Early on in Brionni Nwosu’s The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter, the eponymous heroine gets into a disagreement with Dr. Sebastian Moore, an academic discussing travel narratives written by African-Americans. The disagreement is over the work of prominent Black journalist Jimi Ireland. Sebastian—who is soon to become a love interest for the heroine—criticized the journalist for sidelining the hardships faced by Black people in her work, instead choosing to highlight the pleasant and beautiful. Nella Carter, who happens to be using the name Vivian at this point in time, argues that Black women shouldn’t have to write about hardship, that they should be allowed to focus on beauty too. This conversation encapsulates a central question posed by this book: Is there room for beauty and love when you’re living under systemic oppression?

It is revealed that the aforementioned Jimi Ireland is another of the heroine’s numerous avatars. An enslaved woman in eighteenth-century Georgia, Nella Carter had entered into a Faustian bargain with Death. Weary of humans, Death had decided to destroy the world—and all its inhabitants—and create a new one. Nella catches Death’s eye, and he makes a bargain with her: he will grant Nella immortality, and Nella will spend the years writing, publishing, and documenting the world around her, finding beauty in it, and proving to Death that humanity is worth saving. Nella spends the following years of her life with many different names, many lives and livelihoods, only to be constantly stalked by Death, who takes away everyone she loves.

With this book, Nwusu handles the popular trope of the “deal with the devil.” This is, of course, a trope that has been around for a long time. Perhaps the best known instance of this is that of Faust, which has given us the term “Faustian bargain.” In the German legend—later dramatized by writers like Goethe—the eponymous Faust makes a deal with the devil by which he agrees to give him his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Numerous works of fiction have been written with a similar premise—one example that came out only a few years back is The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab, which has a lot in common with Nwusu’s book.

Neither Addie LaRue nor Nella Carter are, like Faust, motivated by a thirst for knowledge or pleasure. Rather, what they desire is escape. In V. E. Schwab’s book, the protagonist is a young French woman in the 1700s who makes a similar Faustian bargain in order to escape a forced marriage. Both Addie LaRue and Nella Carter go on to spend centuries traversing through the world and meeting different people.

One common critique of Addie LaRue was that it was overly Eurocentric, with a focus on White European culture and art through the years, and with little interaction with non-white people or cultures. The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter comes as an interesting contrast, with its focus on Black history and culture, as well as other nonwhite cultures. However, the story remains wholly set in Europe and the Americas, which was a bit disappointing since it mentions Nella living in other places: “I wandered  for a while, first to Africa, Freetown in Sierra Leone, working in orphanages and hospitals with the Krio people, then to Algeria as the personal secretary of a merchant family, and afterwards, I found my way to what is now known as Turkey as a correspondent for a British newspaper.” I couldn’t help but feel like we were missing out on Nella’s adventures in those places.

In that first part of the book, Nella tries to make a life for herself in New Orleans, initially working with the businesswoman Eulalie. (I later found out that this person was likely Eulalie de Mandeville, a real life businesswoman from the time and place, and just one of the real historical figures referenced in the book.) She finds herself caught between two men—Jacques, a wealthy White man with whom Nella enters into a “placage” arrangement, and William, Jacques’s Black driver, for whom Nella eventually develops feelings. I thought this section of the book was the strongest, and I found myself truly intrigued by the plot. However, as it moved on, with Nella inhabiting other places and finding other loves, the focus on love started feeling a little repetitive: As Nella moves on to live in Paris, London, New York, and Buenos Aires, and she takes on different names and different roles, she repeatedly he acquires new “loves.” They comprise both men and women, varying ethnicities and nationalities, and romantic and platonic dimensions; but they keep coming.

Eulalie De Mandeville is not the only historical figure who appears in the book. One of Nella’s many loves, for example, happens to be a relative of Dadabhai Naoroji, who is now known for being the first Asian to be part of the British parliament, and a fervent Indian nationalist leader.

Likewise, Nella talks about the Harlem Renaissance as something she’s seen in person: “I went to literary salons with Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston, learned to write better poetry with Countee Cullen, stayed out too late at the Paradise, saw Billie Holiday live on-stage, and hung out in her dressing room as Adam completed her fitting.”  Throughout the centuries, Nella keeps writing, recording her life, and expressing her views, proving to Death that the world is saving. She finds beauty and love amid all the darkness and pain. However, having her loves snatched away time and time again takes a toll on her. So, when she falls in love with Sebastian, she is determined that things should work out differently.

The portrayal of Death in this book, and his dynamic with Nella, felt particularly interesting to me. Death is shown to be a complex character, who is deeply aware of the cruelty of humans, and wants to respond to that by wiping off all humans from the planet: “Wouldn’t it be better to scrub it all clean? Death wondered. One final plague to rid the world of them once and for all.”

Nella’s humanity offers an interesting foil to Death’s inhumanity, providing a study in contrasts, showing how love and beauty can exist even amid oppression.