Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, and Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías

After a long dry spell, I finished 2 books in the last week (and they have unexpectedly similar color schemes). I debated whether to start this post with Our Lady of the Nile or Tomás Nevinson because while I started the latter first, I finished the former a few days earlier. 

Since reading Mukasonga's memoir The Barefoot Woman three years ago and learning her first novel had become available in English, I was eager to read it. So I was pleased when it was selected by my Women in Translation book club. Informed by Mukasonga's own youth, we are told, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a prestigious Catholic boarding school for girls in the Rwandan mountains, near the source of the Nile. There is a small clutch of schoolgirls whose lives we learn a little about – some in more depth than others – as well as the Father and nuns around them, a white man with an obsession with ancient Egypt who lives nearby, and assorted other characters. We start to grasp the ethnic distinctions among the girls indirectly, in how they relate to or talk about one another. The book is set at a moment when the power in Rwanda has started to shift, in the wake of Rwandan independence when the Hutu majority population was solidifying its power. The narrative in Our Lady of the Nile consists mostly of vignettes focusing in on one or two of the girls, and together they give us a picture of life at the school and the situation of Rwanda's elite class. This was an interesting book and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't find it as lovely or as moving as The Barefoot Woman.

I had been waiting for Tomás Nevinson to come out in paperback before picking it up with the intention of starting it on January 1, 2025, but then a thoughtful houseguest got me the hardcover in early spring of this year and it sat there on my coffee table staring at me for a couple weeks until finally I decided not to wait. I started in on or around April 9. I got a few hundred pages into it – with Marías it always takes a few hundred pages for things to really get going anyway – but it's a long book, even for Marías, and after two weeks I had to set it aside to read my Women In Translation book club's May selection, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. I didn't quite manage to finish that in time for my book club meeting on May 5 (though I got most of the way) and then these two unfinished books, both of which I'd read more than 200 pages of, were sitting waiting to be finished and instead I read nothing at all. For months. I took Tomás Nevinson to Paris and back in June and never opened it. When I got home from Paris, I knew I had to start Our Lady of the Nile right away to read it in time for my July book club meeting, so Tomás Nevinson went back to the coffee table. Finally, last Friday I returned to it.

I had chosen a good stopping point back in April. The book is divided into large numbered sections with several short un-numbered chapters in each. I paused at one of the numbered sections, just as there was a shift in the narrative, the focus transferred from one character to another. What can I say about Tomás Nevinson? It's about what I expected – not in content, precisely. I assumed it would cover, from Nevinson's perspective, the same period as Berta Isla, but in fact it picks up after the events of that book. I can't even imagine reading Tomás Nevinson without having read Berta Isla – would it hold up at all? There's some interplay between Marías' novels, you could almost ask of any one of them if it would stand up on its own, but Tomás Nevinson seems especially tied to Berta Isla – Marías described it as a companion book. 

I don't think I've lost any affection for Marías, but over years of reading him I've sometimes (and more and more as time goes on) felt forced to confront some, to put it kindly, outdated attitudes about gender that show up in his books. It always takes, as I have said, a while to get around to the point, but Tomás Nevinson opens with the character confessing his own old fashioned sense of ... perhaps chivalry is the way to put it? Although he is an agent who has killed before, Nevinson could never imaging killing a woman – even in the line of duty. So of course we know this must be where the book is headed. [Spoilers follow.]