Waiting for Diego Garcia

When I first picked up the co-written novel Diego Garcia, its jocular yellow cover and sans-serif title reminded me of a YA book narrated from two different perspectives—each spiraling from opposite ends of the novel—that converge as the characters’ lives become entangled. I remember reading a book like this as a teenager and feeling intellectually satisfied by the masterful use of formal structure as a vessel for different narrative arcs. Other novels that use structural interventions to siphon and/or conjoin characters, like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, construct labyrinths within the text to engage the reader in a kind of game, one in which we are responsible for navigating through, for acing the jumps 1-2-3. Diego Garcia adopts this tradition—which readers might identify as distinctly postmodern—to implicate its audience. The authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, winners of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize, point this structure towards a critical aim: to prove “the beauty of the story is in the listener.” In the act of reading, we become responsible for authoring a narrative from the composite realities they present to us. As if we’ve been chosen to play on their team.