I loved this book. I’ll say that right up front, in case you only see the tiny excerpt of this post. I adored it, I enjoyed every minute I spent reading it, and though I just finished it, I already want to read it again.
I hadn’t ever read anything by Aminatta Forna before this book. I have another of hers, Happiness, on my shelves, but it’s one of the many I want to read and yet have never picked up. Now I’m kicking myself. Aminatta Forna is a damn good writer. I didn’t actually know anything about this book, but the title grabbed my attention and the description sounded like it might give me a little break from my reality, remind me what it feels like to move freely through the world, and let me see through someone else’s eyes. It certainly did that, but it surprised me by doing so much more.
Aminatta Forna is a pretty amazing person. She has traveled extensively, she has engaged deeply with every culture she’s experienced and she has honed an ability to critically assess society and her place within it (and how that shifts depending on where she is). She’s a journalist, so she has an ability to dive right into the heard of her chosen topic, cut out the extraneous chatter, grab her reader’s attention, and hold it. It really doesn’t matter what her subject matter is. She can find an angle to make it fascinating, and make me wonder why on earth I never thought about it before.
In this book she discusses a huge range of topics. She starts off talking about travel – both modes of travel and what it has meant in her life. She then moves on to discussing the different places she has lived (Sierra Leone, England, Iran, the US) and the many more she has visited as part of her work. She talks about her father, who became a target of the government in Sierra Leone for opposing them. She discusses racism and how her experience of it has been different in different parts of the world, and the complexities of being mixed race. She explores what it means to be a woman in different parts of the world and the ways in which we are robbed of our power and agency and how she has confronted this in her life. She talks about foxes for a while (a regular part of her life in London) and then moves on to coyotes (common in the US). And so many other topics I can’t even remember everything she touches on.
I loved how much she jumps around, how she can be talking about one subject and then seemingly without pause, she’s on to something completely different. And yet somehow all these disparate pieces feel like a coherent whole, and nothing about it seems misplaced or forced. Much as she learned to navigate the many cultures she inhabited, she proves in this book that she can, like a chameleon, find the perfect way to present any topic she chooses to tackle. I’ve never read a book so wide-ranging that works so well. And she evokes such powerful imagery that I keep having flashes of it in quiet moments throughout my day. Or remembering a particularly thought-provoking passage or idea. I love books that give me thoughts I didn’t even know I was looking for. This book was like an endless buffet of these nuggets. I know I will have part of my mind living between these pages for months to come. I know years from now some of those powerful images will still pop up as if I’d only just put the book down.
There’s a strong possibility that this will end up being my favourite book of the year. And that’s saying something, because so far it’s been a stellar reading year. I think it’s fairly obvious from this review that you really ought to go order a copy of this book immediately. What are you waiting for?
Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.
Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama’s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in “Power Walking” she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman’s body and in “The Watch” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over.
Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is a vital voice in international letters. – Goodreads
Book Title: The Window Seat
Author: Aminatta Forna
Series: No
Edition: Hardback/Audiobook
Published By: Grove Press
Released: May 18, 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Essays, EVERYTHING
Pages: 272
Date Read: August 16-17, 2021
Rating: 10/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.44/5 (63 ratings)