Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
A dive into Laila Lalami's works and short stories
Last week we discussed The Other Americans by Laila Lalami on The Novel Tea podcast. Though I enjoyed Lalami’s writing style, the plot and character depth didn’t stand out to me. I recently picked up a compilation of short stories by her called Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and in this newsletter, I will discuss my thoughts on this story.
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Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits starts with the scene of a group of Moroccan immigrants on a small boat trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in the hopes of settling into a better life in Spain. They all wonder what events in their individual lives led them to this point, but they don't communicate much or even know each other's names. To their shock, their captain abandons them before they reach the Spanish shore, and they are all tossed overboard and forced to swim to survive.
The story then backtracks into short stories to understand the lives of four immigrants onboard this boat: Murad, Aziz, Halima, and Faten. These stories dive into the happenings in their lives that eventually bring them to the decision of this dangerous immigration path. These short insights show us themes of domestic violence, corruption, economic struggles, and religious battles.
I usually don’t reach for short stories because they lack key elements I look for when reading such as character depth, plot twists, and descriptive writing. However, a few recent examples have changed my stance. In season one of The Novel Tea, Shruti and I discussed Passing by Nella Larsen (click here to listen to the episode). We loved discussing this book so much that we did two episodes because one just wasn’t enough. This was my first real experience of a well-written short story that I could not put down, and it got me reaching for more novellas. Another example was Little Death by Lisa Tuttle, which I talked about in The Novelties episode on the podcast.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is a short story that I thoroughly enjoyed. We stay with each character just long enough to sympathize with their situation and grasp why they made such a big decision. The way the book is structured so we have a big picture viewpoint at the very beginning, and then zoom into each character separately gave the book focus and a great foundation. There is a mystery element after the immigrants are tossed overboard because we do not know the fate of whether they were able to reach their goal of settling in Spain or not, and reading through each character’s perspective gives hints to their ultimate ending.
Reading Laila Lalami’s background of why she decided to write these stories makes this book so much more meaningful.
“The news was relegated to the bottom of Le Monde’s online page—fifteen Moroccan immigrants had drowned while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat. They had left Tangier on a summer night, trying to navigate the short distance—only ten miles—that separates their homeland from Spain, and from the rest of Europe, where they hoped to make a new life for themselves. The boat was overloaded and ill equipped to handle the strong Mediterranean currents, and it capsized a couple of miles away from the coast. There were no survivors.
I read the article from my desk, in Los Angeles, where I was working as a computational linguist. By then, I had been living in America for eight years and I was always hungry for news about Morocco. I thought at first that the disaster was an isolated incident, a blip, a bizarre turn of events. Over time, however, the incidents seemed to multiply. Nearly every week in the summer of 2001 there was a report about arrests by the coast guards on either side of the Mediterranean”
— Laila Lalami
One of my biggest critiques of The Other Americans was that Lalami only briefly touched on some big issues, which made me feel like the plot was inconclusive and a little incomplete. Reading Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits made me understand and appreciate The Other Americans because Lalami has a similar approach of spanning the story through short dives into many characters. In both books, each character has deep-rooted issues that we only see for a short period, but Lalami has the ability to brush on these big themes in a way that makes the reader still feel curious, sympathetic, frustrated, or angry.
I loved diving into Lalami’s work and discovering her style and approach in a way that changed my initial thoughts on The Other Americans. Sometimes, understanding a book you didn’t love might take a little extra effort from the reader to understand the author first.
—Neha
Up Next
Neha and Shruti discuss The Savage Detectives, the story of two poets and the people and world that surrounds them, as they journey across Mexico. We talk about some of the cultural context of this book, and the challenges we faced while reading, and share some strong opinions. Tune in to the episode on October 16th, 2024!