Open Water

s.penkevich

Rating: really liked it
WINNER of the 2021 Costa First Novel Award

‘To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breath and live.’

To be one’s whole self in the eyes of another, to be vulnerable and understood, can be frightening. To be denied the same can be dehumanizing or deadly. ‘It’s one thing to be looked at,’ Brithish-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson repeats throughout his astonishing debut novel Open Water, ‘and another to be seen.’ This poetic novel of love and life illuminates the Black experience and the deeply personal terrors of existing, being oneself while acknowledging that the self is experienced differently through the eyes of everyone else. For the narrator, this is both the struggle towards a relationship with someone he wishes to be open for, but also the deadly realities of how this same Black body makes him a target for police violence. ‘We are all trying to live, to breathe,’ he thinks, ‘and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control...We who are Black.’ This is not, however, ultimately a novel of Black-trauma--though it casts a shadow over everything--but also of Black joy and a glorious celebration of Black excellence and artistry. Set to the rhythm of London life and complete with it’s own soundtrack (playlist at the end of the review), this is a gorgeous and tear-jerking will-they-won’t-they love story of two people trying to find their space in a world where violence and racism can spring like a trap at any moment.

‘Language insufficient to reflect the intense mess of being this intimate with another.’

While the frailties of language are a running motif in the novel, Azumah Nelson’s style is so gorgeously powerful to make you swoon in awe. Daringly written in a 2nd-person perspective, the emotional impact is bluntly placed on you, asking you to embody the body of this unnamed principal character while they, in turn, use the ‘you’ to distance themselves from their own pain in order to look at it from the outside. It is a great success that adds a powerful layer of immediacy and those wary of the unique voice will find themselves caught in the flow quickly and undeterred. There are several key phrases that rotate through the prose in their repetition, building like refrains. Some of the finest passages in the novel are loving depictions of music and the prose itself has a lyricality that will rock you tenderly in it’s rhythmic quality. It also opens opportunities for dualities in the many themes present, showing a versatility of imagery and metaphor that embodies the contradictory aspects of life. The prose digs at truth and allows its messages to transcend language through sheer emotional impact that would be impressive even for a seasoned author, much less a debut novel. Featuring a photographer as the main character--the You--the novel reads almost like snapshots of moments in time, little vignettes that resonate together to form something greater than the sum of their parts.

‘What is better than believing you are heading towards love?

Front and center of the novel is the teased relationship between a photographer and a dancer in 2017 London, who were introduced at a party by the dancer’s then-boyfriend who was a close friend of the photographer. This isn’t a cliched will-they-won’t-they love story--though on the surface it is still emotional gripping solely on in that regard--and finds it grit and weight in the ways their lives are firmly rooted into the larger world around them. Something truly admirable about Open Water is the way it instills fresh life into aspects that could have felt cliched in lesser hands, such as the way London becomes a character just as present and active as the people within it. Much of the short novel is spent cataloguing not only the clubs and bars the pair go together on their path towards each but also the routes along the Underground, Uber trips and locales around the city they love within. ‘What is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?’ it is frequently asked, and we see how each conjoining street or connecting station is just as much a journey in their lives as each date is to their relationship.

‘The gaze requires no words at all; it is an honest meeting.’

Central to the novel is the concept of being seen by varying gazes. Early in the novel, You are said to be a photographer, something he dislikes being described as. ‘It’s like knowing that you are something and wanting to protect it,’ he explains, ‘if someone else says I’m that, it changes things because what they think about me isn’t what I think about me.’ Which is something I personally think about a lot as someone who both paints and has published poetry but would never want to be called a painter or a poet as it seems to imply a personality I don’t find true in myself. ‘When you let people in and you make yourself vulnerable, they’re able to have an effect on you.’ This leads to early issues of intimacy between them, being afraid to let the other in knowing what that would mean. ‘You’re scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too,’ and he is in a particularly vulnerable state reeling from the death of his grandmother and not feeling the best of himself.

‘You see the policeman’s knee on her back not being seen.’

The gaze also includes society, where the lack of being seen, or ‘the wearying practice of being looked at, not seen,’ can be what makes you vulnerable. This is particularly true for Black bodies in a world where police ‘see someone, but that person is not you,’ and the flow of the novel is frequently interrupted by stop-and-searches simply for being Black on the street at night, or sudden police aggression on those around them as they are ‘plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror,’ the narrator describes quoting Teju Cole. Referencing writer Saidiya Hartman, he explores the way he is not seen by the police as himself but merely marked as a threat:

’Rendering the Black body as a species body, encouraging Blackness which is defined as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious, finding yourself constrained in a way you did not ask for, in a way which could not possibly contain all that you are, all that you could be…’

This is a constant anxiety over him and everyone he knows, that his body marks him as dangerous and therefore easy to dehumanize or destroy. It is why Donald Williams testimony against Derek Chauvin was so powerful when he stayed calm and said ‘I stayed in my body, you can’t paint me out to be angry.’ Perception of anger can lead to violence, and the narrator knows ‘every day is the day, but you pray this day is not the day...you flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.’.

It is no wonder You is so quick ‘to retreat than showing her something raw and vulnerable.’ However, in contrast to the violence and the darkness, this book is also about light. ‘Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas,’ he says, and while this book investigates the traumas it counterbalances with examinations of joy and love. The music of Black artists is instrumental to the rhythm of the novel, as are references to Black film, dance, art and literature (Zadie Smith even makes a small cameo appearance, as does her book NW). Black restaurants, clubs and barbershops are shown with the same tenderness as home and freedom and a barber cutting hair is described with the same eloquent grace Azumah Nelson describes music.

’You know you can be free here. Where else can you guarantee Black people gather? This is ritual, shrine, ecstatic recital. With every visit, you are declaring that you love yourself.’

There is a freedom to be found in joy and being able to be yourself, openly, expressively in the world, ‘where you don’t have to hide.’ This is why she loved dancing, the woman explains. ‘It’s my space. I make a little world for myself, and I live.’ These spaces are so important to these characters who have often had to fight to have one, or to be seen, having attended mostly white schools and been stereotyped all their lives. Taking comfort in Blackness and Black art, they are able to shine and feel free, to ‘stretch out a spine made crooked by keeping small.’ It is beautiful and glorious and these passages are where the novel shines brightest.

Open Water is packed with social insight, covering a massive array of topics in such a short space without ever feeling crowded. Possibly a work of autofiction (the framing of the novel as an apology ‘on the page’ it seems is a nod to Søren Kierkegaard, whom Azumah Nelson quotes at one point, and his own books as an explanation for a breakup) this is a gorgeous little novel overflowing with brilliant prose and gripping emotion. The descriptions of falling in love are outstanding and ring true of the ‘fever dream’ of passing each moment waiting to see the other person again. The tumultuous love narrative, the introspective anxieties and 'theatrics of playing yourselves' will be appealing to fans of Normal People, but it is this in conversation with the racial discourse where Azumah Nelson really shines. This is a novel of vulnerabilities, so simultaneously wanting to hide yourself while also desiring to be seen and valued. A truly moving and remarkable debut.

4.5/5

‘What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point, you must breathe.’

Playlist of songs included in the novel:
Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up
Isley Brothers - Fight the Power
Idris Muhammad - Could Heaven Ever Be Like This
Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered (Album)
Isaiah Rashad - Brenda
Isaiah Rashad - Rope//Rosegold
Isaiah Rashad - Park
Jonwayne - Afraid of Us
Solange - Junie
Kelsey Lu - Church(EP)
A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (Album)
Walt Dickerson - To My Queen
Dizzee Rascal - Boy in Da Corner (Album)
Frank Ocean - Blonde (Album)

Paromjit

Rating: really liked it
Caleb Azumah Nelson's astonishingly exquisite debut novella is a beautifully crafted piece of poetic art that carries an impact well above its relatively short length. It explores identity, what it is to be a young black Londoner, the nature of masculinity, the excruciating exhaustion, fragmentation and trauma of racism, the police brutality, and of constantly not being seen, only perceived as being the black other. Two black artists from similar backgrounds, he's a photographer, and she, a dancer, find themselves moving beyond the parameters of their friendship into the the deeper, open waters of an emotionally intense and intimate relationship as they become lovers. Inevitably, he brings his personal history, its scars, fears and insecurity too, and when the relationship ends and his lover returns to Dublin, the reverberations continue. There is love, heartbreak and hope in the poignant and moving narrative, littered with black cultural references, and which resonates so deeply with our contemporary realities. An unforgettable read. Many thanks to Penguin UK for an ARC.

Angela M

Rating: really liked it
So intimate and introspective, it’s beautifully written with prose that feels like poetry at times. This is a passionate love story, pure and deep without explicit sex scenes, but the beauty of what that passion feels like within is expressed. Two young Black artists, one a photographer, one a dancer, getting to know one another, becoming friends, falling in love. Their journey to find each other, trying to navigate their relationship takes place mainly in the back drop of racism in London. They reflect on shared experiences, the racism of their days in the elite private schools they went to on scholarships, how they coped, when they did not feel seen. The blatant racism on the streets in London as he is stopped by police twice in one day - gutting descriptions of the encounters, a gutting recollection of racist treatment of a young boy . I kept seeing all of the incidents that occur in the US every day with Black people, men and boys in particular stopped while they jog, or drive or are just somewhere that others think they shouldn’t be, for living their lives . The description of these scenes and the introspective view of this unnamed Black man shook me to the core, as well they should.

It’s told in the second person narrative and I read that this type of narrative is meant to draw the reader in closer to what is happening. I can’t exact pin point why, but I found it a bit disconcerting. Maybe it was supposed to do that. Having said that, I found this to be such a profound story on multiple levels and I recommend it highly. My heart soared and it ached when I finished reading this. I originally gave this four stars because the second person narrative didn’t seem to work for me, but then I read some of the passages I had highlighted because they were so gripping and I thought no, this deserves fives stars. A few of those are below. Please note that the quotes are from an advanced copy of the book.

I received an advanced copy of this book Grove Press through Edelweiss.

“Besides, sometimes to resolve desire, it’s better to let the thing bloom. To feel this thing, to let the thing bloom. To feel this thing, to let it catch you unaware, to hold on to the ache. What is better than believing you are heading towards love.”

“We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabeled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black.”

“I dance to breathe but often I dance until I’m breathless and sweaty and I can feel all of me, all of those parts of me I can’t always feel, I don’t feel like I’m allowed to. It’s my space. I make a little world for myself, and I live.”

“Second time this week. Don’t you get tired? Drowned by screech-squeal-scream of get out of the car get out of the car get out of the car. They ordered you to the ground for symbolic purposes. Playing dead. You let out a skinny whimper sharp as a butter knife. You heard the sound rattle in your chest, pressing shut unserious features. Total eclipse. When you came to, you were beside yourself. This is what it means to die, you thought. Total eclipse. The sky turned black. Ha. You looked in one of their eyes and saw the image of the devil. He had an index finger gripping the trigger, like he was holding onto a lifeline....He looked scared. He looked scared of what he did not know, of what was different....he continues to look at you as a danger. You fit the profile.” I could think only of “ I can’t breathe” when I read this.

Thomas

Rating: really liked it
I wanted to like this one but could just not get past the extremely dramatic writing style. While Open Water contains important themes related to Blackness, masculinity, and the possibilities of two young Black artists falling in love, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s writing felt over the top to me and distracted me from getting to know the characters, who felt more like character sketches by the end of the book, especially the female lead. Here are some examples of passages that pulled me out of the narrative:

“The woman’s face splits open with genuine, kind amusement and, as it does so, there’s a hand on your elbow. You’re being pulled away; you’re needed. The dance floor has cleared a little and there is a silence filled with all that is yet to come.” Several phrases perturbed me here: what does her face splitting open mean? Also, the notion of “filled with all that is yet to come” felt more like telling than showing, like I would have preferred more details about the dance floor itself or what about the atmosphere of the environment made it seem so ominous and foreboding, as opposed to being told that there is more to come.

“She hands you a mug and signals to her sofa. You both sit on opposite ends, knees pushed towards your chests, careful not to breach the border of the bisecting cushion; except you both know something has opened, like pressing a teabag and gazing into the cup to find the leaves swarming through boiling water.” I’m honestly just confused about what this simile is supposed to convey, emotionally or otherwise? I feel like instead of delving into the abstract Nelson could have grounded us more in the present moment, like say more about the posture of the characters or how they interacted with each other to convey the tension between them, instead of taking us far away into a simile about teabags and boiling water.

I appreciate the subjectivity of appraising art so perhaps others will enjoy this writing style even though it did not work for me at all. Again, the novel contains important themes related to race and masculinity. The second person narrative and the purple prose curtailed my positive feelings about the book as a whole though.

Elyse Walters

Rating: really liked it
This is one of the most beautiful books of 2021.
...less than 150 pages....
...written in stunning poetic second person....
...Caleb Azumah Nelson’s simplicity and profundity is sagacious > gorgeously brilliant.
...soooo much intimacy I ached,
...I understood,
...I related,
...but I’m white?
...I still related.
...I didn’t cry.
...I didn’t cry.
...I didn’t cry.
Until....
I finished the last pages at 2am...
...closed my kindle....
set it on my nightstand...
and wept soundless tears... next to my sleeping husband.
...I wept...feeling the sadness, hurt, injustice, fear, anger, guilt, and love mixed together in our world.
...I even prayed.

...I’m glad.. you know? Really glad I finished this slim-gem tonight...the day before January 20th inauguration...
Tomorrow we will have a new President and Vice President...
Hallelujah!

Open Water:
“an expanse of an ocean, sea, or large lake which is distant from shore and devoid
of nearby islands or other obstructions”......
Or....
Open Water:
“honor and respect are necessary in our interconnected world”.

“Language fails us, and sometimes our parents do, too. We all fail each other, sometimes small, sometimes big, but look, when we love we trust, and when we fail, we fracture that joint”.

“You have been going and going and going and now you have decided to slow down, to a halt, and confess. You are scared. You have been fearful of this spillage. You have been worried of being torn. You have been worried that you could not repair, would not emerge intact. You have lost your God so you cannot even pray, and anyway, prayer is just confessing one’s desire and it’s not that you don’t know what you want, it’s that you don’t know what to do about it”.

“We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabeled. We who are loud and angry, who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said. But do not worry about what has come before, or what will come; move. Do not resist the call of a drum. Do not resist the thud of a kick, the tap of a snare, the rattle of a hi-hat. Do not hold your body stiff but flow like easy water. Be here, please, you said”.

“How do you cope? you asked”.
“I smoke. I drink. I eat. I try to treat myself well. And I dance”.

“You realize there is a reason clichés exist, and you would happily have your breath taken away, three seconds at a time, maybe more, by this woman”.

“Are you and her together yet then?”
“Who?”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Samuel said”.
“We’re not together”.
“But you want to be?”
“I said, don’t treat me like an idiot. I saw the way you looked at her when you first met”.

“She spends the week apartment hunting in Dublin. She’s left it late; only a few weeks of the summer remain. You don’t talk about what happened, not really. But what more is there to be said that your bodies did not?”

“She’ll go from London to Holyhead and take the ferry to Dublin. On the platform, she kisses you, one foot on the train, one foot off. The whistle blows once. You need to step away from the train but you’re not ready. You have never loved from a distance, but then you have never known love like this. You want to tell yourself, and her, that it will be OK, that nothing will change, but you don’t know. All too quickly, the whistle is blowing again, and the train doors are sliding shut. You hold off the tears until the train has pulled away, until you are stumbling down the platform. It is like this summer has been one long night and you have just woken up. It is like you both dived into open water, but you have resurfaced with her elsewhere”.

“Nothing is more durable than a feeling. Tell her you’re scared of being taken from her. Tell her what you struggle to tell yourself on some days.
Tell her you love her and know what comes with these words”.

“You want to tell her there are some things you won’t heal from, and there is no shame in your hurt. You want to tell her that in trying to be honest here, you dug until shovel met bone, and you kept going. You want to tell her you hurt. You want to tell her that you have stopped trying to forget that feeling, that anger, that ugly, and instead have accepted it as part of you, along with your joy, your beauty, your light. Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be that some of your traumas”.

“You came here, to the page, to ask for forgiveness.
you came here to tell her you were sorry that you wouldn’t let her hold you in this open water. You came here to tell her how selfish it was to let yourself drown”.

Saidiya Hartman....
is an American writer and academic focusing on African American studies ....
She.....
“describes the journey of
Black people from chattel to men and women, and how this new status was a type of freedom if only by name; that the re-subordination was only natural considering the power structures in which this freedom was and continues to operate within. Rendering the Black body as a species body, encouraging a Blackness which defined as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious, finding yourself being constrained in a way you did not asked for, in a way which could not possibly contain all that you are, all that you could be, could want to be.
That is what you are being framed, a container, a vessel,
a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime, before anyone else who is currently in your lifetime, and now you are here, a body, you have been made a body, and sometimes this is hard, because you know you are so much more”.

I reflect again:
Open Water:
“an expanse of an ocean, sea, or large lake which is distant from shore and devoid
of nearby islands or other obstructions”......
Or....
Open Water:
“honor and respect are necessary in our interconnected world”.

Thank you Netgalley, Grove Atlantic, and the talented Caleb Azumah Nelson

5 very strong stars from me.

emma

Rating: really liked it
like poetry if i liked poetry.

this is a short book but a slow read. from page one it's too prettily written to go through quickly, and too searing in content to want to!

short review for a short book.

bottom line: just read it!

Cecily

Rating: really liked it
Winner of 2021 Costa First Novel Prize.

“Language is flimsy... Language fails us, always."
Here, it’s flimsy and reflective, but it doesn’t fail. Poetic prose and liturgical repetition delicately juxtapose a love story alongside the terror of quotidian micro and macro-aggressions that Black people have to live with. Until they don't.

"It's one thing to be looked at and another to be seen."

It opens at a barbers: a place of mirrors and gazes, looking and seeing, and a hub of the Black community. Reflections and reflecting: seeing yourself as others see you.

The contrast between being looked at and actually being seen is stamped on the story, often explicitly, and other times letting the reader fill in the now familiar phrase. Hypnotic, liturgical ripples. Contrasts and parallels: a mirror is passive, open water is active, and the gaze of a camera is different again. Shiny facets of yourself.


Image: A shard of mirror on open water, and a woman holding a mirror by Elisabeth Toll (Source)

It’s told in the second person, present tense. Thus, “you” mostly refers to the unnamed narrator, but sometimes to the young woman, his best friend. It creates a beautifully reflective distance that is perfect for the themes, while keeping the immediacy and directness of the here and now.

The need to tell a story

“You came here to speak of what it means to love your best friend. A direct gaze. An honest man.”
The narrator is a photographer who wants to document Black people in London. He meets a young woman at a party, introduced by her boyfriend. They immediately bond over the shared experience of having been Black scholarship kids at neighbouring elite private schools.
I never felt unwelcome, but there was always something I didn’t feel privy to.”
She is a literature student in Dublin, and also a dancer. Music is another bond; the book has a soundtrack - on vinyl. The needle traces a spiral, like ripples on water, or a dance on a floor.


Image: Sculpture of a dancer, titled “Seaside” by Isabel Miramontes (Source)

“You came here, to the page, to ask for forgiveness and to tell the truth.”

From love to fear

“You’ve been wondering about your own relationship to open water. You’ve been wondering about the trauma and how it always finds its way to the surface… You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate.”

It’s an ethereal, watery portrayal of friendship and love (with echoes of the central question in Normal People and When Harry Met Sally). Then, shortly before the halfway point, there’s a painful memory of being assaulted by vigilantes. It’s detached, but still raw. Probably PTSD. But he’s never told anyone, because it’s normal. Always seen as a Black body. A potential threat. Knowing “that your bodies are not your own”.
“Sometimes you forget you haven’t done anything wrong… that to be you is to be unseen and unheard… a Black body, and not much else.”


Image: Black hands, handcuffed by white police officer (Source)

The tone and balance of the books shifts to deeper, darker waters. More memories surface:

“Drowned by the screech-squeal-scream of get out of the car get out of the car get out of the car. They ordered you to the ground for symbolic purposes. Playing dead. You let out a skinny whimper sharp as a butter knife. You heard the sound rattle in your chest, pressing shut unserious features. Total eclipse. When you came to, you were beside yourself. This is what it means to die, you thought. Total eclipse. The sky turned black. Ha. You looked in one of their eyes and saw the image of the Devil. He had an index finger gripping the trigger, like he was holding on to a life-line. He looked scared, behind the crumpled forehead, the hard eyes, he looked scared. He looked scared of what he did not know, of what was different… You fit the profile. You fit the description. You don’t fit in the box he has squeezed you in. He looks scared, They all did. You wouldn’t accept their apologies, nor their extended hands, because even these are weapons in the darkness.”

“You’re free to go now, they say. ‘Are we ever?” Leon asks.”

Quotes

Many of these quotes occur several times, in slightly modified form.

• “Her eyes… silvered like mirrored glass, the reflection of yourself warped and warbled.”

• “Your eyes meet in the silence. The gaze requires no words at all. It is an honest meeting.”

• “To not fill your time with someone is to trust, and to trust is to love… Trust is to fill that time with each other.”

• “You are not thinking. You’re feeling. You are in a memory of something yet to happen.”

• “It’s a strange thing, to desire your best friend; two pairs of hands wandering past boundaries, asking forgiveness rather than permission.”

• “How does one shake off desire? To give it a voice is to sow a seed.”

• “She takes in her surroundings like a traveller mapping new lands. You watch her eyes graze over the photographs.”

• “You dream the police wrote your death story and only included your name as a footnote.”

• “Too many policemen for one woman. A knee on the woman’s back.”

• “The face of a man who will try again another day” and a victim who “knew he had been marked for destruction.”

• “Sometimes it’s easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.”

• “The scrubbing of identity with syllables that have never been your name.”

• “The silence was heavy with all that was not said.”

Flotsam

I wanted to swim in the open water, but I didn’t believe the instant deep bond from which all else flowed.

The book is flooded with beautiful, reverent repetition. And two inelegant and unnecessary repetitions, one of which may not age well: sweating and Uber.

Kevin (Irish Reader)

Rating: really liked it
Don’t let this rating hinder your interest in the book, as I’m definitely in the minority! I personally just could not get into the writing style, I knew it was in second person narration prior to reading and thought it wouldn’t bother me, but I was wrong. This format and style is definitely something I’m not used to and for me I couldn’t invest in the story the way I wanted to. This may not be an issue for you, which is why I hope my personal reading experience won’t affect yours!

Dwayne

Rating: really liked it
Told in 30 short chapters, Open Water is elegiac and devastating. At less than 200 pages, I was a bit hesitant in purchasing it at first as I’m kinda wary of books that are either too long or too short. I'm either going to get too much story or too little. As slim as it is, I’m upset it took me a while to finish- I should have read this in two days at most. However, the writing will make you want to take this very slowly; you’ll want to highlight paragraphs, even re-read them out loud because of how fucking beautiful and evocative they are. There isn’t much of a story; it’s really about how two Black characters meet and fall in and out of love over the course of a summer. While it’s about nothing in particular, it’s also about everything. As Frank Ocean's mother says on Channel Orange, it's the difference between being happy and being sad. It’s about how the rhythm of Black music informs everyday life. It’s about how Black bodies are seen (or not seen) and how they are allowed to move (or not move) about in our world. It’s about finding love and losing it very quickly. It’s about passion and nonchalance and excitement and ennui. It’s about wanting more but being happy with what you presently have. It’s about sadness and epiphanies; darkness and majestic light. It’s about life setting you afire, then being devastated by the flames. It damn near ripped my heart out of my chest and tore it into pieces. Please please please do yourself a favour and read this book.

Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer

Rating: really liked it
Hugely deserving winner of the 2021 Costa First Novel award - congratulations to Dymphna Flynn and the other judges for a bold and brilliant choice - which had now been followed by the 2022 British Book Awards - for best Debut Novel.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a 26 year old South-East London based writer and photographer – and this, his beautifully elegant and affecting debut novel - now included in the influential annual Observer first novelist article - has a second person narrator with much of the same background.

The author has said of his writing and photography in a way which I think captures the impulse behind this book.

Black people generally are subject to sociological organisation; subject to continuous discrimination on institutional and structural levels; rendered subject and servile and dangerous, criminal, broken. I ask those in front of the lens, those on the page, to bring themselves. Bring themselves whole. Bring themselves true. To bring their quiet, the rich interior lives which are often overlooked. To bring their joy. There’s power in this. Photography, like writing, is a memorial device, selecting a moment to be preserved, one which emerges from the flow of time but is imbued with all that we know, all that we feel. In this way, photography allows us to build our own archives. To assemble our own legacies. Speak our own truths. Our joy.

The story is a transparent one – but with depth: just like the open water of the title.

Two young black people meet in London – she is a dancer (although studying literature at University in Dublin- which I think has encouraged some slightly lazy Rooney comparisons), he a photographer and sometime writer.

Both won scholarships to private schools in South London – both one of a handful of black pupils, he taking refuge and expressing himself (rather inevitably) in basketball, she in dance – and their shared history makes their bond immediate and their friendship deep. This deep bond and an fear of breaking it complicates the trajectory of their relationship towards its inevitable end point, as the two eventually swim out into the deeper waters of love.

Their friendship and relationship, like the book, takes place at different levels – shared trips into the London nightlife (fast food, tube lines, Uber rides, sweaty parties, the Carnival, cinemas) take place against an self-conscious discussion of Black photographers, painters, essayist and authors (as well as of the musicians and Directors whose works they love and experience).

After a Summer together a return of his now girlfriend to Dublin causes the narrator to reflect on his new vulnerability

You hold off the tears until the train has pulled away, until you are stumbling down the platform. It is like the summer has been one long night and you have just woken up. It is like you both dived into the open water, but you have resurfaced with her elsewhere. It is like you formed a joint only to fracture, only to break. It is an ache you have not known and do not know how to name. It is terrifying. And yet, you knew what you were getting into. You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying.

Increasingly also – the micro aggressions and the more overt police prejudices that bookend the experience of the narrator as a young black man in London – also affect his ability to engage in the relationship.

In some ways the relationship itself – and the discovery of the narrator that he has someone in his life who really sees him as he is,

You lost her gaze for a moment and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity. You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful. Love made you Black, as in, you were most coloured when in her presence. It was not a cause for concern; one must rejoice! You could be yourselves.

makes the prejudiced gaze and lazy stereotyping of a structurally racist City even harder for him to bear.

The line “It’s one thing to be looked at and another to be seen” recurs frequently – at first positively but then I feel negatively as a man tired of being looked at can no longer make himself vulnerable enough to be seen.

You’ve been wondering about your own relationship to open water. You’ve been wondering about the trauma and how it always finds its way to the surface, floating in the ocean. You’ve been wondering about how to protect that trauma from consumption. You’ve been wondering about departing, about being elsewhere. You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning. You came here to ask for forgiveness. You came here to tell her you are sorry that you wouldn’t let her hold you in this open water. You came here to tell her the truth.

The second person narration I feel fits the idea of observation – of being looked at and being seen – with the narrator viewing himself – although at times it also adds a certain distancing. And the frequent references to Black theory via the essayists, painters, photographers, authors and the exploration of what lies behind the character’s love of their favourite music and films – has I think both the same motivation and the same sometimes effect.

But overall this is a love story and an examination of what it means to be a British black male, as well as one which is one surely likely to feature on literary prize lists in 2021

My thanks to Viking, Penguin Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

Some references to featured art:

Photography –Donald Rodney, Roy de Carava

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/...
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cou...

Painters – Sola Olulode and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

https://www.solaolulode.co.uk/#paint20
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/l...

Authors and essayists - Teju Cole, Zadie Smith (particularly “NW”), Saidiya Hartman

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/ma...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://books.google.co.uk/books/abou...

li.reading

Rating: really liked it
You guys weren’t kidding when you said this book was beautiful.

TWs to come.

Lark Benobi

Rating: really liked it
Exhilarating prose. What I mean to say is: I was exhilarated. I could feel my heart beating faster as I read on. I had an immediate, visceral reaction to the first words, the first beginnings of a story, and after that it unfolded before me like a billowing curtain. It kept getting better. I'm grateful to be reminded that words on a page can do these things.

Michelle

Rating: really liked it
As soon as I saw this book cover I just new I had to read this. So beautiful.

This is a story of two black artists in London that meet, become friends, fall in love, and break up but it so much more than just that. Being a middle aged white woman I can't even begin to image what being a young black man in the world today would be like. I don't often read from the point of view of a black man trying to be seen in the world and to say it broke my heart on many occasions would be an understatement. I watch the news stories of the many instances of police brutality and I am outraged and I am saddened. Saddened that these are conversations that we still need to have in 2021.

For such a slim novel this is very dense. The poetic prose is something to be savored. I can't even tell you how many quotes I highlighted.

"You can hear fear. You can hear bodies being crumpled. A knee on a crooked back, a book folded in on a crooked spine. We haven't done anything, we haven't done anything, you hear Daniel say. They do not listen. You are heavy and scared. They pat you down and rifle through pockets and ask what it is you're hiding. You want to say the ache, but you don't think they would understand. Not when they are complicit. This goes on until they grow tired, they grow bored, they lose their focus, there is a call somewhere else. Just doing our jobs, they say. You're free to go now, they say.

Are we ever?"

I did struggle with the 2nd person narration in the beginning but as I got into the flow of the story it became easier. This is a poignant and important story and one that I am so glad to have read. 4 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press, Black Cat for my digital ARC.

Liz

Rating: really liked it
This Novella starts off like an ode to love - the falling in love by two black artists, a dancer and a photographer. We see what draws them together, the shared experiences of having attended private, mostly white schools.
Contrasted with the love story are the encounters the young black man faces with the police, walking while black, driving while black,sitting while black. The more violent encounters other blacks face that are recorded that year. It’s the contrast between being seen as unique by one and as an “other” by society. Nelson captures the exhaustion, the overwhelming fatigue of being marginalized. “You’re free to go now, '' they say. Are we ever?”
It’s a unique narrative style - an unknown narrator (finally revealed at the end) speaking to the male main character. The book reads almost like poetry. The book captures a world of experience in its short form.
My thanks to netgalley and Grove Atlantic for an advance copy of this book.

Henk

Rating: really liked it
An outstanding debut, showing sensitivity to words and rhythm that’s both like a poet and a rapper. Not an easy or a quick book, with knife violence, police brutality, vulnerability, systematic discrimination and grief in prominent roles.
You know to love is both to swim and to drown.

Very impressed with this debut of Caleb Azumah Nelson!
The writing of Open Water is poetic and reminded me in a certain way to Ocean Vuong his prose writing in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
In a kind of unusual second person style (with the main character who we follow being called you) we follow two black young people and their relationship. Feeling of loss, mourning and isolation in childhood as the few token black kids on an elite school bind them together, and an almost instant magnetism during a party. Rap and jazz and funk play large roles in the life of the main character, who recently lost his father. He is kind of on the verge of depression (You’re weary. You’re not without joy, but the pain is much, often), not helped by knife violence and police harassment, but there are flickers of joy as well, including a signing session with Zadie Smith.

The atmosphere of the book reminded me of the movie Moonlight, which is funny since the main chatter even watches it, and cries from the experience, and equally I thought of the movie adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk, and that returns around the 2/3 mark of the book as well. James Baldwin his work in general features.

Hot weather and drunkenness in the book seems metaphorical for the fever dream the two, circling each other on the border of friends and lovers, go through.
The distance between them, waxes and wanes, with the hurdles the main character experiences in expressing himself fully being one of the main areas of contention. The whole vibe of being head over heels in love is well pictured, including all the uncertainty that the state brings with it.
A very impressive work, dream like, sensitive and melodic. I'd be eager to read anything else from Caleb Azumah Nelson, 4.5 well deserved stars.

Quotes:
You don’t always like those you love unconditionally.

We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard.

You are in a memory of something yet to happen

Let’s ask: which came first, the violence or the pain?

Knife violence and police brutality

To not fill your time with someone is to trust, and to trust is to love.

It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.

How do you say the things for which there is no language?

Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas.

You live broken, you live small, lest someone makes you smaller, lest someone break you.