The Coin

Yasmin Zaher

Review by Amanda Vilanova

The Coin is an attractive book from the moment you lay your eyes on it. You’re drawn to its bright yellow cover with a picture of a well-dressed, faceless woman contorted into a strange pose. Its first line, ‘Dirt was my first hypothesis,’ makes you twist your neck, look up and wonder what your own first hypothesis was. We meet its unnamed narrator when she has just moved from Palestine to New York City with the aid of her rich lover. He helps find her a job as a Middle School teacher in an all-boys school. We see her struggle to understand her role in this new world and her relationship with the idea of home and she becomes obsessed with cleaning herself and the space around her. A chance encounter with a curious individual, only ever referred to as ‘Trenchcoat’, ends up with him moving into her home and involving her in a luxury bag ruse. 

The narrator is clearly a funny and intelligent woman but she is not the most likeable. She comes from an affluent family and has been handed a job and an apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. She is brutally honest about the children she teaches and the people that surround her. But she grows on you. This story is not black and white. She is spoiled but powerless because her brother controls the money she receives. She tries to be principled but is lost. She is a good, flexible teacher, but has barely any training or support. Her loneliness makes her hover above others, lead people on and be cruel. She moves between men and interests because life far away from our home is confusing, changeable, and a test of our will. Her voice speaks to us, the reader, directly. It brings us in with plain but honest prose that feels singular. In these pages, we live in her undefined moral greyness and once you’re in, you do not want to leave. You keep turning the page.

For me, this book is close to home. I was born on a Caribbean island and am sure my first hypothesis was sand. I remember hours of staring as it danced between my fingers. Time was endless back then, like a long stretch of beach on the Puerto Rican coast. Now I walk around London yearning for warm sand between my toes and a better handle on the passing of time. I, like the narrator, swallowed a coin when I was young. My family often discuss the tension and humour of reading the date the coin was minted on the X-ray. My mother shakes as she remembers the doctor explaining that if the coin had moved suddenly, it would have covered my oesophagus and stopped me from breathing. The narrator’s swallowed coin disappeared without a trace, and she concludes that it must live somewhere in her body. It haunts her. It is as if the country she has left lives within her but is always out of her reach. 

The narrator’s dark humour and her obsession with cleaning also ring strangely true. I have found unexpected solace in mopping to the tune of a salsa song when I’m hit with an emptiness I cannot explain. The impact of living far from one’s homeland is hard to express, to break down or quantify. I have lived away from my country for nine years now and am haunted by its absence. Migration, even when it is a choice, shakes you. It pulls the ground from under your feet and places you in an eternal in between, in a space of neither here nor there. Towards the book’s final chapters, we follow the narrator as she sinks lower into a pit of confusion and displacement. I have to say, it is a dirty, dark pleasure to be along for the ride.

Amanda Vilanova

Amanda Vilanova is a Puerto Rican writer, actor and translator based in London.