V171 reviewed The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby
A shockingly ignorant story
1 star
A short book calls for a short summary. The Optician of Lampedusa follows the first hand account of that very man, The Optician of Lampedusa, as he and seven other Italians happen upon a capsized migrant ship with hundreds of migrants drowning in the water. They rescue all they could on their very small boat, but only a fraction of the migrants could be saved, with the vast majority of them drowning. The rest of the book focuses on The Optician, his wife, and his six friends as they have a Very Hard Time with reconciling the massive tragedy of over 200 migrants that they were unable to save. It touches on tensions with European and Italian policies and the callous attitudes towards migrants from those who do not have to face them directly.
This book was written by Emma-Jane Kirby, a BBC reporter, and is a novelized version of …
A short book calls for a short summary. The Optician of Lampedusa follows the first hand account of that very man, The Optician of Lampedusa, as he and seven other Italians happen upon a capsized migrant ship with hundreds of migrants drowning in the water. They rescue all they could on their very small boat, but only a fraction of the migrants could be saved, with the vast majority of them drowning. The rest of the book focuses on The Optician, his wife, and his six friends as they have a Very Hard Time with reconciling the massive tragedy of over 200 migrants that they were unable to save. It touches on tensions with European and Italian policies and the callous attitudes towards migrants from those who do not have to face them directly.
This book was written by Emma-Jane Kirby, a BBC reporter, and is a novelized version of actual events in 2013 where an optician, Carmine Menna, rescued many migrants from a capsized boat off the Italian coast.
This is one of those books that I find difficult to review because of the difference in my opinions on how well it was written and my feelings towards the story. The writing was fine. Simple and straightforward. No nonsense, nothing remarkable. The dialogue was a bit stilted and artificial but I can't blame a reporter for not having a good handle on writing dialogue. It certainly wasn't bad.
But from cover to cover, I simply could not get past the question of "who is this for?", and as I continued reading, I got more and more frustrated. This is an event that actually happened, and mirrors similar events that continue to happen to this day. This is an important story that should absolutely be told and awareness brought to it, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why the author believed it was a good idea to center the story on the rescuers rather than the migrants.
Maybe this is a bitter, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would expect from a BBC reporter. Centering the experiences of the rich Europeans and how this awful tragedy made them oh so sad rather than centering on the migrants is tone deaf at best and completely callous at worst. De-centering the experience of the migrants is EXACTLY what drove the tension of the book! The poor Europeans were upset that they couldn't help more people and had difficulties dealing with the fact that the migrants weren't being treated like people. And in this story, the migrants were relegated to side characters! It feels so intentionally tactless, I cannot believe it was not done on purpose. How can the central theme of the book be so heavy handed while the book itself stands as a monument to the very thing it is trying to decry?
So I return to the question: who is this book for? What reasonable person who does not care about the lives of migrants will have their mind changed after reading about how privileged Italians got sad after rescuing them? What good is this story doing? Don't read this.
