What I’m Reading: “Akin” by Emma Donoghue
Just over eleven years ago, I read and enjoyed Room by Emma Donoghue—so I’m somewhat amazed it’s taken me this long to read another of her novels!
I read Akin immediately after Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, which turned out to be interesting because they are “akin” in a number of ways. Perhaps I should say “strangely interesting” because there is no real, substantive connection between the two works, but the overlaps between them were fascinatingly coincidental for me as a reader.
Levi’s The Periodic Table may be memoir rather than fiction, but its centres on WW2—as does Akin, its focal setting being Nice, a French city that sits on the border with Levi’s Italy.
In addition, the fictional character at the core of Akin’s WW2 history, Margot Personnet, is based on the very real historical figure of Marguerite Matisse. Emma Donoghue states this in the Acknowledgements, calling the character of Margot “…in small part my homage to Marguerite Matisse…”
Primo Levi’s war experience was initially one of persecution, for being Jewish in Fascist Italy, before being transported to Auschwitz in 1944. Marguerite Matisse was active in the French Resistance and had been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, and was being transported to Ravensbruck, when she managed to escape.
Akin is not solely, or even directly and exclusively, about WW2, however. The story is set in the present, when Margot Personnet’s son, the 79-year-old Noah Selvaggio, is about to embark on his first visit to Nice since he left it as a four-year-old in 1944. Three days before his departure, he is dragooned into acting as caregiver to his eleven-year-old great-nephew, Michael. Michael’s father, Noah’s nephew, is dead; his mother is incarcerated; and his material grandmother has also recently died.
Akin, therefore, is primarily about the unexpectedly thrown-together Noah and Michael, and about the realities of children falling through the cracks—and ‘safety nets’—of modern society. Although the first part of Noah and Michael’s story is set in the United States, we only have to follow the news here in NZ to be aware of the same issues.
So Akin is what I think of as a ‘diamond’ in form: the midpoint of the diamond is Noah. One apex is Michael, the facets of the story centered on their developing relationship. The second apex is Margot, Noah’s long-deceased mother—and the story pivots on the realization, once he reaches Nice, that he may never have truly known her.
Noah’s gradual unpicking of his mother’s past follows, particularly her WW2 activities, interwoven with his relationship with Michael: family, but also strangers to each other.
Nice itself, both in the present and past, is powerful in shaping the story, especially through reference to the photography of Père Sonne (Margot’s father and Noah’s grandfather), which has been groundbreaking in the early part of the 20th century. His counterweight in the novel is Amber, Michael’s incarcerated mother. Both are (largely in Amber’s case) off-page players; nevertheless, they are significant in shaping the story.
Akin is a book about the familial relationships that bridge present and past, and the network of threads, some tangible, others rarely glimpsed, that connect generations. Although this book is not so dark as Room, if you like Emma Donoghue’s writing, and enjoy authors such as Ann Patchett (Commonwealth; The Dutch House), Kate Atkinson (Behind The Scenes At the Museum; Human Croquet), and Sebastian Faulks (Charlotte Gray; On Green Dolphin Street) I believe you may enjoy Akin.
I purchased the trade paperback edition of Akin (335 pp), published by Picador UK in 2019.
I too greatly enjoyed Akin, as well as Sebastian Faulks and Kate Atkinson. It is one of those books where the main characters are so far apart at the beginning and gradually come together over the course of the book, as may often happen when strangers meet and as they get to know each other.
Emma Donoghue’s an insightful writer, with a lightness of touch to Akin that works with the material.