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Hangman
An enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.
In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.
A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother―setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.
In Hangman , Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, riddles, and strangers that will lead to the truth.
It is an uncommonly assured an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man’s stubborn quest to find refuge―in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.
In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.
A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother―setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.
In Hangman , Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, riddles, and strangers that will lead to the truth.
It is an uncommonly assured an existential journey; a tragic farce; a slapstick tragedy; and a strange, and strangely honest, story of one man’s stubborn quest to find refuge―in this world and in the world that lies beyond it.
208 pages, Paperback
First published August 8, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 396 reviews
June 23, 2025
is there a theme more bittersweet and stirring than the idea that you never can go home again?
this book conveys that and about a million other striking things and is surreal the whole time.
this reminded me of outline: filled with a lot of intelligent dialogue and interiority, expanding on themes deeply relevant to daily life and today's society.
and wow those themes!!! the way it surreally conveys the absurdity of colonization, of the thin line between each of us and abject poverty, of family and of death and of social status and of money and of race.
bottom line: this was one of a kind and remarkable.
this book conveys that and about a million other striking things and is surreal the whole time.
this reminded me of outline: filled with a lot of intelligent dialogue and interiority, expanding on themes deeply relevant to daily life and today's society.
and wow those themes!!! the way it surreally conveys the absurdity of colonization, of the thin line between each of us and abject poverty, of family and of death and of social status and of money and of race.
bottom line: this was one of a kind and remarkable.
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September 8, 2024
‘Death was a communal process even if you wanted to experience it alone.’
When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives in tandem with the acute awareness of anything that has altered. Facades change, as do the people within them and it becomes like a sort of geographical ship of Theseus while we, too, have changed in our mutual time apart. This dissonance is both thematic and tonal to Maya Binyam’s brilliant debut novel, Hangman, amplified by the state of separation having been one of political exile and the return shrouded in a bit of mystery that seems to only portend the news of death. It is a story made up of smaller stories all cascading at the narrator, each registering with a near-mythic property to them as we hear life stories of politics, family, traditions, exorcisms or simply two grad students arguing ideology. Binyam’s writing is utterly captivating, crafting a surreal and sardonic tale of an émigré finding themselves a stranger in a strange land that happens to be his home country now as unfamiliar to him as he is to it. Moving with a steady drip of existential dread through a labyrinth of conversations, the narrator seems stubbornly disinterested in assembling a sense of meaning or self-reflection and instead allows himself to be pulled through events as if ‘waiting for my life to happen’ in a way that makes everything feel threateningly disjointed and disorienting. Wryly humorous and deeply ponderous, Hangman reads like an existential fable on exile, homecomings, culture and the ways each shape and are shaped by political history all wrapped up in the narrator’s surreal journey back into Africa.
‘Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you.’
This is an astonishingly accomplished debut with sharp writing that pulls off stylistic flair and is entirely engrossing. The opening chapter had me completely enthralled, opening with death and a body transported on a return trip home, and it keeps you turning pages with a growing tension and dread as we guess as to what is occurring and getting tiny pieces of clarity along the way—not unlike the stick-figure game that is the novel’s namesake. It is a rather enigmatic novel, one where the events feel akin to having bit off more than one could chew and trying to make sense of it all, though the writing manages to create this effect while still having confident control over all the elements. We are at the mercy of Binyam’s narration through a man who, through his refusal of a deeper meaning to anything, will not read between the lines for symbolism, and it whisks us through the story shrouded in a sort of acerbic ambiguity. There are almost no proper nouns, making room for rather humorously cumbersome flourishes like repeatedly addressing someone as “my son’s mother’s brother” but it also establishes an atmosphere of distance and detachment. Locations are never named, though through the whiffs of clues we can assume it is somewhere in a post-revolution country of Africa and the narrator had been a political refugee in the US (there are references to drones and a President who “looks like us” as his brother writes). It all seems rather cacophonous at times, seemingly leading somewhere we don’t quite grasp which is often reflected in the cities themselves—’viaducts cast the city in shadow, enticing its inhabitants to ascend staircases that led to nowhere’—or homes such as the narrator’s cousin’s that seems to be made up ‘entirely of hallways.’
In many ways it feels adjacent to Franz Kafka, though shorn of the Europeanness, but here it isn’t that the logic is impenetrable or simply meaningless, it’s that we are outside of being able to even grasp the meaning while the narrator insists on it’s meaninglessness that keeps us feeling small in the mechanisms of some threatening and surreal story.
This addresses issues on two fronts in the novel, being both his feeling outside the country of his birth but also seen in the ways the country in which one takes refuge might resist any efforts to understand their cultural differences and ‘People just choose to ignore those manifestations, because being ignorant gave them an excuse to do whatever they wanted.’ The home he has left is no longer his own it seems, and feels ‘only partially accessible to me, given that tie, geography and my changing legal status as a citizen, refugee, tourist, etc., had conspired to dislocate me from it.’ He feels distressed by the dichotomy of re-emerging in a society of more collectivist traditions after having been shaped by the mold of individualism rampant in US culture yet seems uninterested in examining it beyond the surface despite having, we briefly learn, been jailed for being a political revolutionary.
‘He could either be like everyone and help no one, or be an individual and help the world.’
Politics, it seems, is constantly invading and morphing everything and everyone under it. It lingers over every conversation and many of the mordant situations read like parables, such as being required to have a cart to get your baggage at the airport and having to pay someone in order to obtain a cart but having to way of accessing money, or his cousin asking to invest in the completion of a home that has already been finished. The narrator’s own former home is now occupied by missionaries who presumably purchased the house from the government, making for a quick yet devastating jab at the legacies of missionaries colonizing Africa. As for US aid programs to Africa, Hangman addresses aid as something that often exists more for the benefit of the giver to feel they’ve done something than for the recipient, ‘Sending them in lieu of things the local government had asked for, and which might have sustained its constituents forever.’We see this in the used clothing a man forces upon our narrator, or the phone’s the President gives to those who lost their homes in a disaster when what they really needed was a home. But we feel good because someone was selected as ‘a stand-in for the gratitude of all’ and we can turn our heads again.
Our narrator sees much of the way people process grief and tragedy as a ‘performance,’ and it is one he isn’t inclined to participate in. Even the potential death of his own brother doesn’t spark anything in him (though his emails do seem to mimic the scam emails of the early 2000s and perhaps he suspects his brother of just trying to get money). It’s all the same to him either way:
Of course we can see how he might be jaded from time in prison and the US, which he finds less the land of possibility and freedom and more just another way to be oppressed, this time largely by racism and his Otherness marking him as suspicious and not worth bridging cultural barriers to understand.
Hangman is often quite bleak, particularly with a narrator we see being pushed along as if he weren’t even in control of himself (‘and then my body went away’ he says to describe his getting on the flight to Africa), and slowly being transformed by his experiences without any attempt at consent. Yet for all the bleakness, the surreal humor keeps it afloat and it refuses to be bogged down. The ending is a knockout, one that I found excellently executed despite not usually thinking twists actually work beyond initial shock. It arrives as a two-fold twist and while I think we can get caught up in all the foreshadowing of the main twist, doing so allows the second part of it to catch us off guard. Binyam is not only good at crafting the writing of a novel, but shows a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of how a reader reads and processes a text and uses that to help pull off her conclusion.
I really loved this one. It’s elusive and sly, surreal and sinister, yet rather goofy and fun even in the face of otherwise unbearable bleakness. Hangman is a unique look at the exile narrative, one that turns its own gaze inward, as well as the ideas of our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Witty and wild, Hangman is an extraordinary debut and this is a strong promise to start a career I can’t wait to watch.
4.5/5
‘It didn’t matter that we had been political prisoners, neglectful fathers, exiles, and so on, because now we were just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might as well have been any country in the world. That was how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.’
When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives in tandem with the acute awareness of anything that has altered. Facades change, as do the people within them and it becomes like a sort of geographical ship of Theseus while we, too, have changed in our mutual time apart. This dissonance is both thematic and tonal to Maya Binyam’s brilliant debut novel, Hangman, amplified by the state of separation having been one of political exile and the return shrouded in a bit of mystery that seems to only portend the news of death. It is a story made up of smaller stories all cascading at the narrator, each registering with a near-mythic property to them as we hear life stories of politics, family, traditions, exorcisms or simply two grad students arguing ideology. Binyam’s writing is utterly captivating, crafting a surreal and sardonic tale of an émigré finding themselves a stranger in a strange land that happens to be his home country now as unfamiliar to him as he is to it. Moving with a steady drip of existential dread through a labyrinth of conversations, the narrator seems stubbornly disinterested in assembling a sense of meaning or self-reflection and instead allows himself to be pulled through events as if ‘waiting for my life to happen’ in a way that makes everything feel threateningly disjointed and disorienting. Wryly humorous and deeply ponderous, Hangman reads like an existential fable on exile, homecomings, culture and the ways each shape and are shaped by political history all wrapped up in the narrator’s surreal journey back into Africa.
‘Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you.’
This is an astonishingly accomplished debut with sharp writing that pulls off stylistic flair and is entirely engrossing. The opening chapter had me completely enthralled, opening with death and a body transported on a return trip home, and it keeps you turning pages with a growing tension and dread as we guess as to what is occurring and getting tiny pieces of clarity along the way—not unlike the stick-figure game that is the novel’s namesake. It is a rather enigmatic novel, one where the events feel akin to having bit off more than one could chew and trying to make sense of it all, though the writing manages to create this effect while still having confident control over all the elements. We are at the mercy of Binyam’s narration through a man who, through his refusal of a deeper meaning to anything, will not read between the lines for symbolism, and it whisks us through the story shrouded in a sort of acerbic ambiguity. There are almost no proper nouns, making room for rather humorously cumbersome flourishes like repeatedly addressing someone as “my son’s mother’s brother” but it also establishes an atmosphere of distance and detachment. Locations are never named, though through the whiffs of clues we can assume it is somewhere in a post-revolution country of Africa and the narrator had been a political refugee in the US (there are references to drones and a President who “looks like us” as his brother writes). It all seems rather cacophonous at times, seemingly leading somewhere we don’t quite grasp which is often reflected in the cities themselves—’viaducts cast the city in shadow, enticing its inhabitants to ascend staircases that led to nowhere’—or homes such as the narrator’s cousin’s that seems to be made up ‘entirely of hallways.’
In many ways it feels adjacent to Franz Kafka, though shorn of the Europeanness, but here it isn’t that the logic is impenetrable or simply meaningless, it’s that we are outside of being able to even grasp the meaning while the narrator insists on it’s meaninglessness that keeps us feeling small in the mechanisms of some threatening and surreal story.
‘Some situations in life really were confusing and couldn’t be appreciated without prior knowledge about local customs, current events, and other people’s personal lives. However, that information was usually discernible, even if it wasn’t explained in a straightforward manner. Even invisible histories had their physical manifestations.’
This addresses issues on two fronts in the novel, being both his feeling outside the country of his birth but also seen in the ways the country in which one takes refuge might resist any efforts to understand their cultural differences and ‘People just choose to ignore those manifestations, because being ignorant gave them an excuse to do whatever they wanted.’ The home he has left is no longer his own it seems, and feels ‘only partially accessible to me, given that tie, geography and my changing legal status as a citizen, refugee, tourist, etc., had conspired to dislocate me from it.’ He feels distressed by the dichotomy of re-emerging in a society of more collectivist traditions after having been shaped by the mold of individualism rampant in US culture yet seems uninterested in examining it beyond the surface despite having, we briefly learn, been jailed for being a political revolutionary.
‘He could either be like everyone and help no one, or be an individual and help the world.’
Politics, it seems, is constantly invading and morphing everything and everyone under it. It lingers over every conversation and many of the mordant situations read like parables, such as being required to have a cart to get your baggage at the airport and having to pay someone in order to obtain a cart but having to way of accessing money, or his cousin asking to invest in the completion of a home that has already been finished. The narrator’s own former home is now occupied by missionaries who presumably purchased the house from the government, making for a quick yet devastating jab at the legacies of missionaries colonizing Africa. As for US aid programs to Africa, Hangman addresses aid as something that often exists more for the benefit of the giver to feel they’ve done something than for the recipient, ‘Sending them in lieu of things the local government had asked for, and which might have sustained its constituents forever.’We see this in the used clothing a man forces upon our narrator, or the phone’s the President gives to those who lost their homes in a disaster when what they really needed was a home. But we feel good because someone was selected as ‘a stand-in for the gratitude of all’ and we can turn our heads again.
‘That was how people, living people, dealt with the new of people who were suffering: pretending to summon the experience of dying…Pretending that it could be controlled was just something that living people did in order to convince themselves that the real experience was something that happened only to others.’
Our narrator sees much of the way people process grief and tragedy as a ‘performance,’ and it is one he isn’t inclined to participate in. Even the potential death of his own brother doesn’t spark anything in him (though his emails do seem to mimic the scam emails of the early 2000s and perhaps he suspects his brother of just trying to get money). It’s all the same to him either way:
‘Most of the things that happened in life had no meaning, but eventually all the meaningless things combined to produce an emotion so strong that people felt the need to find an explanation for it. So, at the end of their lives, they described the events of their lives through the lens of happiness, or sadness, or resentment, even though the same things happened to basically all of us.’
Of course we can see how he might be jaded from time in prison and the US, which he finds less the land of possibility and freedom and more just another way to be oppressed, this time largely by racism and his Otherness marking him as suspicious and not worth bridging cultural barriers to understand.
Hangman is often quite bleak, particularly with a narrator we see being pushed along as if he weren’t even in control of himself (‘and then my body went away’ he says to describe his getting on the flight to Africa), and slowly being transformed by his experiences without any attempt at consent. Yet for all the bleakness, the surreal humor keeps it afloat and it refuses to be bogged down. The ending is a knockout, one that I found excellently executed despite not usually thinking twists actually work beyond initial shock. It arrives as a two-fold twist and while I think we can get caught up in all the foreshadowing of the main twist, doing so allows the second part of it to catch us off guard. Binyam is not only good at crafting the writing of a novel, but shows a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of how a reader reads and processes a text and uses that to help pull off her conclusion.
I really loved this one. It’s elusive and sly, surreal and sinister, yet rather goofy and fun even in the face of otherwise unbearable bleakness. Hangman is a unique look at the exile narrative, one that turns its own gaze inward, as well as the ideas of our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Witty and wild, Hangman is an extraordinary debut and this is a strong promise to start a career I can’t wait to watch.
4.5/5
‘It didn’t matter that we had been political prisoners, neglectful fathers, exiles, and so on, because now we were just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might as well have been any country in the world. That was how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.’
July 11, 2023
Original, startling, captivating, hypnotic. The closest reading experience I can think of to this book is REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy--the same disorientation, the same need for me as a reader to pay absolute attention and to not allow my focus to waver or I'll drop the thread, the same wild leaps out-of-bounds of what I expected to read next. The same ... the phrase I'm coming up with is "existential dread" but the effect of this novel is both deeper and lighter than this phrase would suggest. I'm very glad to have read it, and I recommend it to everyone whose heart is thrilled when you pick up a book and read its first pages and you think 'oh, my, I've never read anything like this before.'
April 1, 2024
Have you ever looked at the reviews around here and thought: "Hmmm, I must have been reading a different book to everybody else." This novel has been praised to the hilt and the people that love it, really love it. And yet I got precious little out of it. What's wrong with me?
The unnamed narrator, an African man, is flying home to the country of his birth in order to help out a brother who is dying. The passenger beside him on the plane dies unexpectedly. He is confused after he disembarks at the airport, recognising nothing and nobody. An uncomfortable taxi ride takes him on an unfamiliar journey. And as the story progresses, he becomes less of a participant than an observer...
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where this one is going. And as for the explanation that we are presented with on the last page, for me it was no grand reveal - more like, is that it? I'm afraid the story didn't engage me on an emotional or an intellectual level. The narrator is way too passive to be interesting (although we get a reason for that) and there were many long, dull conversations between flat characters. It is original, I must admit, and the author has a voice of her own. However, I didn't find it captivating or witty like other reviewers. The acclaim for Hangman has me a bit baffled, but I suppose life would be boring if we all liked the same books.
The unnamed narrator, an African man, is flying home to the country of his birth in order to help out a brother who is dying. The passenger beside him on the plane dies unexpectedly. He is confused after he disembarks at the airport, recognising nothing and nobody. An uncomfortable taxi ride takes him on an unfamiliar journey. And as the story progresses, he becomes less of a participant than an observer...
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where this one is going. And as for the explanation that we are presented with on the last page, for me it was no grand reveal - more like, is that it? I'm afraid the story didn't engage me on an emotional or an intellectual level. The narrator is way too passive to be interesting (although we get a reason for that) and there were many long, dull conversations between flat characters. It is original, I must admit, and the author has a voice of her own. However, I didn't find it captivating or witty like other reviewers. The acclaim for Hangman has me a bit baffled, but I suppose life would be boring if we all liked the same books.
August 18, 2023
Writer and editor Maya Binyam’s memorable but uneven debut is narrated by an unnamed, middle-aged man visiting an unnamed country in sub-Saharan Africa. After twenty-six years abroad, he's journeying through his former homeland in search of his brother who’s almost certainly dying. Although aspects of the narrator’s life and experiences echo Binyam’s father’s, her novel isn’t conventionally autobiographical or strictly realist. The overall narrative framework is deceptively simple, for the most part operating as a vehicle for a series of intricate arguments about exile, cultural identity and relationships between the West and those defined as its other.
As the narrator travels to find his brother, he encounters a number of strangers who insist on telling him their stories. These combine to form a portrait and a kind of oral history of the country. A land in the grip of social and economic turmoil, riddled with corruption, weighed down by tradition. It’s a place in which entire communities are hemmed in by the strategies of global corporations; often easy prey for well-meaning, but delusionary, international aid workers and misguided missionaries. In many ways the country might seem to fulfil the stereotype of “struggling” African nation. But this image is gradually undermined through a series of subtle - and not-so-subtle – juxtapositions. These indicate that the narrator’s adopted country, which closely resembles America, is not dissimilar.
Binyam’s partly inspired by her family’s past, its tangles with migration and quest for refuge. But she also draws from other diasporic writers notably Sam Selvon, Jamaica Kincaid and Tayeb Salih. Her piece operates rather like a mystery, at the heart of which is her oddly-enigmatic narrator, someone who seems to be both with and without agency, invested in his quest but also strangely detached. These contradictions add to an atmosphere of growing tension broken up by seductive bursts of drily, absurdist humour. There was so much I really liked about Binyam’s writing here, her style, the fiercely political arguments running through her narrative. But I felt let down by her plot which hinges on a final, "momentous" twist – except I’d worked out the basic concept midway through. The attempt at a shock ending just didn’t work for me, it felt too manipulative and melodramatic, threatening to undermine what came before –though I appreciated its links to Binyam's broader exploration of Western hypocrisy and systematic racism. However, despite reservations, I think this is worth exploring, at its best it’s intriguing, inventive and powerful.
Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher ONE for an ARC
As the narrator travels to find his brother, he encounters a number of strangers who insist on telling him their stories. These combine to form a portrait and a kind of oral history of the country. A land in the grip of social and economic turmoil, riddled with corruption, weighed down by tradition. It’s a place in which entire communities are hemmed in by the strategies of global corporations; often easy prey for well-meaning, but delusionary, international aid workers and misguided missionaries. In many ways the country might seem to fulfil the stereotype of “struggling” African nation. But this image is gradually undermined through a series of subtle - and not-so-subtle – juxtapositions. These indicate that the narrator’s adopted country, which closely resembles America, is not dissimilar.
Binyam’s partly inspired by her family’s past, its tangles with migration and quest for refuge. But she also draws from other diasporic writers notably Sam Selvon, Jamaica Kincaid and Tayeb Salih. Her piece operates rather like a mystery, at the heart of which is her oddly-enigmatic narrator, someone who seems to be both with and without agency, invested in his quest but also strangely detached. These contradictions add to an atmosphere of growing tension broken up by seductive bursts of drily, absurdist humour. There was so much I really liked about Binyam’s writing here, her style, the fiercely political arguments running through her narrative. But I felt let down by her plot which hinges on a final, "momentous" twist – except I’d worked out the basic concept midway through. The attempt at a shock ending just didn’t work for me, it felt too manipulative and melodramatic, threatening to undermine what came before –though I appreciated its links to Binyam's broader exploration of Western hypocrisy and systematic racism. However, despite reservations, I think this is worth exploring, at its best it’s intriguing, inventive and powerful.
Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher ONE for an ARC
October 6, 2023
Possibly my favorite narrator ever
--
10/6
I can't believe this is a debut.
Maya Binyam’s book is one of my favorite reads this year, with one of the most unique and slightly odd (and definitely reluctant) narrators I’ve ever encountered. This is an offbeat, absurdist, spare, and smart book. It’s deceptively simple. In reading it, I could tell Binyam was having a blast and completely inhabited the narrator. It’s also hilarious (I figure I’ll just use every adjective I can here).
So the title is a hint, details are withheld while some are slowly filled in. Our nameless narrator is flying from America to an African country to, maybe, see his dying brother. Reading that sentence makes you expect a certain type of narrative. Just throw that idea out - this isn’t the immigrant homecoming story most people want.
The lack of metaphors, adjectives, and proper nouns makes this a disorienting and almost alienating read. And it also makes it hilarious, symbolism is created through repetition or just weird things showing up or being displaced. I’ve never seen a character who resists trying to make meaning or engage with the stories he’s told. Oh yeah, he’s constantly stopped to listen to stranger’s stories, which he’ll politely and respectfully sit through but will not repay in kind. On one hand he wants to be welcomed and be part of the community while on the other he sees himself as separate.
In fewer than 200 pages, Binyam has us thinking about the diaspora, refugee vs actual refuge, temporary vs permanence, resource-rich country vs under-resourced country, the collective vs individuation, liminal spaces, corruption, racism, and death. It sounds like a lot, but it all worked. Like I said, this book is smart.
Can we talk about the cover? Please look up Belkis Ayón, a Cuban printmaker whose work dealt with spirituality, politics, and culture. After finishing this book and looking up the cover art, La Cena, it makes so much sense now. The central figure is an observer, intermediary, and revealer. Doesn’t it just scream isolation?
--
10/6
I can't believe this is a debut.
Maya Binyam’s book is one of my favorite reads this year, with one of the most unique and slightly odd (and definitely reluctant) narrators I’ve ever encountered. This is an offbeat, absurdist, spare, and smart book. It’s deceptively simple. In reading it, I could tell Binyam was having a blast and completely inhabited the narrator. It’s also hilarious (I figure I’ll just use every adjective I can here).
So the title is a hint, details are withheld while some are slowly filled in. Our nameless narrator is flying from America to an African country to, maybe, see his dying brother. Reading that sentence makes you expect a certain type of narrative. Just throw that idea out - this isn’t the immigrant homecoming story most people want.
The lack of metaphors, adjectives, and proper nouns makes this a disorienting and almost alienating read. And it also makes it hilarious, symbolism is created through repetition or just weird things showing up or being displaced. I’ve never seen a character who resists trying to make meaning or engage with the stories he’s told. Oh yeah, he’s constantly stopped to listen to stranger’s stories, which he’ll politely and respectfully sit through but will not repay in kind. On one hand he wants to be welcomed and be part of the community while on the other he sees himself as separate.
In fewer than 200 pages, Binyam has us thinking about the diaspora, refugee vs actual refuge, temporary vs permanence, resource-rich country vs under-resourced country, the collective vs individuation, liminal spaces, corruption, racism, and death. It sounds like a lot, but it all worked. Like I said, this book is smart.
Can we talk about the cover? Please look up Belkis Ayón, a Cuban printmaker whose work dealt with spirituality, politics, and culture. After finishing this book and looking up the cover art, La Cena, it makes so much sense now. The central figure is an observer, intermediary, and revealer. Doesn’t it just scream isolation?
September 11, 2023
This novel is deftly, smartly written, and demonstrates a paradox about the nature of life itself, which is that it is equally obscured when the lens is too wide, as it is when the lens is too close to its subject.
The story is told via the narrator's journey, but that's not really the heart of it. The author's delivery has a funhouse, "there but not there," stretched and surreal feel. There are very real observations, however, and they are all deeply political. It's like a Kathryn Davis or Helen Oyeyemi book, with even deeper social commentary.
I enjoyed the experimental nature of this short, but impactful novel.
And that ending?!? I'm so glad I didn't put it together until the last minute.
This book satisfied my need for something completely different, where the author takes chances. I will gladly read anything Maya Binyam writes.
The story is told via the narrator's journey, but that's not really the heart of it. The author's delivery has a funhouse, "there but not there," stretched and surreal feel. There are very real observations, however, and they are all deeply political. It's like a Kathryn Davis or Helen Oyeyemi book, with even deeper social commentary.
I enjoyed the experimental nature of this short, but impactful novel.
And that ending?!? I'm so glad I didn't put it together until the last minute.
This book satisfied my need for something completely different, where the author takes chances. I will gladly read anything Maya Binyam writes.
October 14, 2023
A very original novel, with a unique narrative voice that keeps you guessing what on earth is going on.
A man is being put in a plane back to his home country after 26 years of exile. He presumes the reason for the trip is that he is expected to visit his sick brother. But is it?
I enjoyed it not only for the intrigue, but also the dry humour, confident writing and intelligent observations about developing aid and the emigrant-returning-home experience. This is a debut, so all the more impressive and author to follow for the future.
A man is being put in a plane back to his home country after 26 years of exile. He presumes the reason for the trip is that he is expected to visit his sick brother. But is it?
I enjoyed it not only for the intrigue, but also the dry humour, confident writing and intelligent observations about developing aid and the emigrant-returning-home experience. This is a debut, so all the more impressive and author to follow for the future.
May 11, 2024
3.5 stars
A unique, humorous, but ultimately deadly serious short novel. I picked this one up because the short story it began as was my favorite of The Best American Short Stories 2023: it has an offbeat, unusual voice I described as “Murderbot with amnesia,” and kept me guessing throughout. The novel certainly retains that voice, and is often quite funny in the narrator’s bizarre over-descriptions of everything, but for much of the book I found myself a bit disappointed and impatient. The contents of the short story are stretched out over half the novel, interspersed with other scenes, and the strange encounters multiply to the point of being scarcely believable (though there ultimately is a reason for that).
That said, Binyam brings a real whammy of a twist ending that ties it all together, recontextualizing everything that came before. Now I see why all that seemingly extraneous information was included and why the book is structured as it is. There’s ultimately more than a bit of surrealism, along with the absurdism, and it won’t work for everyone but I found it fairly effective. It was also interesting to see a literary view of modern-day Ethiopia: the narrator uses no proper nouns, so the country isn’t named (nor are any of the characters), but once I saw it in this review all the references to history and religion were obvious, and I could only shake my head at those viewing this as a generic pan-African novel rather than grounded in a specific place with a unique history.
Certainly worth checking out for those interested in literary, surreal, post-colonial stories. I’ll leave you with an excerpt that gives a good sense of the voice, humor and tempo of the story:
The yogurt man went back to threading the needle through his cheek. I thanked him for sharing his perspective about evolution, the existence of an alternate universe, and the physical science of hijacking a plane, and then asked him once again for directions, wondering what kind of directions I was likely to get from a self-identified conspiracy theorist with an exceptionally high pain tolerance. He looked at me, looking as if he was deciding whether or not to give me that information. To the left, he said, putting down the needle, was a town that was a grouping of rocks. He said that the town was beautiful but extremely difficult to inhabit. People built houses and storefronts with pieces broken from the rocks, but the rocks didn’t want to be houses and storefronts. They wanted to be rocks. Eventually, they fell apart. It was a big problem for the townspeople, he said, and one that would likely never be solved. Even the buildings made from modern materials eventually collapsed, sometimes killing their inhabitants in the process.
I was trying to think about what the yogurt man was telling me. The issue he was describing seemed ridiculous and had nothing whatsoever to do with the principles of physical science. People had been living in houses made from stone, wood, and clay since the dawn of time, and, as far as I knew, no one in this specific town had been killed or even harmed by the sudden collapse of a built structure. But I was desperate for any excuse not to go to the town he was describing, a town that I had once lived in and believed I still knew very well. I thought that potential death might serve as an adequate excuse.
I asked the yogurt man how often it was that people were killed because of these sudden collapses. He thanked me for my question and told me that the answer didn’t concern me. To me, it seemed that the prospect of death concerned all people who were still living, which is what I told the yogurt man when I asked him my question again. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the subject, most likely because his description was an elaborate conspiracy invented to justify the potential collapse of his own poorly constructed yogurt shelter.
I thanked the yogurt man for his help and gave him some change, whatever amount seemed appropriate for a cup of yogurt plus an unasked-for and completely useless description of a town that was already familiar to me. He reached out his hand, and when he touched mine, he closed his eyes. I didn’t understand the meaning of his gesture, but I figured he might be expressing his gratitude, so I was happy to give him temporary possession of my hand, even though, at this rate, our expressions of gratitude might go back and forth until forever.
However, they didn’t go back and forth until forever. Eventually, the yogurt man opened his eyes, removed his hand from our miniature embrace, and gave me a cup of yogurt. I thanked him, being sure to express only a verbal thanks. I crossed the street again, and when the yogurt man wasn’t looking, I threw the cup of yogurt away.
A unique, humorous, but ultimately deadly serious short novel. I picked this one up because the short story it began as was my favorite of The Best American Short Stories 2023: it has an offbeat, unusual voice I described as “Murderbot with amnesia,” and kept me guessing throughout. The novel certainly retains that voice, and is often quite funny in the narrator’s bizarre over-descriptions of everything, but for much of the book I found myself a bit disappointed and impatient. The contents of the short story are stretched out over half the novel, interspersed with other scenes, and the strange encounters multiply to the point of being scarcely believable (though there ultimately is a reason for that).
That said, Binyam brings a real whammy of a twist ending that ties it all together, recontextualizing everything that came before. Now I see why all that seemingly extraneous information was included and why the book is structured as it is. There’s ultimately more than a bit of surrealism, along with the absurdism, and it won’t work for everyone but I found it fairly effective. It was also interesting to see a literary view of modern-day Ethiopia: the narrator uses no proper nouns, so the country isn’t named (nor are any of the characters), but once I saw it in this review all the references to history and religion were obvious, and I could only shake my head at those viewing this as a generic pan-African novel rather than grounded in a specific place with a unique history.
Certainly worth checking out for those interested in literary, surreal, post-colonial stories. I’ll leave you with an excerpt that gives a good sense of the voice, humor and tempo of the story:
The yogurt man went back to threading the needle through his cheek. I thanked him for sharing his perspective about evolution, the existence of an alternate universe, and the physical science of hijacking a plane, and then asked him once again for directions, wondering what kind of directions I was likely to get from a self-identified conspiracy theorist with an exceptionally high pain tolerance. He looked at me, looking as if he was deciding whether or not to give me that information. To the left, he said, putting down the needle, was a town that was a grouping of rocks. He said that the town was beautiful but extremely difficult to inhabit. People built houses and storefronts with pieces broken from the rocks, but the rocks didn’t want to be houses and storefronts. They wanted to be rocks. Eventually, they fell apart. It was a big problem for the townspeople, he said, and one that would likely never be solved. Even the buildings made from modern materials eventually collapsed, sometimes killing their inhabitants in the process.
I was trying to think about what the yogurt man was telling me. The issue he was describing seemed ridiculous and had nothing whatsoever to do with the principles of physical science. People had been living in houses made from stone, wood, and clay since the dawn of time, and, as far as I knew, no one in this specific town had been killed or even harmed by the sudden collapse of a built structure. But I was desperate for any excuse not to go to the town he was describing, a town that I had once lived in and believed I still knew very well. I thought that potential death might serve as an adequate excuse.
I asked the yogurt man how often it was that people were killed because of these sudden collapses. He thanked me for my question and told me that the answer didn’t concern me. To me, it seemed that the prospect of death concerned all people who were still living, which is what I told the yogurt man when I asked him my question again. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the subject, most likely because his description was an elaborate conspiracy invented to justify the potential collapse of his own poorly constructed yogurt shelter.
I thanked the yogurt man for his help and gave him some change, whatever amount seemed appropriate for a cup of yogurt plus an unasked-for and completely useless description of a town that was already familiar to me. He reached out his hand, and when he touched mine, he closed his eyes. I didn’t understand the meaning of his gesture, but I figured he might be expressing his gratitude, so I was happy to give him temporary possession of my hand, even though, at this rate, our expressions of gratitude might go back and forth until forever.
However, they didn’t go back and forth until forever. Eventually, the yogurt man opened his eyes, removed his hand from our miniature embrace, and gave me a cup of yogurt. I thanked him, being sure to express only a verbal thanks. I crossed the street again, and when the yogurt man wasn’t looking, I threw the cup of yogurt away.
Read
May 15, 2024Hangman is original and derivative, absorbing and tedious, smart and, sometimes, obvious. Certainly a puzzle.
The set-up is original: An anonymous man is on a plane, returning to his country of birth (in Africa) from the country of which he is now a citizen (the U.S.). He doesn’t know why, or who arranged for him to come. He strikes up somewhat-reluctant conversations with those around him.
The style is derivative: The style is the style of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. It is exactly that style, a person talking to various strangers and acquaintances, hearing much, revealing little, the monologues of the speakers told in the exact same pattern of reported speech that Cusk employs.
The premise is absorbing: It may be Cusk’s style, but it’s an entirely different scenario, as the narrator makes the way through his African homeland encountering taxi drivers, Aid workers, family members, missionaries, all of whom comment obliquely on the violence and poverty and corruption that has shaped the region.
The pacing becomes tedious: The narrator wanders. He seems not to wish to arrive at his destination and always wanders in the wrong direction. His conversations, sometimes so pointed and revealing, are equally often aimless and filler. There is social commentary, but it isn’t always sharp enough. Generally I found the social commentary about Western figures and institutions to be more on point. The prose was at times (though not always) unbelievably bland.
The structure is smart: This is a puzzle box of a book, and readers who like puzzles (as I do) will enjoy piecing together what is happening to the narrator and what he is doing here. The final chapter contains a reveal that I found it very satisfying. And it has plenty to say about diaspora and homeland and alienation.
Some of this reveal is a bit obvious: See above -- generally, the critique of America is sharper than the critique of Africa, and it’s an easy pill for a Western reader to swallow.
Notable quotes:
“She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. To most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a familial sense of humour.”
“Anyway, she said, she resented her loneliness and also her fear of death. When she imagined it coming, it was symbolic. She would close her eyes and the black beneath her lids would become darker, or her heartbeat would be snatched up by a gust of wind. Either way, she said, she would be old, much older than the farmers’ children, who had felt the presence of death from the start of their short lives. What they felt was the real thing. Not a gesture or a dream, but their bodies shedding mass.”
“Global corporations, he said, were antithetical to human flourishing, but they were so omnipresent in our everyday experiences that it had become almost impossible to envision a better quality of life in their absence.
I looked around for signs of the omnipresence of global corporations and saw a goat eating some trash.”
The set-up is original: An anonymous man is on a plane, returning to his country of birth (in Africa) from the country of which he is now a citizen (the U.S.). He doesn’t know why, or who arranged for him to come. He strikes up somewhat-reluctant conversations with those around him.
The style is derivative: The style is the style of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. It is exactly that style, a person talking to various strangers and acquaintances, hearing much, revealing little, the monologues of the speakers told in the exact same pattern of reported speech that Cusk employs.
The premise is absorbing: It may be Cusk’s style, but it’s an entirely different scenario, as the narrator makes the way through his African homeland encountering taxi drivers, Aid workers, family members, missionaries, all of whom comment obliquely on the violence and poverty and corruption that has shaped the region.
The pacing becomes tedious: The narrator wanders. He seems not to wish to arrive at his destination and always wanders in the wrong direction. His conversations, sometimes so pointed and revealing, are equally often aimless and filler. There is social commentary, but it isn’t always sharp enough. Generally I found the social commentary about Western figures and institutions to be more on point. The prose was at times (though not always) unbelievably bland.
The structure is smart: This is a puzzle box of a book, and readers who like puzzles (as I do) will enjoy piecing together what is happening to the narrator and what he is doing here. The final chapter contains a reveal that I found it very satisfying. And it has plenty to say about diaspora and homeland and alienation.
Some of this reveal is a bit obvious: See above -- generally, the critique of America is sharper than the critique of Africa, and it’s an easy pill for a Western reader to swallow.
Notable quotes:
“She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. To most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a familial sense of humour.”
“Anyway, she said, she resented her loneliness and also her fear of death. When she imagined it coming, it was symbolic. She would close her eyes and the black beneath her lids would become darker, or her heartbeat would be snatched up by a gust of wind. Either way, she said, she would be old, much older than the farmers’ children, who had felt the presence of death from the start of their short lives. What they felt was the real thing. Not a gesture or a dream, but their bodies shedding mass.”
“Global corporations, he said, were antithetical to human flourishing, but they were so omnipresent in our everyday experiences that it had become almost impossible to envision a better quality of life in their absence.
I looked around for signs of the omnipresence of global corporations and saw a goat eating some trash.”
March 25, 2024
And… now what…? Not sure if the purpose of novel ran over my head or not, but I couldn’t care. While I appreciated Maya Binyams displacement and themes of isolation explored in this novel, I found it too meandering. I spent most of my time confused and skimming through pages. The amount of endless dialogues from various encounters felt like reading an academic thesis that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Not sure what this novel was or what it was trying to do.
March 10, 2024
Įspūdingas debiutas.
Romanas, kurį sunku pristatyti nesugadinant skaitymo malonumo – puikių atradimų ir nustebimų. Nieko nežinodama nei apie apie autorę, nei apie šį romaną suskubau jo imtis tik dėlto, jog mūsų bibliotekos Dublino Lit. Prizo kuopelė skaito ir svarsto ką pristatyti šiam prizui 2025-iems. „Hangman“ pasiūlė kolegė, kurios pasirinkimai dažniausiai būną verti dėmesio.
Maya Binyam romano pasakotojas – pagyvenęs žmogus, po nemažai metų praleistų JAV atvyksta į savo gimtinę (neįvardintą Afrikos šalį, kažkur į pietus nuo Sacharos) pasimatyti su mirtinai sergančiu broliu. Ir keliauja jis per jau visiškai svetimą, nebe(at)pažįstamą šalį, nebesuprasdamas nei papročių/ tradicijų, nei sutiktų atsitiktinių žmonių, nei giminaičių, nebeatpažindamas net pačių artimiausių šeimos narių.
Pasakojimas susideda iš nedidukų skyrių, lyg atskirų fragmentų, kur pagrindinis veikėjas sutinka nepažįstamąjį ar giminaitį, bando suprasti/atpažinti jį/ją, ilgai kalba, labiau klauso, kad ir nelabai geidaudamas, bet kantriai. Išsiskiriant netenka kokio tai savo daikto, tačiau kartais įgija tų kitų ar net nežinia kieno daiktų. Pasakotojo balsas iš pradžių skamba primityvokai, bet greit pajunti jo archajiškumą, grynumą. Labai tiko.
Patiko viskas. Sumanymas ir jo išpildymas, stilius, kalba, vykusiai sukurti charakteriai. Patiko kafkiška absurdo atmosfera, vėliau pasikeitusi į kažką jau savišką, binyamišką.
Ir kas man svarbu, nesijautė jokio dirbtinumo, jokio ale miaano, taikymo į Literatūrą, viskas skambėjo natūraliai, lyg kitaip šią istoriją ir negalima buvo papasakoti. „Hangman“ visi veikėjai – bevardukai, kaip Anna Burns „Pieninke“, tačiau tas bevardiškumas „Hangmane“ idealiai tiko, ne taip, kaip Burns romane man jautėsi TOKS SUGALVOJIMAS - tiesiog, kad sustiprintų distopijos atmosferą. Skaičiau aš jas vieną po kitos, tai nori-nenori kažkaip ir lygini.
Man šis romanas – apie jautimąsi svetimu sugrįžus pas savus, (nebe)įmanobybę sugrįžti, atmintį/užmarštį, pasimetimą tarp kultūrų, mirimą/išėjimą. Beje, man dar patiko, kaip subtiliai autorė aprašė pokolonijinės Afrikos šiandieną , tų šalių gyventojų įsivaizdavimus apie JAV ir Vakarus apsktitai.
SPOILERIS!
Man ji šiek tiek susišaukė su Jon Fosse knygoje „Vaizdai iš vaikystės“ paskutinie apysaka „Rytas ir vakaras“. Tik Maya Binyam, mano galva, daug gražiau ir išmoningiau aprašė mirtį/išėjimą.
„The yogurt man said he always wondered what people thought about in the moments before they died, because the moments before they died were the only moments when they could think their thoughts without the pressure of society bearing down on them. He hoped he would one day talk with a dead person about the process of dying. He looked at me when he said that, I waited for him to tell me more about his aspirational conversation with a dead person, whom he planned to treat as a diplomat for all dead people. But he had reached the end of his story, so he just stopped talking.“
„He opened my door, and I hugged him, hoping that hugging him would help me find my heart.“ (174 p.)
Kol prisiruošiau aprašyti savo įspūdžius, "Hangman" pateko į ilgąjį Women's Prize for Fiction 2024. Valio!
Negaliu nepaminėti viršelio. Puikus ir britų, bet JAV viršelis man labesnis. Užmeskit akį internete į kubietės dailininkės Belkis Ayón darbus. Man beveik visi jos kūriniai tinka šiam romanui.
Maya Binyam - Etiopijos-Amerikos rašytoja
Romanas, kurį sunku pristatyti nesugadinant skaitymo malonumo – puikių atradimų ir nustebimų. Nieko nežinodama nei apie apie autorę, nei apie šį romaną suskubau jo imtis tik dėlto, jog mūsų bibliotekos Dublino Lit. Prizo kuopelė skaito ir svarsto ką pristatyti šiam prizui 2025-iems. „Hangman“ pasiūlė kolegė, kurios pasirinkimai dažniausiai būną verti dėmesio.
Maya Binyam romano pasakotojas – pagyvenęs žmogus, po nemažai metų praleistų JAV atvyksta į savo gimtinę (neįvardintą Afrikos šalį, kažkur į pietus nuo Sacharos) pasimatyti su mirtinai sergančiu broliu. Ir keliauja jis per jau visiškai svetimą, nebe(at)pažįstamą šalį, nebesuprasdamas nei papročių/ tradicijų, nei sutiktų atsitiktinių žmonių, nei giminaičių, nebeatpažindamas net pačių artimiausių šeimos narių.
Pasakojimas susideda iš nedidukų skyrių, lyg atskirų fragmentų, kur pagrindinis veikėjas sutinka nepažįstamąjį ar giminaitį, bando suprasti/atpažinti jį/ją, ilgai kalba, labiau klauso, kad ir nelabai geidaudamas, bet kantriai. Išsiskiriant netenka kokio tai savo daikto, tačiau kartais įgija tų kitų ar net nežinia kieno daiktų. Pasakotojo balsas iš pradžių skamba primityvokai, bet greit pajunti jo archajiškumą, grynumą. Labai tiko.
Patiko viskas. Sumanymas ir jo išpildymas, stilius, kalba, vykusiai sukurti charakteriai. Patiko kafkiška absurdo atmosfera, vėliau pasikeitusi į kažką jau savišką, binyamišką.
Ir kas man svarbu, nesijautė jokio dirbtinumo, jokio ale miaano, taikymo į Literatūrą, viskas skambėjo natūraliai, lyg kitaip šią istoriją ir negalima buvo papasakoti. „Hangman“ visi veikėjai – bevardukai, kaip Anna Burns „Pieninke“, tačiau tas bevardiškumas „Hangmane“ idealiai tiko, ne taip, kaip Burns romane man jautėsi TOKS SUGALVOJIMAS - tiesiog, kad sustiprintų distopijos atmosferą. Skaičiau aš jas vieną po kitos, tai nori-nenori kažkaip ir lygini.
Man šis romanas – apie jautimąsi svetimu sugrįžus pas savus, (nebe)įmanobybę sugrįžti, atmintį/užmarštį, pasimetimą tarp kultūrų, mirimą/išėjimą. Beje, man dar patiko, kaip subtiliai autorė aprašė pokolonijinės Afrikos šiandieną , tų šalių gyventojų įsivaizdavimus apie JAV ir Vakarus apsktitai.
SPOILERIS!
Man ji šiek tiek susišaukė su Jon Fosse knygoje „Vaizdai iš vaikystės“ paskutinie apysaka „Rytas ir vakaras“. Tik Maya Binyam, mano galva, daug gražiau ir išmoningiau aprašė mirtį/išėjimą.
„The yogurt man said he always wondered what people thought about in the moments before they died, because the moments before they died were the only moments when they could think their thoughts without the pressure of society bearing down on them. He hoped he would one day talk with a dead person about the process of dying. He looked at me when he said that, I waited for him to tell me more about his aspirational conversation with a dead person, whom he planned to treat as a diplomat for all dead people. But he had reached the end of his story, so he just stopped talking.“
„He opened my door, and I hugged him, hoping that hugging him would help me find my heart.“ (174 p.)
Kol prisiruošiau aprašyti savo įspūdžius, "Hangman" pateko į ilgąjį Women's Prize for Fiction 2024. Valio!
Negaliu nepaminėti viršelio. Puikus ir britų, bet JAV viršelis man labesnis. Užmeskit akį internete į kubietės dailininkės Belkis Ayón darbus. Man beveik visi jos kūriniai tinka šiam romanui.
Maya Binyam - Etiopijos-Amerikos rašytoja
March 13, 2025
Ein surrealer Fiebertraum. Die Autorin versteht es ziemlich gut eine ungewisse Atmosphäre aufzubauen, die soweit geht, dass man am Ende einen sukzessiven Rollentausch wahrgenommen zu haben glaubt, der vermeintliche Retter wird selbst zum Opfer bzw. Verstorbenen. Es gipfelt in einer kompletten Auflösung. Vielleicht lese ich das irgendwann nochmal, weil ich vermute dass mir das ein oder andere Element entgangen ist.
Aber für den Moment sind 3🌟 das Maximum, weil mich die Geschichte eigentlich nach 10 Seiten schon nicht mehr sonderlich interessiert hat, obwohl sie sehr vielversprechend angefangen hat. Aber die Autorin kann wirklich gut schreiben und vielleicht würde ich sogar noch mal was von ihr lesen, würde aber jetzt nicht aktiv suchen.
Aber für den Moment sind 3🌟 das Maximum, weil mich die Geschichte eigentlich nach 10 Seiten schon nicht mehr sonderlich interessiert hat, obwohl sie sehr vielversprechend angefangen hat. Aber die Autorin kann wirklich gut schreiben und vielleicht würde ich sogar noch mal was von ihr lesen, würde aber jetzt nicht aktiv suchen.
June 28, 2023
ARC REVIEW
4.5
So unique and captivating, an omniscient mundane prose. This story follows the narrator as he kind of floats through a series of circumstances.
Summoned back to his home country; this man (who is never named) tries to figure out what he is doing, who the people around him are and why they look so familiar. The sense of intrigue is what kept me as a reader going throughout this story, a short 140 pages which was perfect for this type of writing style. Any longer and I would of lost interest completely.
The ending was great, somewhat predictable but nevertheless the execution was done brilliantly. I was tossing up whether to give this 4 or 5 stars as it is a shorter book and I feel like with omniscient prose like this it'll be hit or miss for some people. But for me I really did enjoy.
4.5
So unique and captivating, an omniscient mundane prose. This story follows the narrator as he kind of floats through a series of circumstances.
Summoned back to his home country; this man (who is never named) tries to figure out what he is doing, who the people around him are and why they look so familiar. The sense of intrigue is what kept me as a reader going throughout this story, a short 140 pages which was perfect for this type of writing style. Any longer and I would of lost interest completely.
The ending was great, somewhat predictable but nevertheless the execution was done brilliantly. I was tossing up whether to give this 4 or 5 stars as it is a shorter book and I feel like with omniscient prose like this it'll be hit or miss for some people. But for me I really did enjoy.
August 16, 2023
4.5
Without a doubt, the best English-language release of this year for me. And 100% one of the best covers I've come across recently (perfectly fits the content of the novel). I feel like I'll give this 5 stars upon a reread, because the architecture of this novel seems sound, but I can't put my finger on everything yet, so I'm left like 95% satisfied. It's like Rachel Cusk, Albert Camus, Wole Soyinka, and V.S. Naipaul came together to dislocate the reader from reality and extrapolate the experience of diasporic displacement beyond the realm of the tangible. Uncanniness is the key. How much of it is real? How much is not? Does it matter? Really wonderfully idiosyncratic. The prose is sparse but just off-kilter enough to feel both neurotic and slightly abnormal. Existentially heavy yet thoroughly light in its touch. Tough to describe. I'm excited to see what Maya Binyam releases in the future, given this is her debut. So good.
Without a doubt, the best English-language release of this year for me. And 100% one of the best covers I've come across recently (perfectly fits the content of the novel). I feel like I'll give this 5 stars upon a reread, because the architecture of this novel seems sound, but I can't put my finger on everything yet, so I'm left like 95% satisfied. It's like Rachel Cusk, Albert Camus, Wole Soyinka, and V.S. Naipaul came together to dislocate the reader from reality and extrapolate the experience of diasporic displacement beyond the realm of the tangible. Uncanniness is the key. How much of it is real? How much is not? Does it matter? Really wonderfully idiosyncratic. The prose is sparse but just off-kilter enough to feel both neurotic and slightly abnormal. Existentially heavy yet thoroughly light in its touch. Tough to describe. I'm excited to see what Maya Binyam releases in the future, given this is her debut. So good.
April 14, 2025
Really, really good. Very funny and strange and sad. Does everything I want a book to do.
"I tried to think about the good-looking man's father's suffering in relation to my suffering. Personally, I was fairly certain that I was done with the trauma portion of my life. I didn't know if God, the self-obsessed graduate students, or my relatives would agree with that assessment, but it seemed to me that everything I was going through or was about to go through was something someone else had gone through before. I would never be alone in it, spiritually, even if I felt alone now. I congratulated myself on that, and then life went on."
"When someone indicates that they've suffered, it's tempting to ask them to elaborate. But the fact of their suffering is often knowledge enough, and the details serve only to satisfy a selfish curiosity. Once that curiosity is satisfied, the horrible details stick with you, and get folded into your personal life and perception of the rest of the world, even if they have nothing to do with you. So, sometimes it's best to end the conversation abruptly."
"I felt I had no choice but to carry this garbage with me for the rest of my life. But, I reminded myself, tomorrow would be a new day, and a new day could bring anything, including garbage bins. So, I closed my carry-on, opened the door to the bathroom, and let yesterday's garbage live with today's problem, the pigeon. I would deal with them both in the future, whenever that happened, and shut the door."
"I tried to think about the good-looking man's father's suffering in relation to my suffering. Personally, I was fairly certain that I was done with the trauma portion of my life. I didn't know if God, the self-obsessed graduate students, or my relatives would agree with that assessment, but it seemed to me that everything I was going through or was about to go through was something someone else had gone through before. I would never be alone in it, spiritually, even if I felt alone now. I congratulated myself on that, and then life went on."
"When someone indicates that they've suffered, it's tempting to ask them to elaborate. But the fact of their suffering is often knowledge enough, and the details serve only to satisfy a selfish curiosity. Once that curiosity is satisfied, the horrible details stick with you, and get folded into your personal life and perception of the rest of the world, even if they have nothing to do with you. So, sometimes it's best to end the conversation abruptly."
"I felt I had no choice but to carry this garbage with me for the rest of my life. But, I reminded myself, tomorrow would be a new day, and a new day could bring anything, including garbage bins. So, I closed my carry-on, opened the door to the bathroom, and let yesterday's garbage live with today's problem, the pigeon. I would deal with them both in the future, whenever that happened, and shut the door."
March 7, 2024
I thought the first chapter, with the alienation and general unease, was brilliantly executed. Unfortunately, the novel then becomes bogged down in the mechanics of family encounters, food consumption, travel challenges etc, which are only occasionally absurd and mildly interesting. There are a number of extended screeds:
She told me that politicians pretended to have personalities, but their idiosyncrasies were just traits they developed in order to get elected. To most voters, it was less important for a candidate to have a coherent ideology than it was for them to have a dog, a second home, or a familial sense of humor.I'm sorry, but don't we all know this already? Then we're treated to 10+ pages of two "graduate students" having a tedious political discussion, which the narrator also considered tedious. I'm afraid my enthusiasm dipped precipitously, to the point of abandonment.
November 18, 2023
This middle-aged male protagonist returns after a long exile to his country of origin, everything is unfamiliar yet familiar. Placed in absurdist situations with acerbic sardonic social commentary by the author, he is bewildered and befuddled, reacting with little agency. Short but compelling, I do admire the risks taken by Maya Binyam with this mode of storytelling. I went back to re-read certain passages on reaching the end to clarify certain aspects. Hangman was clearly designed and plotted with the endgame in mind from the get go.
September 27, 2023
Really a different reading experience…a surreal yet straightforward story of immigration, dislocation and home.
March 26, 2024
The premise of this book is deceptively simple—a man returns to his home country for his brother’s funeral years after he last stepped foot on its soil. His clothes have been packed for him; his ticket, already bought.
And in that, besties lies the perfect example of a clue hidden in plain sight. Just straight up genius. Events unravel at a snail’s pace—everything is mind-numbingly mundane at first, until a little further down the narrative you catch that strange little tingle down your neck. That creeping sensation warning you that something was amiss, some puzzle piece not quite fitting into its foretold space. Then the story begins to take on a hazy, dreamlike quality. You can’t pinpoint yet precisely what it is that has your hackles raised, but this reality feels shifty. Like a filter's been pulled over your eyes and you’re seeing everything through the chinks of a simulation. There’s something jerky in the way characters behave in this space, something unnatural in their speech and their gazes that chafes against your ability to suspend disbelief. You’re sure that there’s solid ground beneath this wily mist, a core truth that’s just within your grasp—but it slips past your fingertips every time you close on its tail.
A literary masterpiece. I only wish that I'd read this in any other form than audio because honestly it dragged for me, but goodness what a piece of work. What a brilliant and chilling exploration of the African diaspora.
Easily one of the best endings I’ve read, period. I still get chills whenever I think about it.
And in that, besties lies the perfect example of a clue hidden in plain sight. Just straight up genius. Events unravel at a snail’s pace—everything is mind-numbingly mundane at first, until a little further down the narrative you catch that strange little tingle down your neck. That creeping sensation warning you that something was amiss, some puzzle piece not quite fitting into its foretold space. Then the story begins to take on a hazy, dreamlike quality. You can’t pinpoint yet precisely what it is that has your hackles raised, but this reality feels shifty. Like a filter's been pulled over your eyes and you’re seeing everything through the chinks of a simulation. There’s something jerky in the way characters behave in this space, something unnatural in their speech and their gazes that chafes against your ability to suspend disbelief. You’re sure that there’s solid ground beneath this wily mist, a core truth that’s just within your grasp—but it slips past your fingertips every time you close on its tail.
A literary masterpiece. I only wish that I'd read this in any other form than audio because honestly it dragged for me, but goodness what a piece of work. What a brilliant and chilling exploration of the African diaspora.
Easily one of the best endings I’ve read, period. I still get chills whenever I think about it.
November 13, 2023
Like a modernized, Kafkaesque, African Sixth Sense.
Fairly impressive debut with strong points, a particular discombobulation, and some wildly funny and spot-on statements. If you are a fan of modern literary fiction, you may want to give this a try.
Cool cover art too.
Fairly impressive debut with strong points, a particular discombobulation, and some wildly funny and spot-on statements. If you are a fan of modern literary fiction, you may want to give this a try.
Cool cover art too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 21, 2023
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In this strange tale, a man is summoned back to the African country of his birth, after escaping to America after a short prison sentence. Our unnamed narrator is constantly off balance as he doesn’t recognize anyone and is not entirely sure why he is there. He thinks the servants at the first house he comes to are his relatives, he has to give a distant relative money to build a house that is already built, he listens to people on the buses he takes cross country as they make speeches or ask him questions. He leaves his money in a bank that won’t let him deposit his money in his brother’s name and leaves his passport in the pharmacy that won’t sell him medicine for his high blood pressure. An ex priest makes him wear used clothes. He ex wife is now a servant. This almost dreamlike book flies along as we root for a narrator who seems very much in over his head.
May 28, 2023
I've been wondering what the conceit is since page one, and when the final denouement came it wasn't much of a surprise. Actually, it wasn't all that important although it is used as a (retroactive) framing device to expound on politics and the state of the world. Where the novel's strength lies is the style - everything's askew, sometimes less sometime more, and reader's rarely sure on what ground she threads and where the narrative goes. The tone is also rather flat, which together with askewness makes for a not so much a cold reading as an otherworldly one.
January 27, 2024
I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about this up until the end at which point I thought it was brilliant. surreal and funny and fresh - feels like Binyam is doing something that nobody else is doing is contemporary American fiction and I’ll be mulling over this one for a while
May 25, 2024
Very well written book.
Hats off to Binyam for her excellent debut novel.
I have a feeling that this book may be even better on a reread.
I disinterested reader made the book a great read. With some of the quotes, at times, sounding like a badly written 'inspirational quote'.
4/5
Hats off to Binyam for her excellent debut novel.
I have a feeling that this book may be even better on a reread.
I disinterested reader made the book a great read. With some of the quotes, at times, sounding like a badly written 'inspirational quote'.
4/5
May 31, 2024
"I looked at the sun, thinking it was still too early, but knowing that even if I believed it was still too early, whatever was going to happen to me was going to happen to me, because the time for it to happen had finally come."
May 22, 2025
i could see this book not being for everyone but i am not one of those people
March 6, 2024
I don’t even know where to begin with this book. The style is very unique. I swear if we had added in a couple of “And so on”s it could have been written by Vonnegut.
It felt very much like someone sitting down to tell you a story about this man’s journey to his homeland. He went here and talked to this person, and then he didn’t want to do this thing, but it would be rude so he did the thing anyway. There’s no real dialogue, just one person relaying their story.
And I was SO HERE FOR IT in the beginning. The first chapter had me giggling like a fool. The situations were so random and delivered with exactly my brand of dead pan humor. I really did laugh out loud at several points.
But the middle of the book hit a bit of a snag where it felt like it wasn’t as humorous as the early parts, and everything had started to feel the same… we go to the bus depot and learn one person’s story, and then we go to another place and learn another person’s story. It just got a bit monotonous in the middle and the humor went missing although the social commentary was sharp.
And then the end gets very abstract in places, which felt like it came a little out of nowhere.
And then the ending…!
I kinda love it, but I also am not sure it 100% works. I don’t think there were enough context clues dropped to make this feel believable, if that makes any sense. There were hints dropped at what was happening, but the characters around the narrator didn’t really react to him in a way that made it feel plausible. I guess it just left me with too many questions.
That being said, I had more positive feelings than negative ones. I appreciated the commentary in addition to the humor.
Congrats to the author on the Women’s Prize nomination. I don’t think I would have discovered or picked this up on my own, and it’s got me excited to check out the rest of the Longlist.
It felt very much like someone sitting down to tell you a story about this man’s journey to his homeland. He went here and talked to this person, and then he didn’t want to do this thing, but it would be rude so he did the thing anyway. There’s no real dialogue, just one person relaying their story.
And I was SO HERE FOR IT in the beginning. The first chapter had me giggling like a fool. The situations were so random and delivered with exactly my brand of dead pan humor. I really did laugh out loud at several points.
But the middle of the book hit a bit of a snag where it felt like it wasn’t as humorous as the early parts, and everything had started to feel the same… we go to the bus depot and learn one person’s story, and then we go to another place and learn another person’s story. It just got a bit monotonous in the middle and the humor went missing although the social commentary was sharp.
And then the end gets very abstract in places, which felt like it came a little out of nowhere.
And then the ending…!
I kinda love it, but I also am not sure it 100% works. I don’t think there were enough context clues dropped to make this feel believable, if that makes any sense. There were hints dropped at what was happening, but the characters around the narrator didn’t really react to him in a way that made it feel plausible. I guess it just left me with too many questions.
That being said, I had more positive feelings than negative ones. I appreciated the commentary in addition to the humor.
Congrats to the author on the Women’s Prize nomination. I don’t think I would have discovered or picked this up on my own, and it’s got me excited to check out the rest of the Longlist.
August 7, 2023
Hangman has the best opening and closing chapters I’ve read so far this year and I ate every word up.
In Hangman an unnamed man is asked to return to his home country following news that his brother is gravely ill. What follows is a funny, rich African journey about belonging covering complex themes with a mundane, matter of fact voice that I just loved.
But please, this book is EVERYTHING. It’s afro surrealist, it’s experimental, it’s a tragedy, it’s satirical and by not naming the country he returns to, Mayam has allowed her debut to remain gloriously pan-african.
I won’t go any further into the plot because it would ruin the reader's experience. But you might like this if you like weird, surreal books, the writing style of Miranda July or are interested in exploring the African, transnational experience.
One point. You might find yourself confused in the middle of the story. I would urge you, stick with it. It’s under 200 pages, so ideal for this sort of experimental writing.
My recommendation? Let go of convention for this one and just be in each moment that Binyam offers us. It really is an exceptional book.
As always, thank you Netgalley for this ARC copy in exchange for a fair review. .
Hangman is out on the 3rd August.
In Hangman an unnamed man is asked to return to his home country following news that his brother is gravely ill. What follows is a funny, rich African journey about belonging covering complex themes with a mundane, matter of fact voice that I just loved.
But please, this book is EVERYTHING. It’s afro surrealist, it’s experimental, it’s a tragedy, it’s satirical and by not naming the country he returns to, Mayam has allowed her debut to remain gloriously pan-african.
I won’t go any further into the plot because it would ruin the reader's experience. But you might like this if you like weird, surreal books, the writing style of Miranda July or are interested in exploring the African, transnational experience.
One point. You might find yourself confused in the middle of the story. I would urge you, stick with it. It’s under 200 pages, so ideal for this sort of experimental writing.
My recommendation? Let go of convention for this one and just be in each moment that Binyam offers us. It really is an exceptional book.
As always, thank you Netgalley for this ARC copy in exchange for a fair review. .
Hangman is out on the 3rd August.
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