“In Africa, you want more, I think”
This book has been making the rounds again, and I have had a copy of it for about 20 years now, and finally got around to it. Our narrator in this long novel is an anthropology grad student working in Botswana who has recently kind of figured out that the bottom has fallen out of her dissertation project. Not yet scrambling, she decides to find her path to a settlement some ways away where a multidisciplinary hotshot in the field has set up a community under the principles of creating a project that helps locals but also requires that Westerners live up to the same standards longterm. You can imagine that from the title of the novel that there’s a relationship that’s going to happen. We also know this going in early because not only does our narrator tells us, she also tells us about the other small, temporary relationships she finds herself in her early days in the country.
She arrives in the settlements after a kind of tromp through the desert that bordered on disastrous, but when she arrives, she slowly finds her place in the camp. Eventually we end up in the relationship, and I am not spoiling anything, because the novel is the exploration of the relationship, not the potential.
This is a novel about where praxis meets theory and whether or not theory and practice have much relationship at all. It’s a smart and erudite novel, and tender at times. It’s a brilliant written and gorgeous novel to boot.