Book Review: No One You Know

I had planned to post a thoughtful, erudite literary analysis of No One You Know, by Michelle Richmond, the kind of review you might read in the New York Times Review of Books, the kind of review a book of this caliber really deserves.

But I live in the real world, and it’s messy. My parents have been visiting all week, and the seven of us have been passing two sets of bugs back and forth the whole time. The only person who hasn’t been sick is my 10-year-old daughter.

And now it’s Sunday evening, and I’m out of time. So instead of insightful literary commentary, you get just me: pumped full of codeine cough syrup and trying to think through a head filled with congestion.

So I’ll simply state in plain, won’t-impress-nobody language: this book is exquisite. Richmond’s previous novel, A Year of Fog, was one of my two favorite books of 2007, and No One You Know is even stronger. More compelling, more complex, and even more satisfying. Definitely my favorite novel of 2008 (at least, so far).

It’s about Ellie, a coffee buyer who is haunted by the unsolved 20-year-old murder of her sister Lila. A chance encounter in a obscure Nicaraguan cafe leads her on a search to answer the question, once and for all, of what happened.

The opening scene takes place in a cafe (“the kind of establishment where one could order a plate of beans and a cup of coffee any time of the day or night”) at the end of a crooked alleyway in Diriomo, a town locals call Pueblo Brujo, or “bewitched village.”

And indeed, I felt betwitched. I was immediately transported, and a part of me remains there still, sitting in that cafe, eating a nacatamal, watching an oddly familiar stranger in the candlelight as he ducks his head and pulls down his baseball cap.

In fact, so mesmerizing is this book, that a day or two after finishing it, I caught a whiff of coffee brewing somewhere, and I instinctively reached for a spoon, to break the dark crust. For that split second, I was no longer Katrina at all, but Ellie in a cupping room, about to take the first scent and taste of a new blend.

There are so many fascinating elements of this book. The process of making coffee, for one. The study of mathematics, for another. Even a detailed observance of El Dia de los Muertos (of particular interest to me because I also included this celebration in my as-yet-unpublished novel, East of Jesus).

And patterns, patterns that form from randomness. This theme is introduced visually in the first scene, through candlelight flickering on the wall, making images “too lovely and symmetrical to be random.” It comes full circle at the end when Ellie says, “I had long believed that Diriomo was an exceptional place, where the ordinary laws of randomness did not apply. But maybe I had been wrong. Maybe there was symmetry everywhere.”

No One You Know has everything a great book should have: fascinating characters who live and breath independently; philosophical questions for a reader to mull over long after the book has been set aside; exquisite settings that truly exist in the reader’s mind; and a driving suspense that keeps the reader inexorably turning pages even when she’d rather slow down to make the experience last longer.

Reading No One You Know changed me. It changed the way I smell coffee. It changed the way I think about the stories we tell ourselves. It changed my view of math and Nicaragua and the quest to write bestselling fiction. It even changed the way I carry myself through space. It burrowed inside me and took root, and now, like all great stories, it becomes something different, shaped through my perspective.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

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Tags: A Year of Fog, Michelle Richmond