Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

And now for the second book this week that puzzled me so much that I had to write a post about it. The Underground, by Hamid Ismailov, is a reflective story narrated by a dead child from Moscow. Mbobo, sometimes called Kirill or “Pushkin,” was probably doomed from the start. He’s the son of a Uzbek woman who came to Moscow to work during the 1980 Olympics and an athlete from an unnamed African country. His mother is disowned by her parents and makes a living on the margins of social acceptance. Mbobo’s mother and his various “step-fathers” are alternately abusive and solicitous to him. This didn’t confuse me. What confused me was Mbobo’s narrative style. The boy is a voracious reader. One of his step-fathers is a writer (but mostly a drunk). Mbobo tells his story with plenty of rhetorical and literary flourishes that make things hard to follow, while also raising the specter of an unbelievably precocious and self-aware juvenile narrator...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.