It was an interesting approach to imagine the conquest from the point of view of someone who himself was marked by conquest. The story line was not as compelling as one would hope, but it was an interesting take on reactions to the "other."

This is the story of the failed 1527 Spanish exploration to La Florida in search of riches as told by a slave survivor, of Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori . Only four are known to have survived, the expedition including Mustafa (aka Estabanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor). The historical official record was written by Cabeza de Vaca, the highest ranking survivor. Mustafa is motivated to tell his version of the events and includes stories from his life before voluntarily becoming a slave. The tale is written at the conclusion of his travails, and he goes in to depth about his regrets, motives and dreams of simple pleasures as the story unfolds.

Fantastic book, LL seems to be a kindred spirit with Amin Malouf and Giles Milton. To make such a story from just one short sentence from old chronicle? Wise and captivating book. Great beginning of the 2015 Booker Longlist.

Deeply satisfying fiction which is probably more truthful than the official “factual” account.

(3.75) First off, this book was written so well that I didn't even immediately notice there are no quotation marks for dialogue which is something that usually bugs me right away. It's also a very immersive tale of the Spanish colonization of North America, and more importantly, of the harm caused by imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy from Mustafa/Estebanico's unique perspective.

It did drag a bit for me in the third quarter of the book, so I think it could've been about 100 pages shorter for maximum effect, but as it's a fictionalization of a historical report made about the Narvaez conquest, there was probably good reason to include as much as Lalami did.

Wonderful. Beguiling. Engrossing. This is a fantastic piece of historical fiction. Will have more to say in a article soon.

Review by Lois Plale

This is a fictional account of the conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to claim what is now the Gulf Coast for the Spanish crown. In the actual expedition, there were only four survivors and this story is told from the viewpoint of one them – a Moor slave from Morocco. Although nothing is really known about this slave, the author has written this as if it were his memoirs detailing how he became a slave in the first place on through the end of their failed expedition. It shows their encounters with the Native Americans as well as the attempts of the Spanish to conquer them.

This is a well-researched book, partly based on an account of one of the survivors, and anyone interested in this time period would enjoy it. It also shows that, contrary to what we are taught, Africans also played a part in the exploration of the New World and that the Native Americans were not just silent witnesses to it. The author is originally from Morocco but now lives in the United States and this is her third book.


About the reviewer: Although new to Tredyffrin Public Library, Lois was previously with the Dauphin County Library System in the Harrisburg area for 15 years. She is a history buff and has her Bachelor’s Degree in History.

As a Latin American studies minor who spent a year abroad in Sevilla and a summer in Mexico, I found this especially interesting. None of the characters were particularly well—written and honestly I didn’t care if any of them lived or died but it was evocative of the time and place from a very different perspective than normally told.

I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.

I've joked before about wannabe authors hefting up the largest book of history they can get their grimy hands on, dropping it, and writing a 300-400 page novel about whatever flips open that hasn't already been done to death. A loophole to the last bit is if the particular span of years have been done to death but were only done so in a few combos of longitude and latitude and landmasses, or were done in those plus a few more that weren't at all represented as the places that Shit Went Down that they should have been, or are so chock full of lies and numbfuckery that the only ones who will cling to such obfuscating filth are those who should be losing their heads anyway, so you might as well start building the platform upon which others will mount the guillotine. This particular work did better than [b: The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade|716632|The Fan-Maker's Inquisition A Novel of the Marquis de Sade|Rikki Ducornet|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439855304s/716632.jpg|369082] and [b:The Book of Human Skin|7199784|The Book of Human Skin|Michelle Lovric|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347696810s/7199784.jpg|7868942] and worse than [b:Genesis|264891|Genesis (Memory of Fire, #1)|Eduardo Galeano|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388547039s/264891.jpg|256798], but it has the added bonus of dealing with one of the most epic cases to fuel immigrant fiction since the first five books of the Old Testament, along with the many debacles of black people existing before 1810 and Islam doing its thing in Spain of all places and "Othello isn't actually black. Why would he actually be black. Let's just do the same thing we'll eventually do with Heathcliff and myriad others and call it a day." Knowledge is power, so the fact that I don't really understand why this particular work was hyped up to almost Pulitzer status (then again, I don't really understand any of the choices save for the books written by non white men whom no one reads anymore) doesn't mean I'm not glad it was.

Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me—that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe.

It's so annoying when people play dead in front of current events. What, me? How was I to know all those people would be killed in a country where 49 out of 50 states still enable the legality of murder of trans people in cold blood? How I was I to predict that a living embodiment of hatred and domination would be the popular figure to rule a nation built by the living embodiment of hatred and domination under the fancier names of imperialism and settler state and military industrial complex? How was I supposed to understand the consequences of raping worldwide under various guises of colonialism and salvation and all that tripe include the of birth many a chicken that won't stop coming home to roost until all the pseudosciences still enforcing genocide today come tumbling down? Wikipedia exists, the Internet is officially a flat rate open enterprise, and terrorism wasn't born yesterday, so how is it that the same adults shitting on the Millennials for narcissistic insularity can't have their views of gender and sexuality and race and the past shaping the present shaping the future questioned without mewling and puking themselves into a mass murderering fit? No insanity necessary. Just sadism. And then for the free speech, free speech, free speech, how about my personal freedom to identify myself as an insane bisexual woman in public without rightfully fearing retribution? Know why you don't know many like me outside of digital realms? Cause the ones who revealed themselves within close proximity to people like you are dead.

Slavery, and genocide. The foundations of my country. It took centuries before polite conversation was laughed out of the houses of literature long enough to pen works like these, and it still keeps creeping back in this and many other types of media and politics. Sure, even this work sanitizes to some degree by having the narrator be, despite lying under other modes of oppression, one with the privilege of being outside. The latter's usually a double edged sword, and even the people who will one day call themselves white get a taste of this midway through the pages, but we all know how the story ends. It helps that this work is no Pocahontas and its racialized pedophilia and genocide apologisms, but something that, as far as I can tell, didn't cut corners for fear of that hegemonic brainwash that is the concept of an "audience". Frankly, literature's audience has been force fed propaganda for so long that only those among them who get an equal or greater amount of systematic death threats have any idea of what lit's actually good for them, so the critics can't be trusted. I can't be trusted either, for that matter, although that's probably a given with the majority of those reading this here. If it's not a white cis het sane male, the kind that's been making the world a bloodbath for the last 500 years or so, its words are suspect.

Do you think we did something to them? Ruíz said. No one did anything. That is just how the heathens are. Look what they did to me. He pointed to the dark socket where his left eye had been, oblivious to the role he had played in his own predicament.

Research wise, this book is amazing. Writing wise, it's too straightforward to prove a favorite of mine. What matters, though, is its persistent probing at who has the right to tell a story, whether by fiction or myth or justifying their religion and humanity and life in front of another who is accustomed to denying just that via stories of their own. Words will never hurt me, so that's exactly why we ground our civilization on them for the last several millennia and commit drone strikes for the sake of holding certain definitions sacrosanct. In that way, it's intertextual, but only in the way it matters when it comes to conceptualizing certain opinions having bodycounts, not in pretty prose or fantastical wordplay or any number of abstractions that won't survive nuclear fallout. Despite that, I want my social justice and my delightful linguistic experimentations. Arguing that one will necessary exclude the other, especially with an overwhelming focus on the latter doing the excluding, just tells me you've got something to lose.

It was a speech Coronado had prepared in the capital and it seemed to me that the more he told it, the more he believed in it: that the empire brought order where there was chaos, faith where there was idolatry, peace where there was savagery, and since its benefits were so indisputably clear, it could be spread through peaceful means. I waited for him to finish telling his tall tales so that we could leave, and go north.