Though too restrained, there are some inspired moments, and Clemmons admirably balances the story’s myriad complicated themes. Peter moves to New York to marry Thandi and raise their child, Mahpee, but all parties soon glean the untenability of Thandi’s building a new family without processing the grief of her original one. The first third of the novel culminates with Thandi discovering that she is pregnant, before then detailing her mother’s illness and how the resulting heartbreak ushered Thandi into an ill-fated long distance relationship with Peter, the child’s father. Early chapters establish these dichotomies in content and form, contrasting Thandi’s charged visits to Johannesburg with her Philadelphia coming of age by way of photographs, articles, graphs, and song lyrics. Born to an American father and a South African mother, Thandi is a character defined by conflicting conceptions of identity, belonging, and class, divisions that only deepen in the wake of her mother’s death. Heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.Exacting reflections on race, mourning, and family are at the center of this novel about a college student whose mother dies of cancer. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman's understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi's life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood.
She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor-someone, or something, to love. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. Clemmons’ potent debut, What We Lose (Viking), depicts a young woman, Thandi, caught between cultures and identities, at home neither in her outspoken mother’s native Johannesburg, where she. Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. The book is a remarkable journey."įrom an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age-a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country
Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like Reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home.". Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, "Raw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger." -Nicole Dennis-Benn, "A richly volatile study of grief, wonderment and love."
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