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 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.]
This book had less of a twist than I might have expected from Marías. You could say that it centers on the question of whether killing can be justified to prevent future deaths that would be caused by the person killed, and you might find on reading it that the book says, "yes, it is justified." But I think the book is actually doing something a bit more subtle. It wants to explore how it feels to know you could have prevented those future deaths and failed to do so, and it wants you to experience doubt along with the would-be killer. At this, it was extraordinarily effective.
As I see it, this book could have gone two ways: Either Tomás Nevinson kills the possible terrorist sleeper agent and he and we are never 100% positive she was an agent; or, he fails to kill her and it turns out she was. Or there is a third way, which did cross my mind once or twice: she was not the agent, she is killed, and the real agent goes on to kill again. But Marías (or maybe I should say Nevinson, as the narrator of the book) tells you quite early on the way this is going to go: two anecdotes of people who had the opportunity to kill Hitler but did not are shared multiple times in the book. And yet: I was never sure – right up to the end – how things would go. (How could I not have known, I now wonder. Maybe taking >2 months off in the middle of the book blurred my vision.) During the scene of the murder that wasn't, even as I had my doubts about the victim's guilt, I found myself urging Nevinson on. Just get it over with, I wanted to tell him. Maybe I was absorbing those clues about the potential murders of Hitler after all.
When I finished Tomás Nevinson last night, my heart sank a little. There's only one Marías novel left that I haven't read: Voyage Along the Horizon, which he wrote as a teenager and was published when he was just 21. He makes a passing allusion to this book in, I believe, The Dark Back of Time– suggesting it may actually be his best work. I'm skeptical. Also remaining for me to read are a book of short stories and a couple books of essays, but it's hard not to feel that I have only scraps to look forward to. On January 1 next year I suppose I will start with Voyage, and maybe then I will go forward and read everything through in order as I've often suggested I might. Or I could go back and reread The Infatuations, the first book I read by Marías. I know there must be so much there I missed because I didn't yet know the world of his books.
