I envy polyglots. I truly do. I wish I could easily pick up languages without having to laboriously memorize noun endings or verb conjugations. I’m jealous of people who grew up in multilingual houses. I say all of this because I can, to a certain extent, understand the protagonist of Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre. Anisa—fluent in English, Urdu, Hindi, and semi-fluent in French—longs to become a great translator, but she can only seem to find work translating subtitles. When she meets Adam, a man who is native-fluent in a dozen languages, she begs him to reveal his secret. There must be one weird trick to mastering that many languages.
But while I can understand Anisa’s deep desire to learn more languages, she’s also the kind of character (and person) who I find incredibly frustrating. She is deeply dissatisfied with her life. Other than her ambition to become a great translator (by which she means someone who translates the great works of literature), she can’t really say what she wants; she only seems to know that what she has isn’t it. She can’t be happy with Adam because their libidos don’t match. She can’t be happy with her work because she thinks Bollywood films are silly. She grows unhappy with her best friend when that friend finds a man she loves enough to marry. Even when Anisa manages to get Adam to recommend her to the Centre (after badgering him to reveal his one weird trick), instant fluency in German and then Russian don’t bring her happiness for longer than it takes to translate a novel from each language into English. Anisa is a bottomless pit of a character.
The most interesting parts of this book are when Anisa is at the Centre or with her new friend, Shiba, the director of the Centre. Outside of her apartment, Anisa is mostly able to leave her discontent behind—although she suffers withdrawal from the internet when she has to surrender her phone on arrival at the Centre. The method developed by the Centre involves listening to a recording of a Storyteller telling their life story, in their native languages, for hours. Other than that, life at the Centre is little different from an elite retreat in the English countryside. Anisa blunders through the sessions with her Storytellers until, partway through her ten-day session, she can suddenly understand what the Storytellers are saying. There are some weird nightmares and psychological effects but they’re a small price to pay for instant fluency.
Anisa never accepts the one weird trick-ness of it all and keeps digging to find out what the real secret is. (Readers might be able to puzzle it out more quickly than Anisa does.) I appreciated this about her. Nothing can be as simple as the Centre makes it seem. That said, I felt that the reveal and the conclusion to The Centre were unsatisfying. There are some out-of-left-field twists near the end of the book that struck me as very out of character for Anisa. I enjoy an unreliable narrator but, usually, I can spot those early enough to pay attention to the discrepancies between what the narrator says and what’s really happening around them. To me, it felt like the last 10% or so of the book was a puzzle piece jammed in the wrong way.
Readers who love languages and linguistics might like parts of The Centre but, overall, I recommend giving this one a miss.