Several years ago, the writer N. K. Jemisin got an e-mail from the voice actor Robin Miles. Miles had just been hired to narrate the audiobook of Jemisin’s new novel, “The Fifth Season,” about the inhabitants of a continent called the Stillness, and she had some questions. How do Sanzeds, midlatters, and Eastern Coasters usually speak? How do you pronounce Essun, Damaya, and Tonkee? “She wanted to know exactly what kind of accents to use at certain places, and where characters were from within their countries,” Jemisin told me recently. There were words in the book, Jemisin admitted, that she had never even said aloud. She usually struggles to read her work after it’s been published; she tends to think about what could have been better. “I kept just saying, ‘It’s a fantasy novel! It doesn’t matter how they’re pronounced. They’re not real!’ ”
But, later, after listening to the finished audiobook, Jemisin recognized that the soundscape was an important part of the world she was building. While working on the sequel, she often reminded herself, “I need to think about what this character sounds like.” After Miles narrated “The Fifth Season” and its sequels, Jemisin asked her publisher to hire Miles for her subsequent books. “She’s as serious about her art as I am about mine,” Jemisin said.
Reading the early works of established, revered writers always reminds me of looking at a baby’s face: how it seems impossible to know the ways that visage will sharpen and emerge, how mushy it is, sometimes indistinguishable from others—but also, when looking back at photos once the baby is grown, how difficult it is to imagine that face turning into anything other than what it has become.
The French novelist Marguerite Duras’s second book, The Easy Life, which has just been translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, might not be much of a draw by itself. The thrill of reading it comes from seeing all of the ways Duras was already the writer she would spend the next 50 years becoming, from recognizing how the interests she cultivated throughout her career were already in progress.
Yesterday, I was standing in front of my desk, piled high with books I had checked out from the library or received for review, trying to decide what to read next. I shifted from foot to foot and gave myself a pep talk. “Pretend you are a normal reader. You’re just picking whatever book looks interesting. You can read whatever you want.”
-record scratch-
You’re probably wondering how I got here. Why am I not a normal reader? What does picking out something to read feel like such an intimidating task that I need to psych myself up and put myself in the right headspace? Well, we start with a kid who loves reading, and we end with an adult who has built their life around books to the extent that reading has become a minefield of expectations and guilt.
I have never needed proof that a novel about an unhappy marriage can be the most capacious kind of book. But if I did, I could find it in abundance in the pages of “Scatterlings,” the South African writer Resoketswe Manenzhe’s debut, a novel that is at once exquisitely intimate and globally ambitious.
We were all searching for something
you’d enjoy, my mother says of the opioid void
I’d become, and I could hardly walk,
but it was my birthday.