RaveSlantTaïa is disarmingly unafraid to revel in the sensuality of trauma, even if, or specially when, it involves the impossibility of consent and children’s early experiences of the body ... The novel is a fresco of departures, imagined and actual, intertwining tales of the wretched of the Earth leaving their country in order to die in another ... Some of the most beautiful moments here emerge when dialogue turns into all but a string of poetic lines, and it becomes pleasantly unclear who the speaker and addressee are. These instances embody the to-and-fro of Taïa’s style, where an adult is always one feeling away from becoming a child again. We may not know who’s speaking but we know something ancestral is being written, or rewritten ... Zahira’s words flow seamlessly from first-person narration to her thoughts being directed to the dead father in short and disarmingly simple sentences. So simple that in the few instances when Taïa writes more abstract terms like \'unconscious,\' \'commodity\', or \'anathema,\' they feel like a jump cut in the text. We are inevitably conducted back to the intimacy of poetry rearranged into prose ... The poetic register of A Country for Dying is wrought by an eventfulness triggered by the tiniest things that just keep on echoing generations later: a memory, a song, a stranger.
