In a way, she walked the path of her first-person narrator herself: After studying mathematics at Cambridge, Natasha Brown worked “ten years in the London financial sector” before winning the London Writers Award in 2019 and from then on focusing on writing, says the blurb. A beautiful young woman is looking at us from the photo. As a reviewer, is it necessary to mention that she is black? And what would it mean, on the other hand, to keep this secret? Before you even read a line, you are right in the middle of the topic of this novel.
The unnamed protagonist in Natasha Brown’s novel is also young and beautiful meeting. And the fact that as a black woman she is treated more as a representative of a population group than as an individual follows her every step. She has climbed the career ladder to the upper income segment. But don’t ask what it cost her. “Be the best. Work harder, work smarter, work more accurate. Exceed every expectation while being invisible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Don’t be uncomfortable.”
In an interview, the author confessed how long she struggled with each formulation to clarify exactly what she means. Her slim book contains an astute social diagnosis that she wanted to write into her protagonist’s mind and body, so to speak – with a racing pulse, with a calmly observing eagle’s gaze and in sarcastic reflection. Language in changing rhythm, so that you even feel like reading passages of the novel aloud. It is an artfully segmented text where everything is coherent. Sometimes only half a book page is printed. The white surfaces want us to look up, let something resonate in us, fill it with our own thoughts.
The translator Jackie Thomae hit the tone of this book well, especially since she is a writer herself. Born in Halle, she had a father from Guinea, but does not want to reduce conflicts in her books to questions of identity. Suhrkamp came across her because she was very interested in the books of British writer Bernardine Evaristo (Friday 3/2021), who in turn recommended Natasha Brown. And you yourself now wish for a new novel by Jackie Thomae on the book market.
Behind the facade …
“The diversity has to be visible.” Natasha Brown’s protagonist is well aware of her role in giving an outdated system of exploitation a modern facade. Rarely do readers find the connection between progressive identity politics and reactionary socio-economic conditions presented in concrete terms as clearly as here. Degrading white macho posturing in the workplace and being offered a senior position because she’s black—it’s only an apparent contradiction. Giving lectures in schools and universities is part of her job. And she herself gets sick of how she preaches in the spirit of the meritocracy that everyone can achieve anything if they make the right effort. She experiences daily how her rise from a disadvantaged milieu also causes resentment, especially among people who, even in difficult situations, could still feel at an advantage over a black woman. She even understands. Something has changed and leads to new resentment.
To casually associate the novel with the Black Lives Matter movement would be to underestimate its depth. Despite all the outrage about the injustice she has experienced, the protagonist keeps questioning her struggle for advancement and finding a good place in society for herself. Which she can afford because she’s pretty much up there. The fact that she has an overview of the whole thing from there and at the same time knows exactly what it’s like down below – this double perspective, from which the power of this book results, has its price, however: the farewell to any self-righteousness catapults her out of the comfort zone that other women, anyway, have fought. She finds her friend Rachel’s “hunger”—”she wants a bigger apartment, a better boyfriend, more money!”—”equally frightening and admirable.” It is the right of the disenfranchised to be “without any shame or restraint,” but it doesn’t change the situation. In her book, the author succeeds in initiating such thoughts, sometimes with only half a sentence.
Even where there is friendliness, she senses patronizing indulgence and is not mistaken. In the end, the son of a British noble family will propose to her, not knowing that she has breast cancer, which she does not want to have treated. She wonders whether the “material prosperity of his family – the house, this land, the staff, art” – is due to British “generosity” in buying the slaves free in the Empire. Denied colonial history, “the ruthless arrows of European imperialism shooting across the world map”: Without illusions, she sees “the ugly machine that works under all achievements” and wishes to “stop kicking”.
In England, Natasha Brown’s novel was the most successful literary debut of 2021. The success also spread to the USA. “A merciless dismantling of the British class system,” praised the Washington Post. “A nuanced, style-defining exploration of class, work, gender and origin,” it said Harper’s Bazar. That’s the way it is.
meeting Natasha Brown Jackie Thomae (transl.), Suhrkamp 2022, 114 p., 20 €