Book review: A sensitive unspooling of self

Yasmin Zaher’s 'The Coin' is a compulsive read, built with startling prose and observation

Yasmin Zaher’s award winning debut ‘The Coin’ marks her as one of the most fascinating writers of the year. Picture: Willy Somma

• The Coin 
• Yasmin Zaher 
• Footnote Press, €12.50

Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel and winner of the Dylan Thomas prize, The Coin, chronicles a woman’s breakdown at the hands of grief, displacement, consumerism, and American dirt.

In short chapters that interweave New York and Palestine, Zaher also explores generational wealth and trauma, the titular ‘coin’ — a shekel the narrator swallowed as a child which re-emerges as a lump on her spine — a brilliantly heavy metaphor for both.

Zaher’s unnamed narrator is a Palestinian heiress living in Brooklyn and teaching underprivileged boys. 

She is chic, snobby, and disturbed by “American culture” — by which she does not mean guns but “wedding dresses and obesity”. 

She is entitled to half her dead parents’ fortune but can only access the money via drip-feed from her brother.

This leaves her “simultaneously rich and poor”. She must work but has the financial security to flout the rules. 

She develops intense, inappropriate relationships with her students and is titillated by the power she has over them. 

The same is true of her romantic relationships. She dominates her rich, Russian boyfriend sexually. 

With her charismatic vagrant lover, she is superior in the knowledge that she is the one paying.

Control is essential to the narrator, and an obsession with cleanliness is its corporeal manifestation. 

Zaher dedicates extensive passages to the narrator’s hygiene regimen — trips to CVS akin to pilgrimages, an obsessive cycle of bathing. 

At the climax of her breakdown, the narrator abandons these routines, builds a garden in her apartment, and hermitises.

None of this is subtle. Her damned pursuit of cleanliness is the pursuit of ‘goodness’; her return to the soil a grasp at Edenic harmony. 

But, like the narrator’s voice — deliciously forthright and melancholic — The Coin’s blatant symbolism is seductive, giving the book a fabular edge.

At the core of the narrator’s madness is the complexity of her identity. She has a ‘deceiving complexion’, meaning she can pass for white. 

She is wealthy and has access to New York high society, yet she remains an outsider, her rendering of America a defamiliarised one through which she offers a scathing critique of social signifiers and consumerism.

It is a compelling perspective; there are echoes here of Vance Packard’s Cornucopia City. What she is less interested is trauma, even as it overwhelms her.

She sweeps through distressing recollections without pause — descriptions of war-torn Palestine and her dead mother are followed by intimate memories of her boyfriend.

This feels like a radical rebuttal to what one might anticipate from a Palestinian narrator — especially given the ongoing genocide.

Bolstered by her use of direct address, Zaher challenges us. Expect trauma? Take glamour, money, pleasure.

“Orgasm is dignity,” the narrator asserts in manic crescendo — that the narrator’s trauma is eventually inescapable is, thus, immensely perturbing.

Towards the novel’s end, the narrator attends a gala in support of Palestine. It is hollow, presenting Palestine as a cause and a costume rather than a reality. 

Although the narrator is good at performing in this environment, it alienates her. As she says, “the more complex your identity … the more difficult it is to love and be loved.”

She retreats further into her memories of Palestine. To quote Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora, her only “home” is but a “mythic place of desire”.

The Coin is a provocative but sensitive unspooling of the self. 

Zaher mirrors elements of the depressive-girl narrative (think: Ottessa Moshfegh) but with a crucial difference — this narrator’s breakdown stems not from the personal but the accumulated weight of generational oppression. 

The detached voice, here, reads not as modern stylistic tic but a coping mechanism.

A compulsive read, built with startling prose and observation, it marks Zaher as one of the most fascinating writers of this year.

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