What an amazing title, don’t you think? I actually finished reading this novel a while ago, but didn’t have time to write about it. Since then it’s haunted me, which I suppose is its way of saying I should write about it.
The almost daughter is a teenager in an unnamed country with a terrible past which no one speaks of. She shares an apartment with her parents and brother in a decaying provincial town. Her mother is learning English over the internet with a woman in Bristol, and regularly visits an old woman, a friend of her grandmother, who lives alone in another apartment and struggles to care for herself. The stories of this old woman ‘with a cave inside her’ and the almost daughter develop alongside each other in 77 portraits, which overlap each other to create a layered whole, richly ambiguous.
As part of a prank, someone sticks a portrait of the country’s president in the lift in the almost daughter’s apartment block, provoking a range of reactions from the inhabitants which unsettle the almost daughter. At the same time, a purple-haired girl called Oksana starts at her school.
The girls of this country are famous for their beauty and the almost daughter and her friends Valya and Elda are training themselves to go for a casting for a model agency. But the almost daughter is also drawn to Oksana, and to a controversial project to create a museum and a monument to those who died in the work camps on the town’s outskirts. The almost daughter increasingly struggles to balance the different parts of her life, to know and not know, until she has to make choices about who she wants to be and how much courage she has.
In the weeks that have passed since I read this, some of the details have slipped my mind. But what has not is the beautiful and precise language, the way that the fragmented structure of the novel reflects both the characters’ uncertainty and ambivalence, and the foggy atmosphere of disinformation and repressed speech. It really is not like anything else I have read and it’s one of those books that changes you.