Sonia Samatar’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, first crossed my radar because N.K. Jemisin recommended it – many years ago, maybe close to ten at this point, enough so that I don’t remember even what Jemisin said beyond praising the book. It is an unusual work of fantasy literature, with a real emphasis on the second part: Samatar’s prose and narrative are smart and challenging, taking the reader on a vast, epic journey through a new world of literature, poetry, religion, war, and bigotry, all in service of her hero’s quest to give solace to the tortured soul of a girl who died without a proper burial.
A Stranger in Olondria starts in another place entirely, and seems almost mundane by comparison to what will follow. We meet young Jevick, the second son of his strict, wealthy merchant father; his older brother was born simple, and thus was a disappointment to their father, who wanted an heir to his trade. Jevick’s father hires a tutor to help Jevick learn the Olondrian language and some of its culture, a choice that turns out to be timely as Jevick’s father dies suddenly, leaving his son to take over the family business without any direct training from his father.
On the ship he takes with his small retinue to get to Olondria, he meets a couple with a young girl, Jissavet, near his own age, who is dying of a form of curse, the true nature of which will become apparent in very small slivers as the story progresses. Jevick reaches Olondria and is overwhelmed by the luxury and iniquity of the big city, but soon afterwards he is visited by a ghost, that of the young girl, who promises to haunt him until her body is found and cremated in accordance with her culture’s norms. These visitations mark Jevick as a holy man, as the Olondrians believe her ghost is an angel, and drops him directly into a simmering religious/political conflict (really, when are the two ever separated, in life or in fiction) that will eventually put him on the run even as he tries to assuage the ghost and find her body for a funeral pyre.
This is a work of depth, in almost every way. Samatar is writing for people who read literature, using words typically not found in contemporary fiction but more common in British literature of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and crafting a layered and unsimple narrative that demands your constant attention. This is not merely the story of a haunting, which would have given us just a rote adventure as Jevick and whoever his companion or the moment might be have to flee from one spot or another while also trying to figure out where Jissavet’s body is. Samatar has instead laced the story with epic, narrative poetry, and built a world beneath the plot where unseen forces are simmering just below the boiling point, an uneasy peace in Olondria that Jevick shatters simply by being there and confiding in one person that he has been visited by a ghost. (That person was his landlord, which shows you that you should never, ever trust a landlord.) Rather than populating the novel with idiosyncratic side characters, Samatar populates it with flashbacks, stories, and myths that further build out the world and explain different aspects of the various cultures in this world she’s created. It feels scholarly, unsurprising as Samatar is a professor at James Madison, and a poet, and the daughter of a Somali scholar/historian of some renown as well.
In December, I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which won the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel, but I never reviewed it in large part because I couldn’t decide what to say. Chandrasekera has also built an incredible, immersive world in his novel, one with political and religious undertones, but in the end, it’s unclear if the building was in service of anything other than itself. The story doesn’t really resolve – the bright doors of the title are a Macguffin, I’d argue – and the protagonist is in some ways a pawn, lacking the agency we expect in a main character. I liked the book as I was reading it, but then felt let down enough by the ending that I punted on a write up. A Stranger in Olondria helped me articulate why: If you’re building a fantastical world, I’m probably going to get sucked in fairly quickly, but you still have to pay it off in the end in the plot and/or the main character’s arc. Chandrasekera didn’t do that; Samatar did, and the Jevick who returns home at the end of her novel is an entirely different young man than the child who left it only some months earlier. It deserves a wider audience – and that’s probably why Jemisin was talking it up whenever she did.
Next up: I’m reading Robert Walser’s peculiar novel Jakob von Gunten, after which I’m going to try to tackle W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
