THE COIN, fascinating trip into a stressed woman's consciousness

THE COIN
YASMIN ZAHER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Jack Edwards of Jack in the Books, aka "the Internet's Resident Librarian," convinced me to procure this book by the way he warbled his fool head off about its glories.

Trust Jack, y'all.

Dangerous, that pretty boy, very dangerous. I'm glad I could get the DRC or this could become far more expensive than I can support very quickly.

The story of a woman's obsessions, her compulsive need to root herself, her intense physicality:

In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman's brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean.

...all of a piece with her exile and search for the indefinable sense of Home.

It's a certain kind of narrative technique that, in the hands of some, can repel me faster than the Enterprise can raise its shields. I'm not a very big fan of "list fiction" where the cataloging of...stuff...stands in for showing me the narrator's a shallow, surface-obsessed person (cf. Quichotte by Rushdie). It gets old and repetitive fast, so is best deployed in shorter bursts in shorter works. Like this one.

A Palestinian is a stateless person, and a rootless person by definition. There is nothing on Earth that can fix this, and yet there nothing on Earth that can prevent a person, any person, from trying to accomplish that result. The narrator's endless fixations, it seems she develops them on the spot as events present her with their objects...I had to look up "Birkin bag" to see if it was a real thing...so she can cause some desired result. "You have to understand that everything outside of me only serves a function," she says at one point. It's not a viewpoint I myownself find all that easy to empathize with.

Yet I feel great sympathy for the narrator. She is cut off from her fortune, she is a lesbian in a misogynistic world that hates her for her genitals and the use she puts them to, she's in the thankless teaching profession. All of these are reasons to feel discontentment. Her tendency to instrumentalize others is both a logical outcome of her life circumstances and a mildly repellent kind of narcissism. It is a difficult balancing act for an author to achieve...realistic character flaws that elicit sympathy while evoking stronger, more visceral negative responses. Author Zaher does a bang-up job of it here.

I recommend the read to any who appreciate a deeper dive into a character's consciousness, as well as those in need of a story that suits the materialist mood of this moment in time. I'm eager for Author Zaher's next work.