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WHO THEY WAS
By Gabriel Krauze
331 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.
One doesn’t necessarily have to be from there to recognize the North West London of Gabriel Krauze’s “Who They Was.” I imagine it might sound familiar to someone from South East London, too, or the Banlieue in Paris, even the South Side of Chicago. The narrator, Snoopz, tells us of a life of people fenced in and surveilled, where cameras high in the sky swing side to side, always watchful, where police are quick to raid, ransacking council flats and people’s lives with swift ease.
Violence and vengeance line the skin and the belly of this narrative. Snoopz, in his early 20s, is trying to step out of the gang life of his youth, studying English at college; but he finds himself pulled back in, by his friends and also by his own wants and needs. The more dangerous the story gets the closer Krauze leans in, the details sure and sharp. We’re submerged in Snoopz’s world, where each encounter might result in his destruction. The value in this dread is less to shock than to reveal an honest depiction of a life lived on the margins, a reality often unspoken, unknown. Krauze challenges not just those who commit gang violence, but the systems that have brought them to do so. Systems that force the hands of those fenced in, those surveilled; that abuse a person, a family, a community and then, when these people are driven to desperate acts of survival, punish rather than rehabilitate them.
The novel opens as Snoopz and his friend are trying to steal a watch. In the sober second just before they snatch at the stranger’s wrist, “everything I’ve ever known falls away,” Snoopz thinks. “Memory, past, future, and then the street, the morning and everything else around us disappears as if I’m forgetting the world and there is only Now.” Snoopz stays in the present lest he have to confront his past, or his future, or lack thereof. In slower moments, when there’s room to confront his demons, he softens the edges of his day-to-day with alcohol or drugs or sex with his on/off girlfriend, Yinka. But even these things fall away. The world quiets, and it’s just Snoopz, asking, in a beautiful, searing voice: How to live in such a world?
BROTHERHOOD
By Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Translated by Alexia Trigo
245 pp. Europa. Paper, $17.
The Senegalese author’s English-language debut is one of possibilities. In the fictional North African city of Kalep, recently sieged by a religious regime known as the Brotherhood, a pair of young lovers are executed for adultery. Crowds are encouraged to gather for the spectacle, and though they buzz with nervous excitement, in the ensuing chapters a spirit of heaviness and dissatisfaction emerges.
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