What a frustrating book! I loved the language, the writing, and the premise -- who wouldn't want a talkative fig tree to tell every other chapter of a family story centred on the tragedy of the Cyprian civil war? But as the book progressed the author choose to tell several pivotal chapters in the voice of a character retelling the past. Given that the book already contains multiple timelines, why not let the reader experience those scenes directly by setting them in the past? It would have made our emotional connection far stronger. While we're at it, I felt that the author was signalling a far more complex story of pain and guilt around the fate of the proprietors of the Happy Fig. Instead we are shown a tragic but incidental coincidence. The author kept pulling her punches.
My final complaint is that the denouement of the fig tree's story felt anti-climatic. Sometimes your magical realist fig tree can just be a magical realist fig tree, you know?
Overall, I loved the first half of this book. I just wished it had lived up to the promise of the opening pages.
