Cbr17bingo Migrant (bingo) The main character has moved from her native Palestine to the US
The Coin is narrated by an unnamed main character, a woman maybe in her 30s who left Palestine for New York City but has an uncomfortable relationship with the city and its people. She is telling her story to someone. Is she talking to another unnamed person? To us? To herself? The narrator is fascinating, intelligent woman of wealth and taste, but she also a few neuroses that make her perhaps unreliable. The Coin is her account of a year she spent teaching at a private boys’ school, but it is also about her traumatic childhood and its impact on her life as an adult.
The narrator’s life revolves around three things: cleanliness, her relationships with two men, and her position as a teacher at a boys school in Manhattan. Her obsession with cleanliness involves bizarre multi-step rituals. She thinks New York is the filthiest place on earth and seems disgusted by just about everything there. She has very strict rules about personal hygiene, housecleaning and laundry, but the personal hygiene rules are the most involved. The narrator is obsessed with the spot on her back that she cannot reach and is convinced that a coin that she swallowed as a child is lodged in her body in that spot she cannot reach. The story of that coin is related to a specific childhood trauma. Later in the book the reader learns more about generational trauma in Palestine.
The narrator lives alone and has no real friends. She is not terribly close to her co-workers at the school. She does have a rich lover named Sasha and later befriends a seemingly homeless but well dressed man whom she dubs “Trenchcoat.” The narrator has freedom, which she prizes. She is not tied down, but she is also looking for some sort of direction or support from the two men in her life. She needs them on her own terms and both men seem comfortable with that situation, for a while anyway.
The narrator teaches middle-school-aged boys at a private school but many of her students come from less privileged backgrounds. She got the job because of a family connection to the school’s principal, Aisha, not because she has any particular skill or training to be a teacher. And her methods are unorthodox to say the least. She is secretive about what doing in classroom, telling lies about herself, exposing the students to questionable influences, and encouraging them to do things like write exposes about their own families (making up details as necessary). The narrator knows what she encourages is wrong, which is why she hides the assignment books and never sends them home with the boys. The narrator is impressed with herself and thinks she is encouraging the boys to be strong and independent while missing red flags about the problematic behavior of some of them.
After a winter break spent in Paris with Trenchcoat, where they engage in a black market Birkin bag ring, the narrator’s life starts unraveling bit by bit. There is a strange and spectacular breakdown in all aspects of her life. This is one of those novels where I know I am not understanding everything I think I’m supposed to understand, and frankly a lot of what I read made me uncomfortable. The narrator is a very strange woman whose mental state is sometimes alarming. I was by turns fascinated and repulsed by her story. I can’t say I enjoyed the novel but it was interesting.