For a long time, I carried around a vague idea for an immigrant novel. While I knew it would be inspired in part by my own experience coming to America, I’d have scoffed at the idea that an Indian college graduate teaching at a Boston-area private school while harboring dreams of becoming a writer would be sufficient fodder for a novel.
I wanted to write a “big book,” one that spanned continents and generations, with multiple perspectives and story lines. I made lists and diagrams and chapter outlines, but each time I tried writing a first chapter, the prose came out false and pretentious-sounding and left me discouraged.
It took an earth-shaking event in my personal life to tear down my defenses enough that I could draft a short, simple scene in first person: a young woman from India, who’s about to move to Boston, Mass., for her first job post-college, meets with her future landlord at one of his properties. She doesn’t overtly say much about herself, but her filtered reportage of what he says conveys the complicated ways she perceives and is perceived as a foreigner.
The need for more than one plotline or multiple perspectives fell away: the narrator, with her outsider’s vantage, proved interesting enough to carry the whole story.
Being an immigrant—or a child of immigrants—can mean grappling with disparate rules, cultures, languages, and histories as a matter of daily existence. None of the following books are the voluminous tomes I’d wrongly assumed were required to do justice to this sort of layered story: rather, they are trim narratives that often employ unconventional elements of storytelling to convey the complexities and contradictions of an outsider’s experience.
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W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants
Written in the same vein as his novels Austerlitz and Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s hybrid of text and photos distorts the line between reality and fiction. His prose has that unique quality of making time feel simultaneously static and in a state of rapid flow, and the overlay of past and present is a particular focus here of the migrant experience.
The narrator, himself a post-WWII emigré from Europe living in Manchester, England, attempts to reconstruct the story of his former schoolteacher, the late Peter Bereyter, who left Germany for Switzerland after he was forbidden by the Nazis to teach, but then returned to his hometown after the war and eventually committed suicide. Paul’s story is the second of four distinct, male, Jewish experiences of exile and resettlement narrated in the book.
Separately and in concert, these narratives evoke the wounds that migrants of war may carry with them to their places of refuge.
Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills
Another story shaped by the traumas of WWII, here a Japanese woman now living in England recounts, in the wake of her daughter’s suicide, her strange encounters decades earlier, in Nagasaki, with another woman, Sachiko.
This was Ishiguro’s first novel, and as in his most renowned work, Remains of the Day, he conveys the powerful, contorting forces of memory through the narrator’s quiet remarks.
Sigrid Nuñez, A Feather on the Breath of God
Echoing the quartet form of The Emigrants, Nuñez’s first novel comprises four sections that crystallize into a mosaic portrait of a child of post-WWII immigrants in New York City. In the first two sections, Nuñez’s narrator tells the stories of her late parents: her Chinese-Panamanian father, Chang, and her German mother, Greta, who understood one another very little and whom she wishes she could have understood more fully.
Then follows a meditation on her brief but intense study of ballet as a teenager, an experience that helped nudge her toward her eventual path as a writer. The closing vignette is of a relationship with a charismatic but dubious Russian taxi driver.
Nuñez’s prose is wry and lyrical, and her parenthetical asides add humor and self-awareness to this second-generation immigrant story.
V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State
Naipaul’s work has always unnerved and fascinated me—its disturbing, tragicomic portraits of misogynistic, racist, male characters from post-colonial Trinidad and India. Here we have three novellas framed by a prologue and epilogue, and the unifying theme is of freedom being thrust on the characters.
In “One out of Many,” Santosh, an illiterate cook brought to America from Bombay by his civil servant employer, finds himself wandering around Washington, D.C., in bare feet and observing with fascination a group of Hare Krishnas dancing on a city lawn.
Later he flees his employer, is given shelter by the proprietor of an Indian restaurant, and eventually obtains a green card by marrying the Black woman who used to clean his employer’s apartment and whom he categorizes as belonging to the hubshi, that “wild” race he is shocked to find “roaming” the city streets of D.C.
Nazlı Koca, The Applicant
Leyla, a young Turkish woman who came to Berlin to study fiction writing, is now in danger of losing her student visa. She cleans hotel rooms and dabbles in prostitution to support herself while trying to keep up her writing.
Eloquent and passionate, Leyla has a lot to say, often in internal monologue, about the exploitation of her country’s people by Germany and the political turmoil in Turkey that has brought tragedy for her family. There’s plenty of partying, drugs, and alcohol in her Berlin social life—a lot of it driven by depression—and a bittersweet romance with a taciturn Swede who dangles the promise of stability were she to marry him and obtain EU residency.
Bruna Dantas Lobato, Blue Light Hours
Another novel about a young student leaving her home country, this time Brazil, for college, Blue Light Hours is largely set on a spartan Vermont campus where the unnamed narrator and her mother spend nightly hours on Skype keeping each other abreast—not always truthfully—of their now-separate lives.
Beyond that tie to family, the young narrator is content to spend hours by herself, studying, reading, and documenting her rural New England environs—an example of how embracing solitude can be useful for a solo immigrant.
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