Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel
Unavailable
A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel
Unavailable
A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel
Audiobook8 hours

A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A New York Times Notable Book

A hypnotic, spellbinding novel set in Greece and Africa, where a young Liberian woman reckons with a haunted past.

On a remote island in the Aegean, Jacqueline is living alone in a cave accessible only at low tide. With nothing to protect her from the elements, and with the fabric between herself and the world around her increasingly frayed, she is permeated by sensory experiences of remarkable intensity: the need for shade in the relentless heat of the sun-baked island; hunger and the occasional bliss of release from it; the exquisite pleasure of diving into the sea. The pressing physical realities of the moment provide a deeper relief: the euphoric obliteration of memory and, with it, the unspeakable violence she has seen and from which she has miraculously escaped.

Slowly, irrepressibly, images from a life before this violence begin to resurface: the view across lush gardens to a different sea; a gold Rolex glinting on her father's wrist; a glass of gin in her mother's best crystal; an adoring younger sister; a family, in the moment before their fortunes were irrevocably changed. Jacqueline must find the strength to contend with what she has survived or tip forward into full-blown madness.

Visceral and gripping, extraordinary in its depiction of physical and spiritual hungers, Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about ruin and faith, barbarism and love, and the devastating memories that contain the power both to destroy us and to redeem us.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 30, 2013
ISBN9780804120807
Unavailable
A Marker to Measure Drift: A Novel

Related to A Marker to Measure Drift

Related audiobooks

Literary Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Marker to Measure Drift

Rating: 3.948983673469388 out of 5 stars
4/5

49 ratings8 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Now everyone knows that the author is a pedophile. But I started reading this before I knew that. This book is a story that I immersed myself in. Jacqueline is the last member of her family after a brutal political coup takes place in Liberia. By her ex-boyfriend's help, she has a Spanish visa. Now she has made her way to the a Grecian island and she must find a way to survive as a homeless person.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This deeply unsettling novel focuses on Jacqueline, a 23-year-old refugee from Liberia who has escaped that country’s brutal second civil war, which lasted from 1999-2003 and resulted in the overthrow of the corrupt regime of Charles Taylor, who was exiled to Nigeria, and the installation of a transitional government. Jacqueline has landed on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, a popular tourist spot, at the height of summer. She has come there with the clothes on her back and little else: a change of underwear, a couple of extra t-shirts, a few toiletries, and no money. She knows no one on the island. Initially, Jacqueline spends her days in solitary fashion. Suspicious of everyone, she drifts from place to place, trying to blend in with the tourists and avoiding activities that will attract unwanted attention, scavenging food only when she can be sure no one is watching. Her only company are her memories of the horrors she witnessed and the imaginary voice of her mother, with which she carries on a continuous bantering conversation. Gradually we learn that Jacqueline’s family was well-off and privileged. Her father was a minister in Taylor’s government. Her younger sister Saifa was a pampered, unruly but perpetually happy teenager who became pregnant, and her mother a domineering alcoholic. Jacqueline herself went to school in England, and after graduating, against her mother’s strong advice, returned home, where, as the fighting started, she became embroiled in an affair with a French journalist named Bernard. In Santorini she finds a cave near a beach and sets herself up with a bed made of cardboard and her meagre belongings. But when some men in the town notice her, she becomes fearful of their intentions, abandons this refuge and walks to another town, where she finds a place to sleep in a half-constructed hotel near another beach. Driven by the need to eat and replenish her supplies, she poses as a student visiting the island who is raising money for her studies by performing foot-rubs for tourists, and with this ruse manages to acquire enough Euros to feed herself and buy a few things. Her other craving, every bit as urgent and one that inevitably wears her down, is her need for human contact, and near the end of the book she befriends a young waitress named Katerina and finally tells her story. From the beginning, Jacqueline’s story is the crisis point to which Alexander Maksik’s suspenseful narrative is building, and though the reader will probably have guessed the gist of what is revealed from the clues that are dropped along the way, it does not prepare us for the full horror of the details. A Marker to Measure Drift, deliberately paced, often dreamlike, is a novel that engages the reader with a promise of the revelation of past events rather than the more customary “what happens next” enticement that many novels dangle to keep the reader turning pages. We keep reading because Jacqueline is as fascinating as she is sympathetic: any uneasiness we might feel about the shock and revulsion we know are in store for us is more than offset by the desire to learn the why and the wherefore of Jacqueline’s tragic story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely incredible. It builds up slowly, though, so you need to stick around for the ride. The last 5% of the book had my heart pounding. Half of me didn't want to read on, but it was far overpowered by the other half that was clinging to every word. Tremendously powerful.

    The less you know about the book, the better. If you are reading this, stop now and just read the book instead.

    I am now going to read something happier. Sophie Kinsella, here I come.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A remarkable book about surviving a horrific trauma when everything, including your country, has been taken from you. Maksik's prose is luminous, and the story he tells about a young, well-educated, formerly wealthy woman who has escaped from the civil war which has engulfed Liberia is heart-breaking, completely believable, and full of a profound kind of grace which makes her journey bearable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Beautifully written, a captivating story of a young woman's life following her escape from Liberia. The story of what happened to her family unfolds slowly, and is haunting. Because the books was so beautifully written, I feel that I'm being unfair in giving it only three stars. The writing was much better than that, and an author should not be put down simply because I was uncomfortable with some aspect of the book that I can't put my finger on. Perhaps I simply read the book at the wrong time, or perhaps the author accomplished his purpose by making me uncomfortable. The legacy of unspeakable acts should never make one comfortable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Maksik's novel is definitely engaging if you love wordplay, although he overuses anaphora quite a bit with the word "She" at the beginning of sentences. His descriptive phrases are lucid, even at Jacqueline's height of hallucination phases. The ending, though -- yikes (I know that's not literary and highbrow enough). The ending is very hard to read and haunted me; I know those things actually happened in war-torn Liberia (and other countries, as well), but it is still hard to grasp.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jacqueline is on Santorini, a Greek island, but she is not a tourist. She has escaped from the horrors of civil war in Liberia where her father was a loyal follower of President Charles Taylor (who years later was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity). Alone and adrift, she must grapple with a past that haunts her and find a way back into normal society.The novel is about memory, specifically how to live with memories: “to live, one must be able to live with memory because memory was the constant. Even for [Jacqueline], even in such a precarious life, when there was danger and uncertainty everywhere, when her immediate life demanded so much of her, still, memory was the constant.” Jacqueline has difficulty separating memories from her current reality: “It was becoming more and more difficult to distinguish what was happening and what had happened. What was memory and what was not.” She sees and hears loved ones who are not there, especially her mother who constantly dispenses advice about how to behave in situations in which Jacqueline finds herself. Understandably, Jacqueline finds herself questioning her sanity: “She was alone. . . . Nothing but memory and memory seemed like madness. . . . she was again having a difficult time distinguishing between madness and memory.”Jacqueline escaped from horrors about which she has spoken to no one. When she does eventually give voice to her traumas, she finds “the distance between recollection and experience is shortening. It is difficult to distinguish between memory and storytelling, between storytelling and experience, between this present life and the other.” The suggestion is that by telling her story, she begins her healing, though her future is my no means secure. It is significant that she has chosen to live on an island which is in constant threat of an earthquake or volcanic eruption; a woman she meets tells Jacqueline, “’We are not a permanent place.’” Of course, given her past experiences, one can understand why she thinks “And maybe that was the way to live. Always in fear of ruin.”I found the book a slow read at the beginning; it took me a while to become engaged. Much of the first part is disorienting since we see the world from the protagonist’s interior monologue and so there is little explanation. Facts about her situation and past are revealed slowly as she focuses on day to day survival: satisfying her hunger, finding shelter, and trying to avoid thinking too much about the brutalities in her past. Of course, the reader’s feelings of disorientation are a reflection of Jacqueline’s feelings; utterly alone, homeless, and impoverished, she lives in a perpetual state of uncertainty. Some of the reader’s questions are never answered. How did Jacqueline come to Santorini? (The beauty of the island serves as a dramatic contrast to the ugly memories that haunt Jacqueline, and the wealth of the tourists contrasts her destitution, so the author’s choice of the location serves a literary purpose, but I would have liked to know how she got there.) Does Jacqueline face real danger from the Senegalese men and, if so, why? (If this encounter is intended to create suspense, why is it not further developed?) Why was Jacqueline, the daughter of a government minister, spared by the rebels? (The rebel leader’s explanation does not seem realistic.) Why does Jacqueline express such hatred for Bernard? (Disappointment and disdain I can understand, but her beating a rock with a “wild violence” imagining she “swung hard enough to break Bernard’s teeth, to shatter his jaw, to crack his skull, to break his fine nose . . . until he was senseless and bloodied” seems extreme.) Why doesn’t Jacqueline call Helen when she believes Helen’s family would help her. (It might be pride or a reluctance to talk that keeps her from making that phone call to London but some clarification would be helpful.)I found myself getting frustrated with Jacqueline. She tends to see herself as a victim and never really examines her or her family’s culpability. She lived a life of privilege in Liberia and even worked for the government. Having attended an English boarding school, she had opportunities to see the outside world and yet she accepted the status quo unquestioningly. She acknowledges only that she erred by returning to her home country despite her mother’s pleas to the contrary and by not listening to her lover’s many repeated warnings about what was happening. She describes herself and her family as “willful, arrogant, stupid, blind, proud” but never actually considers their behaviour as directly enabling Taylor’s atrocities. She is harsher with her father, but even then she considers his great mistake was that “’He kept us [in Liberia] too long.’” I hoped Jacqueline would demonstrate more personal growth, but perhaps my expectations were too high. Occasionally, I felt like my emotions were being manipulated as I read this book. This was especially true when reading the climax. A pregnant sixteen-year-old seemed added for extra horror. The graphic nature of the denouement overshadows the rest of the novel; it is distracting and detracts from the overall quality of the novel. “Shock and awe” is not a literary technique.Despite its flaws, the book has sufficient qualities to recommend it. The lyrical language, for example, is certainly noteworthy. The novel definitely qualifies as interpretive fiction with its serious themes which do indeed give the reader food for thought. Along with "A Marker to Measure Drift," I’d suggest reading "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" by Anthony Marra (whom Maksik mentions in his Acknowledgements as a “partner in writing what we do not know”) which also examines the role of memory in a civil war, and "My Heart is Not My Own" by Michael Wuitchik which describes the civil war in Sierra Leone, a conflict in which Charles Taylor was involved. Note: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Right from the start, I have to say that I really enjoyed Alexander Maksik’s atmospheric character story, A Marker to Measure Drift. Told from the first-person perspective of Jacqueline, Maksik shows a deft touch juggling her physical trials with her unreliable mental state. Maksik’s writing is hypnotic and creates an authentic and unique character in Jacqueline. While the narration allows us to get a feel for what has brought Jacqueline to the edge of madness – and arguable over the edge – it isn’t until the very end that we actually confront the full horror of what has wrecked her young life and the immense courage it takes to even attempt to go on, no matter how haltingly. I was completely absorbed by A Marker to Measure Drift. At 240 pages, it is a perfect length for the story it tells and is written with remarkable ability. I’m not going to call this the best novel I have read this year, but it is certainly one of the better ones. Some readers might have difficulty with the unreliable narrator or the lack of a clean conclusion, but for me, this was one of the best parts. A Marker to Measure Drift is certainly worth putting on your reading list.