The Door of No Return by David Diop

My Favorite Book of 2023

Dec 14, 2023

French academic and International Booker Prize winning author David Diop has written an absolutely gorgeous new book of historical fiction set in 18th century Senegal and France.

This is a novel of nested stories.

It opens as the legendary French botanist Michel Adanson lies dying in his house in Paris. All but forgotten today, Adanson came up with a "natural system" of taxonomy, which was distinct from the binomial system forwarded by Linnaeus. He also was the first person to come up with the concept of mutation in evolution. He performed most of his major research in Senegal and is a perfect subject for the Paris-born Senegalese-raised author. Diop has a French mother and a Senegalese father and spent his formative years in Dakar before returning to France for university.

In the novel, the fictional Adanson hides a long letter to his daughter in the secret compartment of a piece of furniture. It is his hope that she will go looking for clues about his life, which she does whilst busy at work building her Arboretum— which is still in the family today. He wants his daughter to understand what happened to him during the fateful trip to Senegal when he fell madly in love with a Senegalese woman.

Halfway through the letter, this woman named Maram tells her story—and that is when things really take off. It is riveting.

As the title of the novel hints, the book ends at Goree Island, that hellish place where slaves in captivity were held before being loaded onto ships to cross the Atlantic like cattle. This is when the myth of Orpheus, in particular the opera Orphée et Eurydice by Gluck is superimposed onto the story of the captive Maram.

The language is lush and my imagination lit up, I spent a lot of time looking at travel videos and documentaries about Senegal. I hope he winds the International Booker Prize again— my favorite book of the year.

I realized then that painting and music have the power to reveal to ourselves our secret humanity. Through art, we can sometimes push open a hidden door leading to the darkest part of our being, as black as the depths of a prison cell. And, once that door is wide open, the corners of our soul are so brightly illuminated that our lies to ourselves no longer have an inch of shade in which they can take refuge, as if exposed to the African sun at its zenith.