Loin de mon père

A few years ago I read Tadjo's Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice, which remains one of the most intriguing - not necessarily best, though it's very good, but intriguing - ruminations on the idea of myth I've read. It takes an old West African folk tale and starts retelling it, turning it inside out and reimagining it in every standard plot available, looking for a way out, looking for a story that won't trap her...

Far From My Father is in a way a very different novel, a completely modern tale of a young French-Ivorian woman who comes back to a war-torn Cote d'Ivoire to bury her father after he dies, and comes to realise she knows a lot less about both him and her supposed home country than she always thought she did...

Yet it's once again a story of a story, of the malleability and inscrutability of history. It's first and foremost a deftly told family saga, two generations caught in changing times trying to balance where they come from with where they're trying to go. Nina's parents are of a generation who changed everything; the free-thinking French girl who chose her own way, the educated post-Colonial Season Of Migration To The North-style African who looked to build a new world... and yet they can't simply draw a line and say the new world starts here, neither discard the past or live in it entirely. It's a confusing legacy they leave their children, caught between two worlds, a revolution half-finished and ripe with corruption as everyone tries to make their own way. You can ask questions of the past, but you have to fill in the answer yourself.

Don't forget to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

And damn, Tadjo's prose is neat - "Outside, the sun shone with impunity."