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(More customer reviews)I don't know why this book doesn't have 100 customer reviews. It's one of the best pieces of modern fiction I've read in too long a while. The writing is beautiful, and the characters deeply compelling. I wonder if the author did the English translation herself, as no translator is listed.
It's the story of four young African women who have gone to Belgium to work as prostitutes. The four have widely varying educations, backgrounds, and reasons for having made this decision, and none of them came to it easily. Three of them have come because of increasingly desperate circumstances, and maybe that could be said of all four.
They must pay huge fees to a pimp back in Lagos, Nigeria, and are under the thumb of an African madam who is his employee and enforcer. Yet in Belgium they also have a degree of personal freedom. It's not divulging anything to say that the story begins with the death of one of the four. They all have dreams that they're working toward, and sacrificing for, and it's impossible for the reader not to become bound up in those dreams.
As is the case in most good novels, as each of these women reveals her story, it unfolds that their situations are not just those of young people, or Africans, or women, or whatever. Their wants, needs, desires are universal, and I felt each one deeply.
In the last few years I've read too many novels where the protagonists simply drifted along, never making a sensible decision or any decision at all, never planning beyond the moment, ultimately being rescued by some deus ex machina device. Therefore, one of the things I really liked about this book was that the women were pondering and planning, making tough choices even if they weren't always the best choices, were willing to plan and struggle, and to actively look toward the future.
The title of the original non-English version is Fata Morgana. If you read this book (and I hope that you do), you'll enjoy doing some pondering yourself, about what the author meant to say with that title.
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