Akin, by Emma Donoghue

Akin by Emma Donoghue

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The first novel I’ve completed since the pandemic began, Akin relates how a widowed and retired chemistry professor’s life is upended by taking temporary custody of an eleven-year-old great-nephew named Michael, whose mother is in prison and who grew up in Brooklyn. Oddly, this arrangement occurs a few days before Noah is supposed to travel to Nice, France, where he was born, and which he left at age four. Having been largely home-bound for the past 2 and a half months, I shared their excitement as this mismatched pair arrived in Nice, the sense of a familiar and yet unfamiliar cityscape, and the temporal gap between the 1940’s and the present-day. There is a similar gap between the 80-year-old professor and his great-nephew, who swears, plays endless games on a cracked smart-phone, buys obnoxious toys like a noise machine that generates farts and gun-shots, and plays with silly-string that ruins the professor’s prized fedora -- a relic of his grandfather, who was a famous French photographer. The boy also shows a knack for taking photos – like his great-great-grandfather -- and shows some tolerance for the professor’s pedantic life lessons relating to the table of elements and other scientific arcana.

The trip to Nice also involves unraveling the mystery of a handful of odd photos taken by Noah’s mother, Margot, during the war years in Nice, after Noah himself had been safely sent to his father in America. In between excursions to the beach, a circus, a Roman stadium, and Carnival festivities, the old man and the boy visit a museum of the French Resistance and a church Margot attended; stay in the very hotel she photographed, which turns out to be the site of Nazi internment and interrogation of Jews; and meet up with a childhood acquaintance of Noah’s and an old man in a nursing home, who may hold the key to the photos, but suffers from dementia. The reader is privy to Noah’s inner ruminations about his mother’s role in the war – first his awful suspicions, then his dawning understanding of his mother and their shared past. In the process, he and Michael form an unlikely bond that also leads the professor to revise his view of the future. While at times I was perplexed by Noah’s summation of his mother – his tendency to so readily see her as either very bad or very good – and wished for a third person to loosen the back-and-forth between the two main characters, overall I enjoyed this novel and its journey to another place and time.




View all my reviews