Exceptional ... A caustic rendering of immigration, diaspora and deracination ... A marvel of compressed unease, the novel is also wildly exuberant. This is in no small part due to the tensile strength of Binyam’s prose. Her style is simple and matter of fact, but full of unexpected pivots. She is also very funny ... There’s dark wonder in the final moments of this exhilarating novel, as the narrator gives himself over at last to both his fate and his longing.
A slim, stark, and captivatingly enigmatic début novel ... Binyam wrings mordant humor from...paraphrased conversations ... A sphinxlike style ... Would be impressive enough as a Rorschach test about narratives of exile. But its fixation on illness and death also gives it a darker valence.
Engrossing and shrewd ... Readers might wonder if they have been thrust into a speculative world where both small talk and genuine introspection have been abolished ... Binyam pushes into the surreal to reorient readers yet again around basic conceptions of home and family.
Binyam uses these conversations as a vehicle for acute political commentary and philosophical musings on everything from foreign aid and hospitality to refuge and care, injustice and social responsibility, life and death ... The narrator doesn’t offer up much of himself in return, and Binyam similarly withholds, doing some stunning foreshadowing work ... With its unreliable narrator and its social commentary on the supposed binaries between two countries, the novel is at its best when exploring the ethics and mechanics of empathy.
Not novella length, although it might have been better served if it was. While we do get a mix of ups and downs, the plot structure doesn’t bear its classic intrigue ... While the plot lacks a classic structure, the prose itself is beautifully rendered ... Binyam creates a memorial for those from the diaspora who are lost and dead, a topic long begging for exploration.
Strange, surreal ... A committed, inventive and often comedic exercise in abstraction that by its disquieting final pages has moved beyond themes of exile and return to depict something more tragic.
The beginning of Maya Binyam’s debut novel...gives no indication of the unique, strange trip about to unfold ... The human experience that the book perhaps captures best is the phenomenon of displacement and its effect on one’s sense of identity. Many characters struggle with this, including the narrator, who first faced the loss of his family and culture as a young man and is now dealing with it again in his rootless wanderings. These are feelings that anyone marginalized, anyone denied a sense of home, can recognize, and Binyam’s portrait of a man in search of belonging is deeply moving ... The book’s narrative style fits this sense of displacement. The language is simple, although it can also be poetic ... It is a detached, matter-of-fact style, as if the narrator is sharing in a puzzled but offhand way all that he has been through. He reports his conversations but does not quote lines of dialogue. He does not give names or locations, or describe settings or people in depth. These things do not interest him. The style works for this story; the voice grows familiar and feels trustworthy ... The conclusion is in keeping with the absurd elements everywhere in the story and with the dreamlike quality of the narrator’s journey. It’s a clever ending that some may find too clever.
