Very informative and well written, sadly I didn't enjoy reading this book. I didn't feel anything, didn't really care for anyone (which perhaps isn't too odd in this story). Glad I read it, because I learned a lot. Mainly I'm just glad I finished it. 

 Lalami is interested in the interplay between the rigidity of oppression and the fluidity of circumstance. Her narrator, Mustafa ibn Muhammad, is brought to the New World as the slave of a would-be conquistador. Mustafa retraces a sprawling odyssey which is both material and psychological, and along the way we are privy to the ways in which his enslavement morphs, dissipates, and stubbornly reasserts itself, over and over again. Mustafa is above all else a storyteller, and this is a story about stories: about thorny memories, powerful fantasies, and contested reports. At heart, Lalami’s themes are the stories we tell about oppression – and the ways in which those stories become real. 

 

The Moor’s Account is engaging, often exciting, and always quite readable, and Mustafa is an extremely compelling narrator. The story we are being told suffers, though, when it comes to its setting. The majority of the book takes place in North America, but America is never rendered as convincingly as the scenes of Europe and Africa are. Similarly, while the Spanish and African characters are brimming with life and individuality, many of the Amerindian characters we meet are sketched in somewhat broad and generic strokes. To some extent, this results from the narrative structure: we only know what our protagonists know. Still, it often seems Lalami is not taking her setting seriously. America is a backdrop for the stories we are being told, but it is never given the space to breathe in its own right. To be sure, connections are drawn between Mustafa’s enslavement and the nascent dispossession and genocide of the native population, but these connections would be more interesting if the American aspects of the story did not feel so half-rendered. Unsurprisingly, the story drags somewhat in these sorts of settings, sometimes indulging in the tropes of survival narrative, or in gestures towards modern social issues which come across as a little on-the-nose. 

 

While Lalami never fully captures the Americanness of her story, there is a lot to value here, from nuanced introspection to perilous adventure, and Lalami’s central theme receives a sensitive and thoughtful treatment.