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Our community recommends a new book every day.
Today, "Open Water" by Caleb Azumah Nelson published on August 24, 2022 by Éditions Denoël.
Alain Raimbault, writer, blogger and contributor to the 20 Minutes
Books reading group
, recommends
Open Water
by Caleb Azumah Nelson, published on August 24, 2022 by Éditions Denoël.
His favorite quote:
“Being you is about apologizing, and often those apologies take the form of avoidance.
Avoidance is not selective.
He doesn't know when he will come on stage.
What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness than to show yourself draped in your vulnerability.
It's not better, but it's easier.
Only, the more you persist like this, the more you risk suffocating.
At some point, you will have to breathe.
»
Why this book?
Because the love story that develops
between the two characters is based on expectation, while the reader would rather expect a flash, on the unspoken, the silences, the distance and the sensuality.
When words fail, and they often fail because love here is the language of dumb people, music and alcohol fill the voids.
He is a photographer and seeks to see his subjects, to unmask them when he himself is all in restraint.
And that is precisely the problem.
When will he be able to really speak?
To say everything?
A tension arises from this inability to really speak.
Because the photographer is Ghanaian
and has lived in London for a long time.
He still feels in danger because a police check is always possible, for any reason, and risks ending very badly.
He experiences racism on a daily basis.
He never feels free.
It bends under the weight of racial prejudice.
He is tired, disgusted, traumatized by the way English society looks at him.
He would like just once to feel truly free, to feel understood for who he is and not for what the color of his skin represents.
Because the text written in the second person singular
sounds like a confidence, a familiar music imbued with great poetry.
The tone is unique.
It breathes new life into a somewhat eternal story.
Two beings meet, recognize each other and will try to love each other.
This novel resembles a Greek tragedy where the chorus (replaced here by the words of the many songs that the photographer listens to, in addition to the familiarity) would have won at the expense of the action.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
A young Londoner meets a young woman.
She is a dancer and studies in Dublin.
They will try to love each other despite the daily racism the two face because they are black.
Characters.
The photographer and the dancer he is in love with.
Places.
London;
Dublin.
The time.
Today.
The author.
Caleb Azumah Nelson is an Anglo-Ghanaian writer born in 1993.
Open Water
is his first novel, already translated into 14 languages.
This book was read
from the first lines into this impossible love story written with great intensity, great poetry, and heartbreaking beauty.
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