Still Waters in Niger

"Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love," according to the unnamed narrator of Kathleen Hill's Still Waters in Niger. Together with her husband and three small children, she once lived in this forbidding West African town, a "city of winds and wheeling vultures, of rocks shimmering in the heat." Yet in the end, its strangeness only made it more precious, and the place became her consuming passion. As the novel opens, the narrator has returned to Niger to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic not far from Zinder. With Zara she retraces the scenes of her young motherhood, searching for the same transcendence she found there 17 years ago. Once again, she longs to become a woman freed from the confines of her own history:

This time, if no other, myth will overtake one's own stumbling story and all the griefs and longings spilled so messily over the sad confusion of one's days will at last assume a noble shape, both tragic and anonymous: Orpheus, unable to resist the backward glance. Demeter, crying for her daughter

Myth does suffuse this story, but not in the way the narrator envisions. As she meets the Hausa women in Zara's clinic, her story becomes a meditation on motherhood, hunger, shame, and love--both universal and specific, metaphorical and concrete. She moves from the clinic's malnourished babies to her own starving Irish ancestors, from her guilt as a mother to her grief as a daughter. In less sure hands, so much abstraction could easily become too much for one slight, plotless novel to bear. But Hill writes like a dream, and her Zinder is both lyrical and precisely observed. Still Waters in Niger is a lovely, satisfying book, as vivid and compressed as a poem. --Mary Park