Book No. 21 of 2020
I picked up The Moor’s Account because I really enjoyed Lalami’s The Other Americans and thought it would be similar: it absolutely isn’t, and the fact that Lalami delivered a wholly different type of story is pretty impressive.
The book is unflinching in its depiction of cruelty, enslavement, and colonization: it follows the journey of the titular character as he is sold into slavery and crosses the ocean as part of a Spanish expedition to colonize the New World. LOTS of disease, violence, and misery entails; it’s pretty bleak. (It also reminded me of all those “great journey through the wilderness” type books we read in elementary school, only way more explicit.)
I really enjoyed the book, which sucks you in and is at times haunting and infused with an undeniable sense of yearning. The narrator in this story also has a way of starting a section of his tale with foreshadowing on how badly things turned out, which casts an ominous, fatalistic sense of doom over many chapters like a shadow (and keeps you reading, because you just want to KNOW what happened).
Similar Reads
Books with similar bleak-but-ever-striving journeys (and explicit depictions of human cruelty): The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Some of the themes of desperation, isolation, and language reminded me, oddly enough, of the sci-fi Semiosis by Sue Burke.
Lastly, the narrative arc (which i won’t spoil here) is very similar to that of A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (although vibe-wise they are VERY different books).