"Greenland is a smart, exhilarating novel about racism and self-knowledge.... 'Only connect' is, of course, Forster's famous epigram from Howard's End, a poignant, at times desperate plea for connection among people who are as much mysteries to themselves as to others. In Greenland, Donaldson reworks "only connect" to be a paean to self-connection, the integration of ambivalent identities into something like a wryly formed human being for our time." — NPR's Fresh Air
"This is a book with respect for neither the margins of the page nor those that confine us in the real world. Donaldson sustains a plot that ends with ecstasy, action and reconciliation, satisfyingly concluding a novel of ideas that is also about one queer Black man finding his true north."?
— Los Angeles Times
"As it weaves in meditations on colonialism, spirituality, and the erotic, Santos Donaldson’s supremely stylish fever dream of a novel may delve most deeply into a specific subset of the queer experience, but the bigger questions it poses about how we come to terms with our own social and cultural identities make it feel surprisingly universal." — Vogue
"A delicious and delirious work of metafiction." — Electric Literature
"Perceptive and personal, this compelling novel eloquently clarifies ongoing issues of race and racism while authentically telling a unique story. Highly recommended." — Library Journal (starred review)
“Greenland is a sly meditation on the will to create, the limits of reality, the pleasures of storytelling, and the audacious possibility of salvation by narrative. With a novel that is hyper-literate, meta, and modernist, David Santos Donaldson invites us to remember that thinking is a way adults play and reading is sometimes how we save ourselves.”
— Alice Randall, award-winning author of Black Bottom Saints
“Fresh and edgy, David Santos Donaldson’s Greenland is profoundly entertaining and full of emotion, humor, pain, and wisdom. His narrator dances in a hall of mirrors but he doesn't dance alone—he is joined by his husband, his best female friend Concha, E. M. Forster, Forster's Black Egyptian boyfriend, and others both earthly and unearthly. Rather like The Golden Notebook for a new age with race and sexuality replacing gender and class, this is the work of a brilliant, inventive, sensuous dreamer.” — Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Lives of the Circus Animals
“David Santos Donaldson’s dazzling debut novel can be read on many levels: as a work of fiction that examines the difficulties of creating loving relationships between the colonizer and the colonized—especially when they are of the same gender and of different races—and as a clear-eyed dissection of how empire-building dehumanizes and then subjugates the people it conquers. As with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Greenland reminds us that far too often Black people are allowed visibility only when their talents are needed or sanctioned by white society.” — Jaime Manrique, author of Cervantes Street and Our Lives Are the Rivers
“Throughout Greenland, David Santos Donaldson has powerfully captured the isolating pain of a man who has spent his life being seen as “the other.” …[A] fine contribution to a growing canon of Black queer fiction.” — New York Journal of Books
"A refreshing novel from an author who makes unconventional artistic choices to serve his ends.” — New York Times Book Review
“Greenland is unique, passionate, and vast in both its reach and its impact. With his debut novel, David Santos Donaldson has written a beautifully personal missive about a writer desperate to find his voice, his possibility, his very reason for living. Greenland depicts a panorama that will make you think of Robert Altman and Tony Kushner, who, like Donaldson, take you on a night walk that leaves you shattered—but rest assured, you will get home before dawn, happier, richer, aroused.” — James Grissom, author of Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
"Besides being a talented fiction writer, Donaldson is a psychotherapist, and his debut novel is psychologically acute in its portrayal of a queer Black man crumbling under the weight of personal, historical, and racial trauma." — Booklist
"Powerful and hypnotic. I couldn’t put this book down, because it’s one of the most engaging and thought-provoking novels I’ve read this year.” — Buzzfeed
"[An] assured debut."
— Publishers Weekly
Greenland is unique, passionate, and vast in both its reach and its impact. With his debut novel, David Santos Donaldson has written a beautifully personal missive about a writer desperate to find his voice, his possibility, his very reason for living. Greenland depicts a panorama that will make you think of Robert Altman and Tony Kushner, who, like Donaldson, take you on a night walk that leaves you shattered—but rest assured, you will get home before dawn, happier, richer, aroused.
"Besides being a talented fiction writer, Donaldson is a psychotherapist, and his debut novel is psychologically acute in its portrayal of a queer Black man crumbling under the weight of personal, historical, and racial trauma."
Greenland is a sly meditation on the will to create, the limits of reality, the pleasures of storytelling, and the audacious possibility of salvation by narrative. With a novel that is hyper-literate, meta, and modernist, David Santos Donaldson invites us to remember that thinking is a way adults play and reading is sometimes how we save ourselves.”
David Santos Donaldson’s dazzling debut novel can be read on many levels: as a work of fiction that examines the difficulties of creating loving relationships between the colonizer and the colonized—especially when they are of the same gender and of different races—and as a clear-eyed dissection of how empire-building dehumanizes and then subjugates the people it conquers. As with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Greenland reminds us that far too often Black people are allowed visibility only when their talents are needed or sanctioned by white society.
"A delicious and delirious work of metafiction."
Fresh and edgy, David Santos Donaldson’s Greenland is profoundly entertaining and full of emotion, humor, pain, and wisdom. His narrator dances in a hall of mirrors but he doesn't dance alone—he is joined by his husband, his best female friend Concha, E. M. Forster, Forster's Black Egyptian boyfriend, and others both earthly and unearthly. Rather like The Golden Notebook for a new age with race and sexuality replacing gender and class, this is the work of a brilliant, inventive, sensuous dreamer.
2022-05-11
Saddled with the name of his “father's favorite writer” by his colonial-throwback Jamaican parents, aspiring author Kipling Starling is desperate to be published and will do seemingly anything to realize his dream.
Encouraged in writing by his schoolteachers and believing himself “useless at anything but,” Kip built his personality from the expectations and literary opinions of others and the blueprint for his future from those he saw as his predecessors, assimilating Dostoevsky’s style by repeatedly rereading Crime and Punishment and leaving his family in London for New York because fellow “skinny gay black” writer James Baldwin had found success in America. More than recognition of his work or talent, Kip seems to crave the legitimization that acceptance from the predominantly White world of publishing would signify, as he “flounder[s] in the wake of a peculiar invention called Whiteness.” Having been kicked out of his MFA program and despairing over a spate of rejections for his historical novel about E.M. Forster’s relationship with Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed El Adl, Kip receives an inexplicable invitation to meet with a “publishing legend” who was among his rejectors. In the meeting, she implies that a rewrite from Mohammed's perspective might entice her, but there's a catch: In four weeks' time, “a commercial media conglomerate” will acquire the publisher, and the editor expresses nebulous doubts that she will be allowed to continue acquiring literary fiction after the merger is complete. Thus Kip is launched on a frenzied three-week rewrite quest, and he barricades himself in the basement of the Brooklyn brownstone he shares with his well-intentioned but oblivious White psychotherapist husband, Ben. As boundaries between Mohammed and Kip in his isolation begin to dissolve and a mysterious entity appears, Kip is propelled into a still larger quest to find his “true voice” in a wilderness beyond the confines of Whiteness itself. Though the result is an overplotted and lopsided narrative with a sometimes-tedious start crawling toward a rushed ending, the book still shines at times in the elegance of its prose and its depictions of a stark arctic landscape and in Kip’s musings through Mohammed’s story on the intersections of colonialism, White supremacy, and queer love, particularly the liberatory potentialities of queer love between Black men.
An ambitious if uneven debut exploring the possibilities of love, self-realization, and art under and beyond the White gaze.
