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Today’s BTBA post is from Sofia Samatar, author ofÌýÌýand Assistant Professor at James Madison University.Ìý

Reading for an award jury is a special type of reading: very alert and very fast. IÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™m finding that the , combined with a certain sharpness in my eye, which has to read and judge at the same time, is enhancing my sense of the structure of a book.

ItÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s like developing a kind of x-ray vision. When I look back at the books IÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™ve read for the award, I can see the bones.

: Six characters. Their monologues make up the novel. ItÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s an explicit homage to Virginia WoolfÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s The Waves, and the text has a wavelike motion, one voice drawing back in order to make room for the next, then recurring again, so that a pattern seems to rise. But what kind of pattern is this? ItÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s less regular than waves; itÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s more like a crazy quilt. The dominant color would be Camilla, whose name arises often, and knits the book together by appearing, in bold, in section headings: CAMILLA AND THE HORSE, CAMILLA AND CHARLES, CAMILLA AND THE REST OF THE PARTY. Even though Camilla doesnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t appear for the first few chapters, you can feel the importance, the centrality, of Camilla. Maybe Camilla isnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t a block of cloth, but rather the thread that travels all over the quilt, stitching it together.

And what about Alwida? SheÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s the one of the six who appears least often. A small triangle of fabric in the corner. I read a review of the book that said there are five narrators, not six; the reason for this must be Alwida. SheÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s easy to miss. SheÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s also the least intellectual of the characters, the most active, practical, a doer, a traveler. What is the point of Alwida? Why create six characters and give them not only such different roles, but such different portions of a book? In the case of a crazy quilt, the amount of each fabric is determined by how much you haveÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½”that is, the condition of your rags. Maybe Camilla comes from a dress that wasnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t worn very often, so thereÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s a lot of it, while AlwidaÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s from something worn every day, outside, leaving just a few scraps.

(This explanation still doesnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t satisfy me; I keep thinking, why Alwida? Why so little Alwida? In orthopedic terms: a bone spur.)

ThatÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s one example of the way I find myself looking at novels lately. Here, briefly, are two others:

: A series of splinters branching out of a single point. This point, which bulges in a monstrous way, always producing new growths, is the hospital; the splinters are the psychiatric patients interred there.

: A lovely adolescent skeleton, perpetually on the verge of change. ItÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s the story of a young boy, who may be a girl, staying at a dear friendÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s house; no, itÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s the story of the dear friendÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s mother and her much younger lover; no, itÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™s the story of an extended family, adoption, and mistaken identities. Ultimately, it doesnÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½™t want to take a final shape, to calcify, to die.