The thing is, because the book is told entirely from Jevick’s point of view, we only experience that culture second-hand. But also in the end, the positions of the two cultures are flipped – it is Jevick’s homeland that becomes a haven for the written word, and Olondria that reverts back to a more oral culture. In the end, the value of the written word is affirmed, and Jevick even becomes a tutor in his own right. Samatar (and I really should have known this going in) approaches these questions from a far more nuanced perspective. When I started reading A Stranger in Olondria, I was fully expecting the plot to champion those ideas without question. I’m a writer – it says so right there in at the top of this page – so I naturally place value on literacy and the benefits it conveys. Of course, that’s because I’m a product of my culture, and because I occupy a somewhat privileged position within it. When you think about it, though, writing is a big deal – it makes things more tangible yet more remote, somehow. Up until very recently, I didn’t know about the concept of “ orality.” I knew that there were cultures with oral traditions, but I didn’t really think about how they differed from ones with literal traditions.

In the end, Jevick has to face the results of that struggle – what should people value? The book, or the voice? Flesh, or parchment? His quest to learn and record the story of this woman turns him into a pawn between two rival factions fighting for both power and control over the written word. However, after taking part in the Feast of Birds, he is soon haunted by the ghost of Jissavet, an illiterate woman from his homeland. Life in Olondria is intoxicating, and Jevick soon gets caught up in the whirl and bustle of urban life.

Enchanted by this knowledge – by the sound of Olondrian words, by the idea that they last long past the limits of human memory, by the images they conjure, by the idea that life is so much larger than the islands themselves – Jevick yearns to visit Olondria himself, and leaves as part of a trade run as soon as he can after his father’s death. He had a tutor, an Olondrian exile, brought in by his father. Unlike almost everyone else around him, Jevick is literate. Jevick is the son of a pepper merchant on the island of Tyom, one of a remote group of islands to the southeast of Olondria, a vast and powerful empire.

A stranger in olondria review