True story, everybody beware! Although Mowgli’s story has not been proven to be just a clever fabrication, the girl who hung out with wolves (Misha Defonseca: Surviving with Wolves) has admitted that she just made it all up. Now you might think I have preconceptions, but hello, I’m definitely writing this review after reading The Girl With No Name.
If you also read it, two things will be clear about Marina Chapman’s text: one, it’s an unbelievably naive narrative, and two, you must be very gullible to buy into it. Okay, sure, for someone raised by monkeys, a naive worldview is forgivable, it would be different, I guess, if she had been nursed by Nile crocodiles in her early years.
And the monkey part isn’t even that bad. The Girl With No Name feels like a somewhat simple, sentimental adventure novel, a sort of Tarzan-light, in a girly version, swinging minus the vines. (Those unfortunately break, supposedly even under a little girl… let alone the big lug Tarzan. Of course, he’s just a fabrication too, don’t believe otherwise!)
Perhaps only the kind, old monkey stands out from the text (and the other monkeys), saving our hero from poisoning. And the girl’s long hair, because you believe that anyone would run around waist-deep in a mane of hair through the undergrowth without getting tangled in every other bush? I don’t.
Marina Chapman’s troubles come from people. Damn people, again. And it’s not about the little girl with no name communicating like a monkey while people just stare, as if at the movies.
Living among monkeys is exotic. Period. Living among people in 1960s Colombia, in a run-down brothel, is not. Being among people, the protagonist ends up in worse and worse places, and through her eyes, pay attention now!, you get to know a lot of things you ALREADY KNOW. A bed, a table, TV. Not very interesting.
The narrator (and the ghostwriter) knows this too, so she joins the street kids instead. From here on out, it’s David Copperfield – Colombian edition. And no matter how hard the no-name protagonist tries, for example, to be taken in by normal people, she always ends up back on the street. EXCEPT when a thoroughly wicked gangster gang takes her in as a maid, who regularly beat her.
Well, here it becomes most obvious, as the protagonist inexplicably does not escape from here, that The Girl, who had no name, is just a foolish invention. As you witness increasingly ludicrous twists, you begin to feel like you’re watching some sort of pseudo-documentary film that throws bigger and bigger absurdities at you, waiting for you to finally slam your hand on the table and say “Enough already!”
There’s, for example, the unrealistic friend the monkey girl meets from atop a tree, and they (these two linguistic super-talents) DEVELOP THEIR OWN SILENT SIGN LANGUAGE during their spare hours, so that the gangsters won’t overhear them. And then there’s the BOMB!
A person from far away can say whatever they want. If you claim that mongooses raised you in Indochina from the age of five, and taught you snake hunting, who’s there to prove otherwise?
5/10
The Girl With No Name by Marina Chapman – Lynne Barrett-Lee – Book Review
256 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2013 by Pegasus