A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Front cover of Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, which features cover art by Kathleen Jennings of a man with brown skin and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail wearing a purple waistcoat with a book tucked under his arm. He is walking in front of an ornate railing and gazing towards the right. Behind him are the domes and spires of a city, with ship’s masts and treetops in the back ground. Dotted white lines which seem to indicate invisible air currents swirl in the sky. There is a blurb at the top by Karen Joy Fowler, and text above that that indicates that the book is a World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Crawford Award Winner.

**Spoilers aplenty, if you care about that sort of thing!**

When I heard that Book Moon was starting to reopen for browsing, Britt and I visited, and one of the books I bought was A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013). I had enjoyed Samatar’s story collection, Tender (I often think about the story, “Honey Bear,” which you can read at Clarkesworld), so I wanted to check out her novel.

I quickly fell under the spell of this novel, whose subtitle is, “Being the Complete Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom.” In the map of this book, there is a mainland which is identified as the Empire of Olondria and, far to the Southwest, the Tea Islands. Jevick is, “…from the blue and hazy village of Tyom, on the western side of Tinimavet in the Tea Islands,” and is the son of a wealthy pepper farmer.

Tinimavet seems to have numerical writing, (burned onto wooden planks) for the purposes of keeping accounts, and map-making, but it is otherwise a nonliterate culture. Jevick’s father hires Lunre, a tutor from Olondria, who teaches Jevick Olondrian and instills in him a love of reading. Since the books Jevick loves are in Olondrian, from Olondria, and of Olondria, they kindle a desire in him to leave his home—an opportunity he soon has when his father dies and Jevick must travel in his stead to Olondria’s capital city, Bain, for the ostensible purpose of trading spices, but in actuality to fulfill his passion for books and the places he has come to know through them.

I’m not as widely read in fantasy as poetry, but in my limited reading, I haven’t come across many literacy narratives as well-executed as this one (shoutout to Samuel Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon), which does such a good job of describing the ontological transformation of coming into reading, in part because Samatar stages it within a story about the encounter between literate and nonliterate cultures, between religions, and between center and periphery. In my reading I was often reminded of nonfictional literacy narratives—Frederick Douglass’s was foremost in my mind, not just for the way he narrates his preliterate life and how he comes to literacy, but also the existential gap literacy and freedom open between him and some of the still-enslaved people he encounters.

A Stranger in Olondria is a work of postcolonial fantasy. In the spirit of not getting too lost in the weeds of finding the most authoritative definition, this list of characteristics I grabbed from a quick google search includes, “Appropriation of Colonial Languages, Metanarrative, Decolonization Struggles, Nationhood and Nationalism, Valorization of Cultural Identity,” and, “Counter-discourse.” These qualities are readily apparent in A Stranger in Olondria. That this is not just a fiction (well, the people and places are invented but a novel is full of truths) but a fantasy makes me wonder what the pros and cons are for a writer to choose to express postcolonial themes with some of the formal characteristics of postcolonial literature in a fantasy milieu. Not being beholden to history—sometimes annoyingly resistant to being mobilized for exemplary purposes—seems like it would open up opportunities to write a story that feels truer than the truth, if that makes any sense.

I don’t think I’m reaching by considering the Tea Islands an economic colony of the Olondrian Empire. Remember that Jevick’s father has him learn Olondrian so that he can’t be taken advantage of in business transactions. Jevick makes the Olondrian language his own, but eventually writes his memoir in both Olondrian and his native Kideti. I realize of course that the book I read is written in English, but it is a testament to Samatar, that I could swear I read it in Kideti! One part of why is the Olondrian and Kideti words that circulate within this narrative (sans glossary), accruing meaning and nuance until when Jissavet says, “I know what the vallon is...It’s jut,” I felt both moved and instructed (a rough translation might be: I know what the book is…It’s external soul).

Part of why is in her world-building, which benefits from the rich intertextuality of A Stranger in Olondria. The many books that Jevick (or others) read, write, recite, quote from or allude to, depict, ban, burn, save, treasure, et cetera add depth and texture to this world. If it weren’t a fictional text within a fictional text, I would be heading to the library now to look for copies of Leiya Tevorova’s The Handbook of Mercies and Ethen of Ur-Fanlei’s Lantern Tales! These invented texts within the primary text are not the only stories within stories contained in the book. As Jevick’s misadventures lead him across Olondria and finally home to Tyom, he receives and, at times, becomes implicated in the stories of others: Tialon and Lunre, Hivnawir and Taur, Miros and the Baroness Ailin of Ur-Melinei, and finally the Anadnedet of Jissavet, which contains sub-sub-narratives, such as the story of the first woman and man (Tche and Kyomi). His own story converges with Jissavet’s; in the process of translating her telling into a book, he falls in love with her spirit. 

This profusion of narratives reminds me of my beloved Alf Layla wa Layla or A Thousand and One Nights, not only in terms of the often-nested story structure, but also in terms of thinking about who is doing the telling and to what end. In A Thousand and One Nights, Shahrazad is ultimately trying to rehabilitate her royal husband from his uxoricidal ways and this goal is embedded in the stories she tells. Reflecting on some of the stories Samatar tells, the many pairs of mismatched and star-crossed lovers serve to reinforce the love Jevick has both for reading and for Jissavet and via Jissavet, for writing.

The ghost that follows Jevick, wracking his body, discomfiting his soul, is in a literal sense the ghost of the girl Jissavet, fellow Tea-Islander, with whom he shared a ship, but in another sense, this ghost—in the book they are called angels—is an avatar of the spirit that rides all of us who are afflicted with writing (like Jack Spicer’s Martian radio, for instance). I can be a little slow on the uptake, so I realized this late in the book, at the moment when Jevick has finished writing Jissavet’s story and encounters the silence that follows having written:

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

This is akin to the phenomenological bracketing that Husserl describes (and Ahmed critiques and complicates) when he talks about the physical and mental turning away from the world involved in sitting at his desk to write. It also becomes, as Jevick returns to Tyom to teach written Kideti and the first work of Kideti literature (his memoir), a sometimes beautiful and sometimes tragic expression of a collective shift from orality to literacy, and the tensions of their coexistence. Tragic, I think, because literacy is a complicated gift, since along with a world of wonder, Jevick also gives his pupils and readers hunger, longing, and loss.

A Stranger in Olondria is a gift. I was grateful to sojourn in this world, even if I was bawling when Jevick and Jissavet had to part. I was grateful even for the silence at the end of the book, having been primed for it by the passage above. The emptiness that follows the fullness of the reading experience isn’t often described, but reading it I felt connected to the spatially separate but spiritually intimate fellowship of readers and, through that connection, less alone.

Pick it up from Small Beer Press or find it at the library.