The writing is succinct and powerful, offering tidbits filled with truth on human nature in almost every sentence.īut I have not talked about the main story, really, behind everything else I've mentioned. Every chapter hits fast and hard, leaving a lasting impression. What We Lose is the complete opposite of a slow, gradual book that leads up to a bigger picture.
Thandi leads us through all these things, both with her personal experiences and secondhand observations. Clemmons covers so many themes, including but not limited to love, marriage, race (particularly being mixed race), motherhood, apartheid in South Africa, modern day Johannesburg, and abortion. It's difficult to know which aspect to start with. But, despite its size, it hit me really hard. This is a tiny book - I don't know the word count, but it is surely barely more than a novella - and it contains short, punchy chapters that cover a broad range of issues, disjointed narration, and strange jumps in time. Others may envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own. Even while you’re out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss.
In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor-someone, or something, to love. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age-a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
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