Emanuela Anechoum was born in 1991 in Reggio Calabria, a city on the southernmost tip of Italy that faces west across the Strait of Messina to Sicily, just five kilometers away. Like Mina, the 26-year old narrator of Tangerinn, Anechoum went to London to find a job (in publishing), while Mina worked as an executive’s aide at the headquarters of a fast-food chain “famous for their avocado toast.” She rents a room in Liz’s two-room flat (“she wanted to be seen with me in bars in Soho” and “sometimes, I peed in her conditioner bottle”). After six years of London life, and upon the death of her father, Mina returns to her family: “We lived in a house by the sea, in a provincial mafia-run town that had once been called one of the best villages in Italy.” This, her mother’s hometown, is a destination for migrants; her father had emigrated there from Casablanca, and Mina inherited his looks.
Mina’s narrative toggles between memories of her youth and her father’s stories, reflections on life in London, and her renewed life in Calabria. Her assessments are often harsh – she portrays her London friends satirically, she resents her Italian mother’s detached and disturbed behavior, and she critiques her town’s attitude toward migrants. And now her father, to whom all of this seems to be addressed, has died. Anechoum is a shrewd writer; she inspires our empathy for Mina and exploits our professed attitudes toward the familial and societal habits that irritate her, but she won’t let us bask in self-satisfaction. The core dynamic of Tangerinn is the unstated question that triggers Mina’s anxious telling: How should I live my life?
I was never quite certain about the present moment of telling – how much time had elapsed between what is told on the final page and Mina’s status, but I assume not much. “Tangerinn” is the name of the local bar her father ran, now in the hands of her affectionate older sister Aisha, a practicing Muslim. Returning home, Mina revisits her father’s history, since just like Mina, he had aspired to achieve something of his own in the world, as an athlete in Europe. His reasons for not exploiting the opportunity presented, and for sustaining an unsettling marriage with Berta, are both unclear — and that’s the point: such understandings are often slippery. Mina also grapples with her feelings of inferiority among the London women, and sense of superiority on returning home.
Tangerinn is thus a search for something, a halting probe made concrete by Anechoum’s fluid scene-generation and faultless ear for both conversation and Mina’s measured but worried take on her world. Her parents have everything to do with her misgivings; here, she addresses her father, whose ashes are kept in a jar under her bed:
“Just naming you in front of her made Berta explode with a violence I’d never seen before. She broke chairs and glasses and screamed at us that we were shits, useless creatures she wishes she’d never given birth to. Nothing new, really, but what worried us was the weakness of her voice, how she tired more easily day by day, in a hunger strike that was the slowest death of all. Part of me wanted her to get stronger because if she didn’t she’d never be able to say sorry to me, and then we would never be able to make up and I would be a true orphan forever, not because you were both dead, but because you had both died without me knowing whether or not I was loved.”
This isn’t nuanced language, and unlike the Hotschnig novel, Mina’s narrative doesn’t present unique aspects of tone or motivation for the translator to work out. But Anouchem’s portrayal of Mina is replete with assertions and hesitations, insights and blockages, and has build her novel with an ear attuned to the rhythms of youthful wonder.
Aisha says, “Nobody taught us how to love ourselves – this is the only way I know.” Mina responds, speaking to her lost father: “Sometimes I look at beauty outside and I feel beautiful too, but only in its reflection. It’s all outside of me, and I limit myself to admiring the image I’ve created of my life, but I never know if it’s real or not., I look at it and say: it’s such a beautiful picture, and if I’m living it, it must be true, right?” Mina is introduced to a Turkish man named Nazim, a potential lover perhaps, but even here Anouchem won’t indulge a rom-com impulse; the two get along and their conversation has a provocative edge, but they are both extremely careful with their affections.
There is something transgressive about our listening. Invited to a party at Tangerinn, Mina says, “The idea that there might be some happy or joyous occasion I’d be expected to enthusiastically take part in made me feel like I was being tested; what if I wasn’t sufficiently happy? … I seemed to have discovered that I was no longer capable of pretending. Yet the prospect of accepting whatever mood I was in at any given moment and showing it to others, just as it was, felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.” We are the “others” – and who are we?
