The Medusa Tree: A Novel - Hardcover

I think people should come with maps. Everyone should have her destiny stenciled clearly on the palm of her hand.

Of course Fanny could help me, a little bit. But she doesn't. She only shrugs when you try to ask about the past, as if to say, That's all done, that's nothing that matters now, to anyone, anymore. She sometimes hints that she was lonely, and lucky to have Gerda find her; then she retreats again into her vagueness, the masked safety of her lovely face. But why are you so distant? I want to ask her. Why are you so demure? What do you do when you've tiptoed onto the far edge of yourself and you find you're way too little to get by with, or worse, way too much?

She isn't like my mother, who churns out words like a paddlewheel. Mama, for the most part, likes to keep moving. It's her way of staying afloat, of not feeling the cramp.

My grandmother was the daughter of a French-Dutch father and a Javanese mother. This much I know. There were records from before the First World War, Gerda told mebirth certificates, marriage licenses, parish registriesbut most of these were eventually lost through fires and wars and successive typhoons. There are other, simpler records, of course. I think my great-grandparents must have been an elegant couple. Fanny moves sometimes, inside her old bones, with an effortlessness that can't be taught, with a wordlessness that sometimes murmurs. As if there were a kind of history written inside the body. She had a younger brother named Theo, like Van Gogh's, and an older sister called only Zus. They lived in a house at the edge of a coffee plantation, although it isn't clear now if Fanny's father owned the land. These are only pale memories she passed along to Gerda, and that Gerda, like a spy, slipped across to me. Fanny no longer talks about them.