There are several key phrases that rotate through the prose in their repetition, building like refrains. It is a great success that adds a powerful layer of immediacy and those wary of the unique voice will find themselves caught in the flow quickly and undeterred.
Daringly written in a 2nd-person perspective, the emotional impact is bluntly placed on you, asking you to embody the body of this unnamed principal character while they, in turn, use the ‘you’ to distance themselves from their own pain in order to look at it from the outside. While the frailties of language are a running motif in the novel, Azumah Nelson’s style is so gorgeously powerful to make you swoon in awe.
‘ Language insufficient to reflect the intense mess of being this intimate with another.’ Set to the rhythm of London life and complete with it’s own soundtrack (playlist at the end of the review), this is a gorgeous and tear-jerking will-they-won’t-they love story of two people trying to find their space in a world where violence and racism can spring like a trap at any moment. ‘ We are all trying to live, to breathe,’ he thinks, ‘ and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control.We who are Black.’ This is not, however, ultimately a novel of Black-trauma-though it casts a shadow over everything-but also of Black joy and a glorious celebration of Black excellence and artistry. For the narrator, this is both the struggle towards a relationship with someone he wishes to be open for, but also the deadly realities of how this same Black body makes him a target for police violence. ‘ It’s one thing to be looked at,’ Brithish-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson repeats throughout his astonishing debut novel Open Water, ‘ and another to be seen.’ This poetic novel of love and life illuminates the Black experience and the deeply personal terrors of existing, being oneself while acknowledging that the self is experienced differently through the eyes of everyone else. To be denied the same can be dehumanizing or deadly. To be one’s whole self in the eyes of another, to be vulnerable and understood, can be frightening. ‘ To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breath and live.’
WINNER of the 2021 Costa First Novel Award
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