Girl, Woman, Other stond al heel lang op mijn lijstje en ik had HOGE VERWACHTINGEN! Helemaal in mijn straatje qua onderwerp en bijna alleen maar 5-sterren reviews.
Maar… het viel me een beetje tegen? Ik vond de personages niet leuk of realistisch. Er is geen plot: het is gewoon een opsomming van nieuwe personages. Het voelde als vooral veel clichés en stereotypes.
Ik las deze kritische recensie op Goodreads en kon me daar wel erg in vinden:
Okay, folks, I had some time to think about it … so here goes nothing. The more I reminisce about this particular book the more I cannot shake the feeling that this … simply ain’t it. I’m sorry. If this is the best what Britain has to offer at the moment, the situation is more grave than I initially thought. Uff. Where do we even start here?
The book has no overarching story. Instead, each chapter of the book follows the life of one of the 12 characters (mostly Black women) as they negotiate the world. Although each character has their own chapter set across a particular time, their lives intertwine in numerous ways – from friends and relatives to chance acquaintances.
So, chapter one starts with Amma, a middle-aged, politically engaged lesbian theatre-maker whose latest play is about to be staged at the National Theatre. Next is her daughter Yazz, a super annoying self-righteous undergraduate who hangs with a group of like-minded pals who agree that: “…the older generation has RUINED EVERYTHING and her generation is doomed / unless they wrest intellectual control from their elders / sooner rather than later.” (EXCUSE ME?)
And then there’s Dominique, Amma’s great friend and long-time collaborator, who falls for a controlling radical feminist and is lured into moving to America. The following three chapters continue the same pattern with occasional stories overlapping to a greater or lesser extent with those earlier in the book.
For a novel with so many different characters it is astounding that I absolutely cared about none of them. I disliked all of them. All of these women are full of themselves, downright annoying and simply haven’t gotten their priorities straight. If there’s one thing one must take away from Evaristo’s novel, it’s that all a woman wants in life is being in a relationship. All of these characters are so preoccupied with their relationships and sex, it’s fucking ridiculous. Like, I’m so confused??? Why do you write 12 different character portraits and then mostly focus on the sexual side of things, like, that’s so boring??? Who even cares???
There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather hang around the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. The narrative needed to develop and deepen – to flesh out what has gone before, to draw the reader into the world the characters inhabit. Clearly, Evaristo didn’t live up to what she set out to do, and so everything remained on a surface level. Instead of building the story and developing the protagonists and their relationships, we are given yet another batch of brief biographies, all of which are okay in isolation but they are, quite frankly, underwhelming in the context as a the whole.
The lively introductory profiles fail to evolve into complex character studies, which leads to a growing sense of superficiality. Evaristo does attempt to add drama and three-dimensionality by way of chapter-connecting plot devices, but the set-ups are too obvious and the pay-off fails to appear. Especially towards the end, Girl, Woman, Other becomes monotonous and very predictable.
I know that this form – character vignettes that make up a whole novel – is incredibly hard to pull off, but it is definitely possible, and so I want to give you some recommendations of author’s who have done it so much better. Gloria Naylor is basically the queen of this form and I can highly recommend Bailey’s Café or The Women of Brewster Place. Both narratives are incredibly well written and deal with the experiences, emotional traumas and the persistence of Black women in the US. Another writer who never fails to amaze me when it comes to writing about the human condition, is the French playwright Yasmina Reza, her novel Heureux les heureux is nothing short of amazing, and a cynical, insolent and sometimes hilarious dissection of the human soul. Even Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Jean Toomer’s Cane, albeit they have their flaws, have done it so much better.
What all of the novels above have in common is the fact that they managed to unfold multiple variations in which the reader clearly distinguishes the voice of each protagonist. These are novels in which a dichotomy between main and side characters doesn’t exist. In Girl, Woman, Other , everything seems to center around the character of Amma. That doesn’t make any sense. And above all, it makes the narrative repetitive and predictable. The novels above showcase a net of complexity and interweavement that Girl, Woman, Other can only dream about.
Girl, Woman, Other leaves you frustrated. We are denied the chance of getting to know the characters better. Furthermore, Evaristo’s novel shoulders some heavy themes — racism, the immigrant experience, the increasingly fluid borders of gender and sexuality, the patriarchy — and it often feels overburdened by them.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of Evaristo’s characters were reduced to mouthpieces for a popular debate, or the identity that they were supposed to represent. We get the artsy Anglo-African playwright, the hipster questioning transgender identities; and then a separatist lesbian thrown in the mix. The characters throw phrases around, such as “gender is a social construct”, “femininity and masculinity are society’s inventions”, “in any case, ageing is nothing to be ashamed of” – and that’s all nice and swell, but where’s the depth to that?
I’m sorry, but the writing felt way too artificial for me. None of these characters were real. Amma and her best friend have seemingly profound conversations about “reconfiguring feminism” … when they literally have just snorted four lines of coke and drank two bottles of red wine. Like, are you kidding me?? How stupid do you think I am?? Who’s supposed to be buying this?
On top of that, some of the passages are just truly horrific displays of bad writing, in which Evaristo truly rivals Rupi Kaur, e.g. “she tried boys a couple of times / they enjoyed it / she endured it”.
There were passages of such bad writing in here – “Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay – who’s amaaaaazing? / was this a student outwitting the master? / #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl” – that I really started loosing my faith in humanity, and not just contemporary British writing.
When a character was raped it was referred to as having “had her virginity stolen” … UMM, HOW ABOUT WE DON’T CALL IT THAT WHEN A MINOR WAS LITERALLY RAPED BY HER FATHER IN LAW??? When a character had to prostitute herself to ensure her daughter’s education, she said: “she was now a business woman / this was her first transaction”. I don’t know about you but I find these choices rather appalling and cringey, to say the least. #notafan #dontusehastagsinliterature #fortheloveofgod
Evaristo truly did her young characters dirty. I have rarely seen such an inauthentic portrayal of our current culture and how young people navigate in it. The woke self-righteousness of present-day Yazz (who is describing herself as “part ’90s Goth, part post-hip hop, part slutty ho, part alien.”), and her multicultural “uni squad, the Unfuckwithables” (don’t get me started on that one), is a little too one the nose to be even remotely believable. Her entire character is a joke.
But even the older characters aren’t more likeable due to their unhealthy obsession with sex and being in a relationship. At one point, a MOTHER’S REACTION to seeing her daughter’s boyfriend for the FIRST TIME is that “she wanted to run her hands all over him, massage his balls, feel him harden at her touch”??? What the fuck is wrong with you??? I’m sorry. Have you ever looked at a person for the first time in your life and thought to yourself “DAMN, I REALLY WANNA MASSAGE HIS BALLS”??? I am confusion.
And as another reviewer pointed out, the characters overcome horrific traumas such as (gang) rape, severe postpartum depression and drug addiction shockingly easily. Just by the power of their will. It’s ridiculous. There is absolutely no depth or believability to their journey of healing and finding their will to live again. For example, in the case of severe drug addiction, the character simply stays at home for a week, and then is magically cured. Excuse me?
So, at the end of the day, I don’t know why I rated this even two stars. Maybe because I found a few of the explorations of the intersections between gender and race, and across the generations (e.g. “I haven’t suffered, not really, my mother and grandmother suffered because they lost their loved ones and their homeland, whereas my suffering is mainly in my head”) quite interesting and engaging … and even though the epilogue runs the risk of feeling gimicky, it has some quality to it and drives home the overarching point Evaristo was trying to make - that we’re in this together – so yeah, it’s not ALL bad. But it mostly is. #sorrynotsorry
En ook: waarom ben je doorgegaan met Tate James lezen, als ze steeds zo slecht waren 
Jammer dat deze serie van Tate James niet zo beviel, ik ben nog erg benieuwd naar de Madison Kate serie. Sowieso veel in je lijstje wat nog op mn tbr staat haha.
maar het waren goede impuls aankopen
zo mooi. Heb je de film ook gezien?
