After reading The Centre, the debut novel of Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi you may reconsider the obsession of learning fast, at any price - the expensier, the better the promise - a language. As a book featuring a young woman translator AND language learning, this book looked as my perfect read as both topics are very important for my professional and personal life. Therefore, I was very happy to be offered the chance to read the book, with the excitement of having to deal with something completely new and intellectually challenging.
And, indeed, The Centre is one of those books dealing with a lot what is discussed right now in the intellectual circles: stories and clashes of race, priviledge, language learning as a class-based priviledge. Anisa is a translator of Bollywood films based in London coming from a middle class family from Pakistan. Through an ex, Adam, a fluent speaker of many languages, she got to know The Centre, a mysterious place for learning languages in less than one month, through complete immersion in the language: no grammar and other annoying details - ask my students how we negotiate every day the vocabulary over the ´der, die das´ - just listening a personal story of the translator, told in her/his mother tongue. Afterwards, she was able to fluently translate from Russian, respectively German.
Everything looks like an intellectual fairy tale, until one day, when she is getting to get some dirty secrets while visiting her supervisor, the daughter of one of the founders. Her curiosity to really understand what is happening to the translators is fully rewarded as she will be revealed by bits a terrible secret. A secret that goes way too far. Does it matter when the price is learning a precious rare language in just two weeks? An idea really hard to ´digest´ - literally - for me.
I was indeed overwhelmed by the diversity of topics, although I enjoyed the intellectual exchanges and conversations, and they maybe flow as in real life: sporadic, spontaneous, unrelated. It is like a flow of though that is coming and going getting lost in the everyday events. Therefore, I felt like this diversity promises too much but you don´t know what to expect in the end. (Talking about the end, it was my favorite part of the book, one of the best I enjoyed in a long while).
Through the characters, the women characters are relatable - my favorite is Anisa´s best exotic friend Naima - and their everyday humour and irony saves the awkwardness of some situations.
When I go through small details, I may have some reserves about The Centre, but when I look from a different angle, more inclusive and self-ironic, it is a very intellectually challenging read.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
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