TANGERINN

A woman returns home in the wake of her father’s death.

Mina is nearly 30, living in London in the slipstream of her best friend and flatmate, a fastidiously perfect “digital activist” named Liz. When her father dies, a trip home to Italy for his funeral becomes an extended stay as Mina and her sister, Aisha, work to preserve the bar, Tangerinn, that was their father’s livelihood and the epicenter of immigrant life in their coastal town. The two sisters were privy to different sides of their father, and their lives have each been shaped by the pieces of himself he shared with them. Born in Morocco, he came of age in the midst of the Western Sahara War and participated in the bread riots of 1981. He ached to leave home, and eventually he did. In a narrative that zags between past and present, Mina traces the similarities between herself and her elusive father. Hunger is a pervasive theme, both the literal hunger of her father’s childhood and the insatiable appetite for a meaningful life that drives Mina away from home and back again. The voice is a propulsive second person, a direct address to Mina’s late father that, for long sections, reads as first person. Anechoum’s prose, in Rand’s translation, is unassuming yet exquisitely detailed, with keen observations falling thick and fast throughout the novel. If there is a weak point, it’s in the depiction of Liz and her hyper-relevant coterie of hip Londoners: Some people may be that relentlessly obnoxious, but the pitch of Liz’s absurdity amounts to caricature, and caricature isn’t necessary when insights like this abound: “We were wild girls, but it wasn’t something to be proud of. Perhaps this is what Liz sensed and envied in me, she who worked so hard to imitate the freedom that comes from neglect.”

An elegy with momentum and teeth.