Book Report: North

52. Brad Kessler, North (2021) (10/14/21)

The other day I mentioned that I'd just purchased a book in Kindle format—an experiment. My experience with Kindle has always been mixed: I tell myself that I find it harder to concentrate, to stay engaged. Well, I guess it depends on the book, because this book I plowed right through. It helped that I removed my iPad from its cumbersome keyboard case, making the device lighter and easier to hold. I found that I enjoyed being told just how many hours of reading I had left, and what percentage of the book I'd finished—perhaps simply because I was making such good progress. Yay forward momentum!

But in the end, it was the book itself that mattered, and the medium felt more or less beside the point. 

North is very much about story—or in Somali, sheeko. One of the main characters is a young Somali woman, Sahro, who, her parents, and later a beloved cousin, having been killed, flees her homeland to find safety in the United States, where she has family in Ohio. In the course of the narrative, we learn about her life in Somalia, already as a girl a migrant there between south and north and back again, and about her trip at age 19 through the Americas to the U.S.-Mexico border, followed by 18 months of detention outside New York City and, ultimately, monitored custody in a home with a sponsor. When she learns that her asylum hearing will be led by a "two-percent judge"—with just that much chance of succeeding—she decides her only choice is to try to make it to Canada. An accident occurs, however, as the car she's being driven in swerves to avoid a moose, and she winds up at Blue Mountain Monastery in Vermont. There she is given shelter by Abbot Christopher, whose story we also learn, from his start as a painting student to his quest for a spiritual home—for sanctuary of a different sort. A third character, Teddy, the monastery's groundskeeper and an injured Afghan war veteran, also figures in.

It's a rich story, beautifully told, weaving between present and past, among loves and yearnings and disappointments and joys. Place plays an important role—always a favorite for me. Kessler's use of metaphor—a few recurring themes—and his descriptions are very satisfying.

Here are a couple of quotes:

"Diaspora" was the English word for the Somali qurba joog: the scattering over the earth, a dispersal of people. Sahro had looked up the word in an English dictionary in detention. "Diaspora" meant "exile" but it also referred to a mineral, a greenish rock called diaspore, whose elements, when heated, vaporized into air. Wasn't that happening to all of them? Wasn't it happening to Sahro this very moment? A little heat, a little pressure. A small uptick in the earth's temperature, and they were all vaporizing into air, becoming ghosts?

Or here, in Rome, where young Christopher meets the man who would become his spiritual father:

One evening in late November he watched a cloud of starlings over the Aventine. The birds had been in the city for weeks but he hadn't noticed their habits before. The starlings arrived in fall from the surrounding countryside to roost in the city at night, and that evening on the Aventine he stood in the Orangery and watched with dozens of others the flocks begin their crepuscular flights. One by one the birds lifted into the twilight; then a massive wave rose into the sky. The murmuration moved like liquid, fluid, unconfined, forming in dark creases and folds above the city, a shape that kept shifting, as if erasing any idea of fixity or permanence, their collective body becoming one.
     Everyone around Christopher watched, commenting in many languages, staring into the sky over the Tiber as if at a son-et-lumière show. Then the birds gathered above the Orangery in a darkening pool and dropped into the orange trees and pines, encasing branches in cloaks of iridescence and creaking beaks, a million miniature umbrellas flapping open and closed. The noise was so great, Christopher couldn’t hear his neighbor speak, a small man in a cream-colored tunic and a thatch of wiry black hair—a monk. Then a white rain began to fall around them. A rain of starling shit. People screamed, pulled jackets overhead. There was no escaping the baptism; the sky seemed to be squirting milk. People ran in one direction or another. Christopher and the monk, for some reason, were laughing, deliriously, wiping crap off their sleeves. Then they were sprinting out of the Orangery and up the road, the small monk shouting the whole time, “Hurry! Hurry!” a look of uncontained glee on his face.

(Another advantage of Kindle: you can cut and paste text, rather than having to type it in. Though I like typing it in; it allows me to savor the words all over again.)

At the end of the book Kessler writes a bit about the dangers of appropriation: 

Novels are always attempts to cross borders, the border between one consciousness and another, the writer's and the readers', mine and yours. The question always is: who gets to cross whose borders? Who has the passport and why? Power is always at play, and White American writers have historically owned the passports, the visas, the point of views (the whole real estate). I wrote this book in—and against—the White settler literary tradition in which I was raised, knowing I could never see enough, know enough, experience enough, beyond my own blind spots and ignorance. Beyond my own body. My aim was not to extract from, but allow with. To give an offering, an accompaniment. I'm not sure I succeeded. Perhaps just failed a little less.

Kessler also provides a very thorough bibliography of works that informed various aspects of this book—Somali life, the asylum seeker's experience, Islamic constellations, post–war injury rehabilitation, monastic practices, Renaissance landscape art, Northern Spy apples and Bicknell's thrushes, and much more—as well as a reading list of Somali writers and poets. Kessler's respect for his material is palpable.

Bonus essay: White Men, Land, and Literature: The Making (and Unmaking) of an American Pastoral—Brad Kessler on Settler Narratives and the Violence That Haunts American Land and Literature

(A final note on Kindle, a con: I can't add the book to my gratifyingly growing pile of books that I have actually read. I enjoy viewing the richness, and it reinforces my pleasure in the activity of reading.)