March 2016: Season of Migration to the North (Salih)

Post date: Mar 13, 2016 7:19:42 PM

A group of stalwart book club members braved a dark and stormy night to meet at Jane's on Thursday March 10 to discuss Taleb Salih's short novel set in a small village in Sudan in the 1960s. Season of Migration to the North has received wide acclaim, but our members found it difficult to like. Many found the overlapping narratives and timeframes hard to follow, and mostly found Mustafa so unsympathetic that it was hard to understand how to interpret the novel. He seemed to us to be a sociopath unable to make any human connections from an early age, and thus we found it difficult to understand how to interpret his actions or story as a part of a larger story of post-colonial relations between Africans and British. Readers did find a some lovely and evocative passages--the description of our narrator's experience of entering his grandfather's house, and the impromptu party on the roadside on the way to Khartoum, for example, but all in all, nobody loved this book, and a few really disliked it. Most of us skipped the introduction as it was full of spoilers, but Karen said she'd gone back and read it after finishing the book, and found it helpful in setting context and that it made her give the book another chance in her mind, so perhaps the rest of us need to do the same thing.