Book review: Girl, Woman, Other

 

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo

Winner of the Booker Prize 2019, Evaristo being the first Black woman to do so, chosen by Barack Obama as his top 19 books of 2019, shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.

My rating: 5/5 stars

 

This is Britain as you’ve never read it.

This is Britain as it has never been told.

From the top of the country to the bottom, across more than a century of change and growth and struggle and life, Girl, Woman, Other follows twelve very different characters on an entwined journey of discovery.

It is future, it is past. It is fiction, it is history.

It is a novel about who we are now.

 

Amma

Yazz

Dominique

Carole

Bummi

LaTisha

Shirley

Winsome

Penelope

Megan/Morgan

Hattie

Grace

 

We meet these twelve people, mostly women, mostly black women. We get a snippet of each life. We meet them and we live with them, we hear their thoughts, their struggles, their regrets. Although the novel is not written in first person, we are in very close third person, and so we feel each character so in depth.

In sentence structure, there is very little restriction. There is little use of punctuation: no speech marks, very few full stops, and capital letters only for names. This seeks to make the rare use of punctuation to be all the more impactful.

Additionally, the speech, despite no punctuation denoting it, is still clearly articulated in the writing. As we read, and we switch into an internal thought or piece of dialogue, we hear it in a subtle voice change within the sentence. It is a powerful thing to be able to write dialogue so well without the crutch of speech marks and line breaks. I can only aspire to write in such a way.

Once again, I found myself stopping while reading to write down descriptions and lyrically brilliant lines from the novel. Bernardine Evaristo, I salute you.

 

Reading the novel, we get a glimpse into each character and their lives. Although some stories seem more mundane, they are written in a way that makes them feel just as important as the stories where the characters succeed in ways, or don’t conform to standards of feminism and modern society.

Evaristo herself claims the story embodies ‘fusion fiction’ and that the different character stories reflect the ‘infinite possibility of who we are’. I love that.

Each character is as important as the last, and that is how they are presented within the novel. I think this quote reflects this in the novel: ‘it’s easy to forget that England is made up of so many Englands’. It reminds us that where England is made up of different Englands, so human lives are made up of so many human lives. This theme is really reflected within the novel as each character, while searching for themselves, has to interact and intertwine themselves with other people.

We find, that throughout reading, all of these women are intertwined, through varying degrees of interaction, and this ‘fuses’ each chapter together and leaves little easter eggs for us to pick up as we read along.

 

            I was extremely intrigued by this book, and being a Literature student I enjoyed the free form writing within, and the portfolio style of character profiles.

As a reader, it is such a captivating book, with in-depth character portrayals, and interesting plots and shocking twists and personal and professional changes. While reading each chapter, I was so enveloped by each character, and each story, each setting, each interaction, that I wasn’t overly aware of the other chapters that had come before.

Each character feels like they have a novel of their own; they take centre stage, and they become the sole object of our interest and intrigue. The occasional reference to another character we have met reminds the reader of the intertwined relationships within the novel.

We find ourselves speculating how each character will be linked.

The book is made up of five chapters. Each of the first four are in sections of three women. These women are more closely, and obviously, interlinked to each other. As we read on, however, we find that the women in each chapter has ties to those in other chapters.

This allows us to gain an intrusive perception of certain characters, through other characters’ gazes. Meaning, we understand one character more, by the way they describe another.

The final chapter takes us back to the location at the beginning of the novel. Amma’s play at the National. Here we see the climactic coming together of certain characters, and we see this through a passive, multi-perspective narrative. It feels right.

 

            I really enjoyed this compounding novel. It feels special, and unique. It reads beautifully, and will be unlike any other book you have read.

It is difficult at times, and Evaristo employs her characters to think freely, and say things that perhaps are hard to hear, or disagree with your own philosophies, but that’s what makes it so interesting. We aren’t in an echo-chamber of likeminded individuals.

We are in a world, much like our own, where everyone is different, and everyone has their own opinions. A world where everyone is just trying to survive.

So, I implore you to read it, if you haven’t yet for some reason. It is brilliant. It is important.

 

This was my second read of 2021. Only 23 to go. I’m giving it 5 stars.

 

Ellen Victoria

@artawaytheworld