The Specters of Algeria Review

Aug 26

by Hwang Yeo Jung
translated by Yewon Jung

Stranger and More Layered Than It First Appears

Published by Honford Star

One of my Bookstagram BFFs, who happens to be a wonderfully grumpy guy whose taste I trust, told me it was one of his favorite books and that I really needed to look for it. I added it to my TBR and figured I would get to it eventually.

Then, maybe a day or two later, I was looking through books for Women in Translation Month, specifically books with women authors and women translators, and there it was again.

Fine. I can take a hint.

At first, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what kind of story I was reading. Two couples have been close friends for years. They are writers and creatives whose lives have been tangled together for a long time. Their children grow up together, and the daughter from one family falls in love with the son from the other.

It felt like it might settle into a slightly unusual love story about two families who had spent their lives together, but it gets much more complicated than that.

The Story Just Keeps Opening Up

The novel moves between the main character's adult life and her memories of growing up in this environment. The adults were close, but there was also a lot of volatility in those relationships, and the older she gets, the more complicated those childhood memories become.

There are old arguments and betrayals. There is violence. There are things people said that affected other people's lives for years, whether those things were true or not.

Then the play enters the story. The Specters of Algeria is also the name of a play inside the novel, and its history becomes increasingly strange as the book goes on. What initially feels like an odd little piece of family history starts pulling in politics, secrecy, performance and the stories these adults have created around themselves.

Every time I thought I understood what kind of story Hwang Yeo Jung was telling, another part of the family's history opened up and made everything a little stranger. I really liked that about it.

One of the sadder parts of the present-day story involves dementia. The main character finds herself caring for a woman who has been part of her life since childhood, someone who sometimes recognizes her and sometimes doesn't. With so much of the book already about memory and the stories people tell about the past, watching her lose pieces of that memory made that part of the story especially sad for me.

The Writing Held All of It Together

This could very easily have become a book where I spent half my time trying to figure out what was happening, but the writing stays remarkably clear even as the story becomes more complicated.

I really loved Yewon Jung's translation for that. The shifts through time, memory and relationships never felt harder to follow than they needed to be, and there is a smoothness to the language that kept me moving even when the story itself was getting increasingly tangled.

It starts with something that seems fairly small and then keeps adding history and complications until you realize just how much has been sitting underneath that original story.

Definitely worth the read.