Book Review: Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Stubborn Archivist has a lot of the hallmarks of a debut novel – an unnamed narrator whose life reflects the author’s in a lot of ways, a focus more on character and situation than plot, a lot of play with perspective and style including a lot of blank space on the page.

None of that is to say that Stubborn Archivist is a bad novel or not well-written. A lot of the ways Rodrigues Fowler plays with language and style are immensely creative and satisfying. Her dialogue in particular is very good and I frequently found myself thinking of how authentic it seemed in its stiltedness and unsurety while not becoming annoying in its roughness.

Our main character, unnamed (and this is a growing pet peeve of mine!) is London-born to a British father and a Brazilian mother. After some sort of following out between her mother (Isadora) and Isadora’s family there is reconciliation after the baby’s birth (this is our main character, sometimes narrator, sometimes referred to as the baby even when she is long past the baby stage) and so Isadora and her husband, Richard, and the baby travel back and forth between London and Sao Paulo, spending every Christmas with Isadora’s family. The main character grows up between these two worlds, speaking Portuguese and English. Looking more like her mother, in England she is often taken as a foreigner or a new arrival. In Brazil, she is assumed to be fully English. She loves both places and feels out of place in both places. It is the timeless plight of every child of an immigrant, I think.

There isn’t much plot and the story moves a bit non-linearly through time. We get glimpses of who Isadora and Richard were before their baby. We learn a bit about Isadora’s sister, Ana Paula, who has her own troubles though we never quite get deeply into who she is or what her motivations are. We watch the main character grow up and change although at the end I felt like she still had a lot of growing up and learning to do. (Though, don’t we all?)

I liked the book and with its play on form and blank space, it was a relatively quick read. At the end, I’m left with that age old workshop question: Why this story? Why now? Obviously this is a story important to the author because it reflects her own. And so, I can assume that this is a story that will reflect the stories of many first generation adults. Since that isn’t my background, I can’t speak about whether or not the book does a good job of that. Apparently, Rodrigues Fowler has published a second novel, this year in fact, and I’m curious to read it and see if she explores a more traditional plot line and what her writing might look like there.