Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum: book review
Mina created a new life for herself in London, one where she tried very hard to forget where and who she came from. But when she gets a call that her father has passed away, she goes home to Italy for the first time in years and has to sort through what she finds there—a fractured yet strong bond with her sister, a mother who's entirely given over to depression, and a downtrodden bar that was her father's pride and joy. While resentful of having to return, at first, she starts to find pockets of joy in this place she used to feel like such an outsider, reconciling these experiences against those she had on her own in London. There's some romantic sparks, there's deep family connection, and there's a quest to discover her always tender but somewhat unknowable father now that he's gone.
The book is simply beautifully written. Anechoum's choice to write the book in the first person addressed to the "you" of her father adds a haunting layer to the prose, and she blends a clear-eyed straightforwardness of style with poetic moments that meaningfully jump out of the text. Her characters feel lifelike and true as the four part book dips between exploring the daughter's life and her walled off inner-world and telling the story of her father's youth, one she has somewhat mirrored in her own life path. Much of the story arc sees Mina finding a closeness she never had to her father in life by finding the points where she once felt isolated but now see their stories overlap.
This book has everything you could want. In her begrudging return, there's deep, thoughtful work on family and there's also some electric chemistry with a new guy in town, and there's also wisdom gained from reaching out to people from her father's past. Mina is forced to grow up in many ways, but the events also finally give her a reason to and the path forward she's been missing. Plodding, thoughtful, and meditative are all notable qualities of the book, but it's also oddly gripping. The events are simultaneously the small exhalations of life and the sweeping journeys of moving to new places without any assurance of what one will find. I found that every time I picked Tangerinn up, I would read a large chunk of the book without fully meaning to. Anechoum unearths the urgency in this story about grief and return.
As I read the book, I thought about all the different people in my life I want to recommend it to, whether because of the writing style, the framing, or the themes. I also thought of books it is comparable to. Not because it serves the text, necessarily, but it was marketed in a comparison-forward way with the back blurbs bringing up names like Elena Ferrante, Sally Rooney, and Vincenzo Latronico. While I can't comment on Ferrante, I can see the Rooney comparison. I can see it in the general sense of control on the sentence level, but I more see it in the social commentary and the obsession with specialness in this book, a preoccupation that runs through all of Rooney's novels as well. Mina and her father are both special in their oddities, a package that makes being ostracized manageable, and like in Rooney's books, they both go on a journey of unpacking that simple story and looking for the truth beneath it. As for the Latronico's blurb, I saw the tie to his work in the social commentary, in the way that the Western life of Instagram-modeled influencers, so canned and preened and packaged and unthinkingly intelligent for aesthetics, is rendered in a near alien way. They both have an interest in making the deeply familiar strange. Accurate but stripped of its more flattering lighting to make it easier to cut through. The way Mina has a disdain yet obsession with her roommate from London reminded me of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan.
This book certainly doesn't need to be couched within so many authors and books, but I offer them up as an access point if you're a fan of any of the above to dip into this one, which swirls all their best parts together in a truly enriching, thought-provoking way. There are so many layers to the journey in this novel that I forgot as we wound our way to the end that it is a book centered around the grief a daughter has for her father. It wasn't until I read his letter to her that makes up the final pages of the book, that the simplicity yet depth of anguish hit me again, and I found a hot tear welling in my eye, falling onto the pillow. Tangerinn had completely disarmed me without my notice.
Overall: 4.5
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