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Loading... The Drift Latitudesby Jamal Mahjoub
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 The novel is meant to be about refugees over the generations, as Mahjoub signals in the sisters' visions: Rachel watching poor marsh-dwellers passing her gate, Jade among the illegal immigrants of London. But Jade's vision does not connect to the real world, and neither does Mahjoub's. He never mentions the real refugees from Germany, anti-Nazis and Jews; and Rachel is not a refugee, but someone who married for love.  By understanding that life is improvised on fundamental themes like belonging and knowledge of self, Mahjoub has made an illuminating statement about the human condition. His combination of sharp lateral thinking, structural ingenuity and descriptive power paints a vivid picture of identities in flux, cities as fluid, imagined spaces, the sea as a fixed backdrop of moving, timeless tales. Though a few feel peripheral, Mahjoub's characters are mostly deftly drawn. The book is not without humour. Part of the diaspora of German scientists, Ernst ends up producing gadgets for the back pages of the Illustrated News (the Innovations catalogue of its day). In some ways, The Drift Latitudes is very much of its time even as it telescopes time: when Ernst finds Babylonian ruins (ruined twice over) inside the sacked Pergammon museum in postwar Hamburg, his guide points out that "civilisation is all about who steals the best stuff". But this beguiling cyclical narrative is also enlarged by allusion: Mahjoub uses Herman Melville for an epigraph and has Ernst invoke Melville's Redburn, another seeker after his father in Liverpool over a century earlier. Jade's moving return to the burned-out site of the Blue Nile, where waterfront jazz and fado, tango and ska had once formed a "confluence of dreams", reminded me finally of something in Melville's big American novel: "the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it".
Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it ... Like the jazz that snakes its way though this beautiful novel, The Drift Latitudes is about how we improvise our lives and the chances we take. From the Nubian boy who flees the tedium of home to find the bright lights of New York's jazz scene, to Ernst's daughter Rachel who turns her back on Europe and follows her husband to the Sudan, it is about the movement of people around our globe and the interdependence of our dreams. Awash with memorable characters, filled with unputdownable stories, this is a brilliantly intricate novel that lingers in the mind long after its final note. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3)
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