Tilfældets gud

I was intrigued by the idea of this book - Ana, a hard-nosed career-woman from Copenhagen, on holiday at a beach-resort in Gambia (because that happened to be what the travel-agent was able to offer her at short notice), meets a local teenager, Mariama, and somehow comes to see her as the missing half of her own personality. She helps Mariama to come to Europe, and, naturally enough, things don't go the way she hopes. It's a complicated and sophisticated book in many ways, with a lot of different layers of imagery, pulling out social and psychological ideas about African and European cultures, families and individualism, role of women, colonialism, multiculturalism, destiny vs. chance, and a lot more.

But I didn't enjoy it as much as show more much as I hoped: the writing seemed to let the rest of the structure down. Garton talks about Thorup's "deceptively straightforward everyday language", but in the translation, at least, it often read more like the work of an incompetent beginner - which it obviously isn't. I felt that there was a flatness and lack of humour about the text, and we were forever being explicitly told characters' thoughts and motivations ('"X," said N, thinking Y'). That's something you can certainly do occasionally in a novel, but when you do it consistently for all the characters in every dialogue, it becomes more than a little wearing. More like reading an academic report than a novel. show less