Homesick (2023)
Why this one?
I’m currently dipping into some tempting titles from the 2023 Women’s Prize Longlist. This is my third read from the list, which I chose through a combination of liking the cover (isn’t it lovely?) and its description, of which more later.
Jennifer Croft grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Although this is (technically…) her debut novel, she is a renowned translator, working in Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. Along with author Olga Tokarczuk, she won the 2018 International Booker for her translation of Flights. She has argued passionately for greater recognition of the role of translators, launching the “Translators on the Cover” campaign in 2021 with Mark Haddon.
Fittingly given her background, Homesick is a novel with an extremely unusual (and international) gestation. It has its roots in her Spanish language novel, Serpientes y escaleras, published in 2014. She subsequently published Homesick: A Memoir in the US in 2019, in a version which apparently incorporated her own and her mother’s photographs and was significantly adapted into a more memoir-like format as a result. The version which appears on this year’s Women’s Prize List is different yet again, published in the UK for the first time, here without any photographs and with ‘…A Memoir’ missing from the title, presumably deliberately. While all of the versions seem to feature the same sister-based dynamic and general plot, after the first two versions which published, Croft stated that neither was a translation. Interesting, if not a little confusing to someone relative alien to the world of literature in translation!
Thoughts, etc.
Focusing on the version that I read, for obvious reasons (that’s the one in the picture above), Homesick is a childhood memoir / coming of age story of a girl called Amy, who is seemingly a reasonably direct proxy for Croft herself. Central to the story is her relationship with her younger sister Zoe The two are initially inseparable, with a unique bond that they supplement with the creation of their own unique symbol-based language. When Zoe develops a life-changing illness, Amy becomes wracked with guilt, which only seems to expand when she moves away to college at just fifteen, accepted on the basis of her prodigious grasp of Russian. Along the way, there are also explorations of young love, as both girls become obsessed by their language tutor; grief, as they deal with an unexpected suicide; and of course language itself.
Taken in and of itself, this is a really gripping and moving read. It’s told in the kind of sparse, economical language that I love, taken to formalistic extremes where some chapters are barely as long as their titles. This creates an impressionistic sort of feeling, giving the sense of slices of time captured and frozen by photography, something that felt obvious even without knowing that other versions of this story have photographs to accompany those linguistic images. I haven’t compared the two versions, but omitting the images feels completely logical - the text is precise and evocative, rendering illustration seemingly unnecessary. Amy is a rounded and complex character, one that it’s hard to entirely pin down, but certainly in the mould of the troubled child genius, her talent both gift and burden. While she achieves what seems to be a kind of happy ending, it’s her lowest moments that stick in the memory, none of which are gratuitous but articulated using the translator’s particular gift for economy and precision.
Aspects of it slightly disappointed, notably the heavy focus on the ‘shared language’ of the two girls in the blurb, which led me to expect a Silent Twins style setup, where in reality Amy and Zoe’s secret communications are only really alluded to in passing. It was also, for me, one of those books that raced past me, entrancing me with beautiful poetic vignettes, but leaving only impressions behind, rather than a sense of a truly satisfying whole. I do think it’s one that might benefit from a re-read, though, which might improve that last issue.
Score
8
As you might expect from a celebrated translator, the language is what makes this. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading it, and only mark it down slightly for the minor quibbles I mention above.
Next up
Having a go on Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which everyone seems to love…
