated by the life of the woman at the center of her investigation.
The Museum of Other People, by Adam Kuper (Pantheon). Non-Western and Indigenous artifacts—antiquities, ceremonial objects, human remains, and the like—are sites of contention in this anthropologist’s history of museums. Covering more than two centuries, Kuper considers the troubling entwinement of his field with colonial thievery and racist propaganda, while tackling a wide range of other subjects, from Franz Boas to World’s Fairs, modernist art to the National Museum of the American Indian. Beginning as a scholarly historical survey, Kuper’s analysis gradually morphs into a polemic that questions contemporary restitution and repatriation efforts, and is based on a fear that anthropologists are no longer deferred to as experts.
