Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

4.5 stars

I think if I had read this in print it would have been a 4 star book but the audiobook pushed it to a 4.5/5 as Trevor Noah reads it so well.

The disjointed sense of time in this book serves to make it more of a macro story about racism/relations between different racial used identities in South Africa, and life under Apartheid...as opposed to a very specific personal story as it might have read if it had been in chronological order. While in general I didn't mind the jumping around in time, there were a few moments where it suffered from the same issue I've seen in other memoirs; it felt like it was originally written as separate essays, and not enough was done to tie them together. Sometimes characters or places were introduced as if we had never heard about them before, when we had just been reading about them in the previous chapter. The choices of where to put chapter breaks also felt kind of odd, as often an idea was introduced at the end of one chapter and only became relevant two thirds of the way through the following chapter. I got the hang of this partway through reading but it felt unusual.

As the story goes on it becomes clearer that this story is truly about his relationship with his mother above all else, and she is a fantastic character. He does an excellent job of portraying her as a whole person, both romanticized through a child's eyes, respected/feared through a child's eyes, and loved in different ways at different ages. Looking back at his mother from an older point of view he is able to understand her and her choices with more sympathy than he did as a child, but even as a child their relationship is clearly so mutually loving and respectful (shown through teasing, laughing, teamwork) even when it is tense or strained.

He did a fantastic job of interweaving history/politics, personal anecdotes, scary stories, lights stories, stories that should be scary but are told as though they are light, and humour.

Sometimes the relevance of the anecdotes felt slightly inconsistent, as did the level with which he analyzed them. Sometimes the gravity of what was going on felt shocking, and I would wonder why his character didn't feel more deeply about it, and then he would remind the reader that he was 5, or 6, or 7 years old when that anecdote occurred and it would make his lack of understanding of severity make sense. For that reason a chronological narrative might have been interesting as it would have allowed more insight into his changing understanding/character overtime.

I'm not typically a celebrity memoir reader but I suspect most are not this open and frank.