Now everyone knows that the author is a pedophile. But I started reading this before I knew that. This book is a story that I immersed myself in. Jacqueline is the last member of her family after a brutal political coup takes place in Liberia. By her ex-boyfriend's help, she has a Spanish visa. Now she has made her way to the a Grecian island and she must find a way to survive as a homeless person. ( )

This deeply unsettling novel focuses on Jacqueline, a 23-year-old refugee from Liberia who has escaped that country’s brutal second civil war, which lasted from 1999-2003 and resulted in the overthrow of the corrupt regime of Charles Taylor, who was exiled to Nigeria, and the installation of a transitional government. Jacqueline has landed on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, a popular tourist spot, at the height of summer. She has come there with the clothes on her back and little else: a change of underwear, a couple of extra t-shirts, a few toiletries, and no money. She knows no one on the island. Initially, Jacqueline spends her days in solitary fashion. Suspicious of everyone, she drifts from place to place, trying to blend in with the tourists and avoiding activities that will attract unwanted attention, scavenging food only when she can be sure no one is watching. Her only company are her memories of the horrors she witnessed and the imaginary voice of her mother, with which she carries on a continuous bantering conversation. Gradually we learn that Jacqueline’s family was well-off and privileged. Her father was a minister in Taylor’s government. Her younger sister Saifa was a pampered, unruly but perpetually happy teenager who became pregnant, and her mother a domineering alcoholic. Jacqueline herself went to school in England, and after graduating, against her mother’s strong advice, returned home, where, as the fighting started, she became embroiled in an affair with a French journalist named Bernard. In Santorini she finds a cave near a beach and sets herself up with a bed made of cardboard and her meagre belongings. But when some men in the town notice her, she becomes fearful of their intentions, abandons this refuge and walks to another town, where she finds a place to sleep in a half-constructed hotel near another beach. Driven by the need to eat and replenish her supplies, she poses as a student visiting the island who is raising money for her studies by performing foot-rubs for tourists, and with this ruse manages to acquire enough Euros to feed herself and buy a few things. Her other craving, every bit as urgent and one that inevitably wears her down, is her need for human contact, and near the end of the book she befriends a young waitress named Katerina and finally tells her story. From the beginning, Jacqueline’s story is the crisis point to which Alexander Maksik’s suspenseful narrative is building, and though the reader will probably have guessed the gist of what is revealed from the clues that are dropped along the way, it does not prepare us for the full horror of the details. A Marker to Measure Drift, deliberately paced, often dreamlike, is a novel that engages the reader with a promise of the revelation of past events rather than the more customary “what happens next” enticement that many novels dangle to keep the reader turning pages. We keep reading because Jacqueline is as fascinating as she is sympathetic: any uneasiness we might feel about the shock and revulsion we know are in store for us is more than offset by the desire to learn the why and the wherefore of Jacqueline’s tragic story. ( )

"It's about how we live with what we know"
By sally tarbox on 6 March 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
I read the whole book in a day, and I think it's a narrative which gains from being 'blitzed', as you totally get into the feel of it and the existence of illegal immigrant Jacqueline.
The protagonist has just arrived on the Greek island of Santorini and is patently in shock at some unspecified events in her recent past. An educated woman of good family in Liberia, she now finds herself poverty-stricken and driven to sleeping in a cave.
Day follows day, and very little happens - an occasional friendly word, a meal here, a change of location - all narrated in a kind of dream-like way which conveys Jacqueline's frame of mind as day melts into identical day. The only constant companion is her mother who, in her mind, comments on her actions, criticising or encouraging.
Only at the end do we learn the details of what has happened in Liberia.
Very powerful read. ( )

Jacqueline has escaped Liberian and is living in a cave and scrounging for food by offering foot messages to tourists on the beach. She is mentally suffering and slowly reveals to us her experiences. ( )

Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift is a title which will be difficult to recall. It is a hypnotic read, the story of a homeless woman on a Greek Island and her memory of events in her native country of Liberia under the Charles Taylor regime. It made me curious about the history of that African country and I ordered a couple of the movies mentioned by the author in his acknowledgments. The writing was very good, musical. Even though her days ran together in similar patterns as she tried to find food and a place for the night, the story held my interest as a diary does. Written in the third person, it has the same mesmerizing quality as if the main character were talking. There is little dialogue except the voices in her head.
As Paul from City Lights Bookstore said of the book: "Visceral and gripping, extraordinary in its depiction of physical and spiritual hungers, Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about ruin and faith, barbarism and love, and the devastating memories that contain the power both to destroy us and to redeem us." ( )