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A Novel
by Yasmin Zaher
Book Reviewed by:A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind
The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. 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 material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
Zaher's writing will garner comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh and Miranda July for its exploration of bizarre interior worlds, but its explicit rendering of a diaspora experience of empire makes it, in the words of the main character, its own thing. The societal critique that washes through The Coin by default is itself a force of nature: unrelenting and free-flowing but also soft and beautiful. Even alongside the narrator's isolation and seeming psychological decline, the humor of her monologue, which exposes vast contradictions, truths, and failures, rises to the top of her language like the residue of her long, ritualistic baths, warm and human and inevitable...continued
Full Review
(1202 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
In Yasmin Zaher's novel The Coin, the unnamed protagonist, who has inherited a coveted Birkin bag from her mother, enters into a pyramid scheme with a relative stranger that involves buying more of these elusive items and reselling them. In many ways, the Birkin, a luxury handbag made by the French designer Hermès, is the ultimate symbol of upscale contemporary consumer culture, and it is used in Zaher's novel to illustrate the absurdities and artificialities inherent in elite fashion.
While it is now one of the most desired objects on the planet, the Birkin bag's beginnings were somewhat arbitrary and undramatic. It grew out of a 1983 encounter between British-born actor and singer Jane Birkin, who gained fame in France and ...
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