THE SILENCE OF THE CHOIR, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s second novel, “The Silence of the Choir,” opens with the arrival of 72 migrants in a fictional Sicilian village called Altino, an ideal narrative framework to test a novel’s empathetic capacity.
The migrants may be the newcomers, but Sarr is too interesting and thoughtful a writer to simply answer the inevitable question: Will the good people of Altino learn to care about these men?
His interest, rather, is in finding what kind of narrative form, if any, is best suited to such a task.
Traoré’s story is so hard to tell that Sarr interrupts the narration halfway through and turns it into a play.
Persons:
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Alison Anderson, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s, ”, Mount, Sarr, Jogoy, Fousseyni
Organizations:
Choir
Locations:
Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Mount Etna, Sicily, Malian