Book Review: Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham

Rating: 4.5⭐

“To be haunted by a memory and to be haunted by the feeling that you have lost all memory are nearly the same thing; it is all lost. You are never getting the real thing back.”

Six months after losing his younger brother Kai to drowning, Damien, consumed with grief at losing the only family he had left, leaves his job as a cook in a restaurant on a journey with no destination in sight. His journey takes him across a grueling trek through the desert where he meets a Goatherd who directs him to a village, “a land for the grieving”, where he believes Damien will find what he is looking for. Damien lands up in the village, which is home to a struggling fishing community on the day of the funeral of one of its residents. Damien finds himself amid the deceased Carla’s family, her mother Ana-Maria, and Carla’s younger sisters Paola and Marta. Rumored to be “Bruja” whose fate is intertwined with that of the village and therefore influential, Ana Maria is an imposing presence. She is kind to Damien and employs him in her family’s shop, but rumor has it that she is the one responsible for Carla’s death and her youngest daughter Marta believes this to be true. Between Ana Maria and Marta’s manipulations, Damien finds himself unable to figure out the truth behind their intentions. Paola has a deep connection with nature and tries to maintain peace within the family. She also expresses concern for Damien’s well-being and her mother’s influence on him. On the personal front, Damien is also grappling with a mystical physical transformation that is symbolic of his relationship with the very waters that took his brother from him. We follow Damein as he navigates his grief and his dynamic with the family who has befriended him, as the village gears up for an impending storm that could possibly lead to the destruction of the entire village.

“Humans over the years have lost their ability to commune with the ocean and desert and mountains everything below and beneath, all the sacred directions stop from the overfished waters to the now empty mines, the polluted rivers now conduits for oil, the slashed and burned forests choking out what lungs we have left. It is only a matter of time before we are all evicted. Might be too late to stop the storm, but not too late to hide.”

Steeped in magical realism, metaphors and symbolism, Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham is reminiscent of works by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Rulfo. The author taps into the history of the Diné, incorporating the story of the Navajo Long Walk into the narrative and Damien’s family history. Revolving around themes of loss and grief, revenge and jealousy, and climate change, this is an immersive but heavy read. The author’s writing is descriptive, and his use of vivid imagery transports you to Damien’s world. The narrative is a tad disjointed, but overall, I found this novel to be a compelling read.

“We long for nostalgia, crave its pain, for in that remembrance is a kind of cure, a beautiful handful of a gift, like a handful of dirt, joy running through our fingertips, and what better gift than a handful of dirt?”

Many thanks to Harper Books for the gifted copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.