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.

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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