Book Review: The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

 

I´ve started to listen to the audiobook of The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat - read by the actress Bahni Turpin - curious to hear more voices about the Ethiopian diaspora. From this point of view, the book was satisfactory and I am looking forward to explore more the information in this respect.

However, from the literary point of view, I was greatly deceived.

An unnamed teenager girl is the storyteller and one of the most important witness of the story. At the beginning of the story, she is part of an Ethiopian communa in Boston, where she lives with her father. From there on, the story is took back in time, back and forth, built around male characters as her father and Ayale, the mysterious parking lot attendant with a very special mission that we will - unfortunately - let known about only in the very last chapters of the book. 

There is a huge lap between the beginning - which sounded so promising - and the end - which has a grain of fascination. In-between, a lot of dead time(s) for the story development, although the writing flows. Once in a while I just got completely woken up from my letargic - passive - listening, by sentences like that: ´How do you make a new country? You go to a land store?´. But most of the time, was idly waiting for the next chapter to enfolds. And another one. And another one.

There are almost four year covered, and the story oscillates between the narrator´s growing up story and her unclear family situation - what actually happened with the mother we will have the chance to be shared - again - only at the end of the story, and her interaction with her father - and the Ayale, the parking lot attendant, story, whom plays a complex role for her: employer for small jobs around the Ethiopian community, lover-friend-male figure - and a kind of secret agent of national change and revival, in diaspora and abroad. I felt largely frustrated for being left to wait for so long, but it was also the general feeling of guessing the potential of a story that, in my opinion, was largely betrayed.

The Parking Lot Attendant was one of those disappointing reading episodes, but I will keep looking further for more Ethiopian topics and authors in the next weeks...

Rating: 2.5 stars