A beautiful, unsettling novel told through the eyes of a child growing up on a small island off the coast of West Africa. Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel's story curves back on itself, spirals around its events and themes in great ellipses; each time you (re)approach the series of tragic events which overtakes the island community, you understand a little better what's been going on. (Perhaps a very little. Ávila Laurel's unnamed narrator withholds information the whole way through the book, and tells us so, and in a way that tells me he wants the non-Equatoguinean reader to pick up on it.) Full of vivid imagery that will linger with me, even if the ending didn't quite satisfy. ( )

This is a difficult book - not to read - the translation and the story flowed easily for all the desolate power of its fiction but to attempt to assimilate - there are more questions than answers here and I've lost countless hrs since reading this in an attempt to learn more of Annobón / pagalu.

This story took me right on to reading human rights reports and country histories, to trying to piece them together w my own knowledge of today into a sort of reader's next step after.

- the author, with the voice of a child, the distance of adulthood and new freedoms evokes a powerful need to know ( )

Other reviews can tell you what the book is about, this one is a piece of advice: This novel starts slowly and you might be tempted to put it down. It feels disorganized and repetitive, as if it might not be going anywhere. Stick with it. Those circumlocutions are part of the story and help make it unlike any novel I've read. This is beautiful, mysterious, horribly cruel, then beautiful again. It may take more time to get into this novel than most others, but you'll be rewarded. ( )

The story of a boy growing up on a remote island somewhere to the west of Africa (?), and living through a number of major events including a cholera epidemic, various superstitions, a massive fire, violence within the community and the other tragedies of people living a subsidence lifestyle. It is not happy reading, but the story is well told and since it is through the eyes of a child, does not have the heaviness that it might. ( )

On an island off the coast of Africa, just below the Equator, lived a people all but forgotten by the world. They lived cooperatively, as they had to in order to survive.The men fished in canoes made from hollowed out tree trunks. The women had plantings of cassava, yams, bananas and date palms. As for the children, they lived a relatively carefree existence with one exception. Whenever there was a funeral on the island, all the children who lived along the procession route were shut up in their homes, with the windows covered over. It was said that if the funeral air, 'the air of the dead', came into contact with children, it killed them and took them away with whoever was being buried. Of all the terrifying things we were told about in our youth, being touched by the air of the dead frightened us most. Children could only open the door again when their mother or another adult of the house told them it was safe to do so.
The unnamed boy who narrates this story does so in classic story telling fashion. A description of a particular event might loop back to a legend, or off to another story about the person involved. The story will move forward and then forward once more, advancing the narrative, but then an earlier thread pops up again, as if to remind the listening audience of it, and alert them that it will soon be expanded.

On this particular island, there was a belief that when something unusual happened, it was a warning sign that extraordinary events would follow. The unusual event here involved the young boy's grandfather. Grandfather lived upstairs on the second floor of one of only two homes on the island with a second floor. He didn't come downstairs. The young boy believed Grandfather didn't speak and didn't eat. He sat on a balcony facing away from the sea, the source of all the island's bounty, facing inland instead toward the mountain.

Then one day a man arrived by boat to accompany Grandfather to a funeral. The children of the house used the occasion to secretly explore Grandfather's room, but the narrator doesn't reveal what they found. The child considered these two events together extraordinary. Thinking it through he surmised

...we ought to think for a moment about what a great friend that man who came to see him must have been. I say this because he made something happen that none of us had ever seen before, namely that grandfather came down from upstairs.... to us, grandfather leaving the house was a really big deal. And in our island's culture, it's believed that whenever something extraordinary is about to happen, there's always a warning sign. In this case the warning was grandfather going out with his friend to join the funeral procession... What happened after that was something truly extraordinary, one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened on our Atlantic Ocean island.... Something momentous.

Sure enough, that very day, the first disaster struck: an uncontrollable fire. Over the ensuing years, one hardship followed another. Were the children to blame because they went to Grandfather's room the narrator asks rhetorically. Then, like a child, he brings up something else that might have been the cause.

Like any good storyteller, the narrator sprinkles his tale with lessons on the ways of his people. We learn of men skilled at paddling who can ply Atlantic waters, of women whose men have disappeared to the place where boats take them, of what happens to children when there are no men in the family to catch fish. We learn how to make a dugout canoe and how date palms are harvested.

The years went by. Foreign trawlers fish offshore and the islanders cannot compete. A cholera epidemic strikes, at least that is the name the foreign doctor gives the sickness, but there is no medicine. The people struggle on, but the outside world seems to have forgotten them. Offerings are made to the sea, but the narrator expressed his own childlike doubts about the process. The last great event he recounts feels like an elegy for his people, especially when he tells us how his story has come to be.

This is a beautifully written novel, reminiscent in style at times of the stories told in The Storyteller, at times of the descriptions in Life of Pi. Juan Tomás Avila Laurel is from Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish speaking African country. The book has been translated from Spanish and somehow kept the sense of rhythm and movement in the telling, and most of all, the sense of wonder. I hope to find more works in translation by this author.