Girl, Woman, Other

Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo. London: Penguin Books, 2019

Celebration

Bernardine

She starts speaking and then you become confused: why is she so smily? Isn’t her book about the fact of being angry? Maybe I just misunderstood and the story of Girl, Woman, Other is not the story of a group of furious women claiming for their rights, screaming about injustice. Maybe I’m wrong.

The interviewer smiles also. This is a mirroring effect: they’re happy to each other, happy to talk about black British women and their circumstances from the late nineteenth century until 2019.

So: Am I wrong?

No, I’m not: It’s just that I didn’t read it that way. This is a novel which probably was incredibly difficult to be written but which is incredibly easy to read. Surprisingly.

No, she doesn’t use full stops (almost none in more than 400 pages) but you don’t feel exhausted after reading some paragraphs: you know how to breathe in between lines, commas, blank spaces. She guides you through and you can go with the flow, with the character, feeling her, thinking like her.

Girl, Woman, Other is easy, is also comfortable although it touches our inner souls with pain and suffering. It doesn’t force you to «re-think» your beliefs (although it does) and it doesnt’t puts you out of your comfort zone (althoug yes, it also does!). I’ve been moved by those twelve characters equally important in the story. Their story.

How strange is to be moved by the simple fact of reading about people that struggles for being reunited with each other. This novel is a praise for the life itself and the pieces that fit within each other to make it possible.

«Not struggle but celebration» she said, and she was right.