Scatterlings

In This journey, someone will get lost, someone will give up and turn back, and someone may go all the way to the end. All these people will try to tell you the story of what happened. Abram, a South African winemaker who might be English or Dutch (depending on whomever happens to be listening to his troubles) will tell you that things went wrong when his wife stopped loving him, when his children couldn’t be citizens of their country of birth, and his country tried to put him in prison and steal his vote and estate. He will also tell you that in a twist of irony, his treason came about because he loved his wife and children. Abram’s wife, Alisa, will tell you that things went wrong much earlier than that. She will outline the details of her displacement with some simplicity. This is what she knows: her ancestors were brought to the Caribbean islands as slaves, she was born in 1882, and after her birth parents died she was adopted by an Englishman who raised her in the United Kingdom. Then there’s Dido, their troubled, eldest daughter; there’s also an angry man along the way and a woman who kept a secret she shouldn’t have. That’s how the story starts. And even the wind doesn’t know who will get lost, who will turn back, and who will eventually reach home.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.