{"id":14227,"date":"2020-03-21T18:54:36","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T17:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pocolit.uber.space\/?p=14227"},"modified":"2023-01-27T09:12:47","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T08:12:47","slug":"soul-tourists-by-bernardine-evaristo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2020\/03\/21\/soul-tourists-by-bernardine-evaristo\/","title":{"rendered":"Soul Tourists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bernardine Evaristo made headlines in 2019 when her latest book Girl, Woman, Other <\/em>won the Booker Prize \u2013 which it shared with Margaret Atwood\u2019s much-anticipated The Testaments<\/em>. But Evaristo has been a writer to watch for some time, and her earlier work is very much worth checking out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soul Tourists<\/em>, published in 2005, tells the story of an epic road\ntrip from England to Kuwait. The main characters are Stanley and Jessie, who\nmeet in a club and fall in love. Stanley, clean-living, reliable and a little\ndull, is thrown off-course by the recent death of his father. Jessie, older,\nextravagantly extrovert and looking for a travelling companion on an overland\njourney to visit her estranged son in Australia, manages to convince Stanley\nthe trip is what he needs. And off they set in Jessie\u2019s old Lada. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a layered read\nand a thoroughly hybrid text, interspersed with verse, imagined dialogue,\nletters and whatnot. There\u2019s no doubt Evaristo is a consummately accomplished\nwriter; sometimes you can feel the academic\u2019s taste for research and clever\nallusions peeking around the corners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s\nperegrinations coast along two main lanes: the tumultuous relationship between\nits main characters, and the historical task it appears to have set itself. The\nfirst is perhaps the less compelling, or at least the less unusual, although\ncredit is due to Evaristo for developing characters who are both granted enough\nthree dimensionality that you\u2019re never entirely sure whether you like them or\nnot. The second is what recommends the book and makes it special. Stanley is,\nas the novel describes it, \u2018susceptible\u2019 to visitations from ghosts, and as\nthey travel from London, to the palace at Versailles, and on through Spain,\nItaly, and Turkey, he encounters the spectre of various Of Colour characters who\nhave been written out of history. Some of it might be speculative \u2013 scholars\nare still disagreeing about the \u2018Dark Lady of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets\u2019, for\ninstance \u2013 but the overall political project of the novel is convincing and\nbeautifully executed. It rewrites Europe as a space constitutively configured\nby non-white presences, even as much of its history has been concerned to make\nthese lives invisible, or as current-day discourse would model Of Colour\npeoples in Europe as \u2018new arrivals\u2019. The novel is a creative intervention in\nthe histories and stories told about Europe and who \u2018belongs\u2019 in it; we could\nuse more literature like it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo’s earlier works are also worth checking out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[99,101,110,109,100],"class_list":["post-14227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-bernardine-evaristo","tag-europe","tag-kuwait","tag-london","tag-soul-tourists"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14227"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20318,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14227\/revisions\/20318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}